[MLB-WIRELESS] Question for WGRouting

[Donovan Baarda]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 02:52:13AM +1000, Darren Fulton wrote:
> > Here's a Q for WGRouting I have been pondering for a while...
> >
> > What's wrong or inadequate about the existing solutions such as
> > nocatauth or sputnik?  No disrespect intended, I'm sure you've
> > answered this question amongst yourselves.
> 
> I think a lot of people were turned off sputnik (the company) because it was
> a commercial venture creating their network with our private gear. You
> supply the network infrastructure and they supply the software and
> coordinate the network. Depending on the licence, there may be some parts of
> their community gateway software we could use, but I wouldn't want to use
> all of it.

I thought that the sputnik infrustructure allowed for co-existance and
sharing of comercial and non-comercial groups, allowing comercial groups to
offer connectivity and/or services at reduced and/or billed rates to
non-commercial wireless "webs". Any commercial or non-commercial node can
authenticate/restrict/measure/bill/ignore/whatever traffic passing through
it however it likes, sputik just provides the infrustructure to do so. The
obvious "billable" service a commercial node could provide is an internet
gateway.

I don't think there's anything in sputnik that _requires_ sputnic the
companies involvement. Sure they are banking on being the major comercial
group making money on such a "web" in the US, but I don't think there's
anything stopping other comercial groups grabbing their software and doing
the same thing. But I could be wrong :-)

IMHO any sort of structure that allows commercial and non-commercial
wireless groups to co-operatively interact is _much_ better than a spectrum
bandwidth war. The key to ubiquitous wireless access is more co-operating
nodes everywhere, and any form of exclusion/competition is going to
undermine that.

-- 
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