[MLB-WIRELESS] Newbie Hello / wireless article / Mt. Dandenong?

[Paul Bird]

Hi all,

I just joined the list.  I recently discovered the world of community
wireless in Aust. via an article on Slashdot
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/23/0042242).  What you guys are
doing is fascinating, especially given the state of the Australian broadband
market.  I wish you the best of luck with it.

I'm totally clueless at the moment, and will be doing lot of reading to try
and get up to speed with this stuff.  Once I do, I'll think about becoming a
node and hooking up with some of you guys.

In the meantime, here's a couple of things I'd be interested to hear your
comments on.

First, another Slashdot article
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/26/0153214) linked to an article
on recent wireless issues:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/wireless/library/wi-sec2.html?open&l=2
51,t=grw,p=wsec

I found this statement about the big bandwidth sales that have occurred in
recent years particularly interesting:

"In a compelling case study, the report pointed out that the 97 billion
deutsche marks raised in the German 3G auction could have bought 60 million
WLAN base stations -- enough to blanket Germany with a base station every 77
meters. This would mean high-speed wireless broadband access for Germans
today with data transmission rates around 11 Mbps a second. Comparing the 11
Mbps offered in today's 802.11b WLAN networks with the estimated 64 Kbps
offered in tomorrow's 3G networks prompts an important question: Why crawl
tomorrow when you can walk today?"

Makes you think.  In Australia, would it be practical & legal for a
commercial operator (say Optus) to begin adding 802.11 WLAN base stations to
their mobile towers, and offering Internet access through them?  If so, this
seems a good way of offering wireless broadband to the masses without
spending zillions on access to broadband.  Or is the 2.4GHz space reserved
for non-commercial uses only?

When I discovered there was a Melbourne wireless group, it made me think of
Mt. Dandenong as a broadcast point for the network.  The TV towers there
broadcast TV to most of Melbourne, thanks to Melbourne being basically flat.
I don't know anything about the technical aspects of radio & 802.11 yet, but
I imagine it would be a cool spot to get recruits that could potentially
have line of sight to thousands of rooftops :-)  (I grew up there but now
live in Brunswick.  Ironically, I get better TV reception here than when I
was up there :-) But here's my question for the radio gurus here: would it
be feasible for a commercial operator to set up a wireless broadband
transmitter at Mt. Dandenong?  In understand some operators already offer
satellite Internet access.  It seems that a terrestrial radio setup could be
similar in operation: dish/aerial on the roof for the downchannel and
upchannel via the PSTN.  However, the terrestrial transmitter bandwidth
would be cheaper (I would guess) and users would suffer less lag time than
with a geostationary satellite.  Is this a dumb idea?  If not, why hasn't
anyone done it yet? :-)

Finally, no matter how good our "last-mile" solutions for broadband internet
access is, it ain't make backbone bandwidth cheaper, which is the other
reason I like the concept of a community Internet.  It's like building your
own Internet so you don't need to pay for access to someone else's...

*phew* That turned out a little longer than expected.  I'd be interested in
your thoughts!

cheers

Paul Bird


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