[MLB-WIRELESS] Applications on the melb-wireless network

[David Arnold]

-->"Ben" == Ben Anderson <a_neb at optushome.com.au> writes:

  Ben> I personally think the government should finance wiring cities
  Ben> to provide a UPN.  Let the telcos concentrate on doing the
  Ben> 'difficult bits' -- like service provision, as in tv on demand,
  Ben> voice gateways, and access to high bandwidth international
  Ben> links.

i agree.  i wish Austel had been given the copper network in the great
Telecom selloff, and Telstra and Optus could then just rent it from
them (and they could put those rents into coax, fibre, etc).  ho hum.
 
  Ben> At one stage canada had a grand government plan to lay a
  Ben> massive backbone across country and basically lay it open for
  Ben> all to use (they overengineered it something chronic).  I
  Ben> haven't heard of it for ages now, I wonder if it actually went
  Ben> anywhere...

Canarie (www.canarie.ca) by any chance?  although i thought this was
only for educational use?

  Ben> The telco's stand to make **more profit** this way, not less.
  Ben> And if they run the numbers, I'm sure they'll stand back and
  Ben> let someone else worry about laying cable (price is high,
  Ben> uptake is low, and therefore they don't get the return on
  Ben> investment that's expected).

well, i'm not an economist, and so my comments must be taken in light
of that fact.  but ... i've always felt that there was more ideology
than economics in the methods of privatisation of telecommunications.

  Ben> Passing data back and forward for someone else is considered
  Ben> "carriage" of the data, and requires a carrier licence (from
  Ben> some of the legal info I've read today)...  Bye bye public
  Ben> access points, bye bye mesh.

this is where it becomes adventageous for the wireless community to
formally establish itself as a legal entity.  then the data is not
being carried for someone else, it's being carried for the "entity".
there's been some suggestion that a standard "club" entity would be
suitable.

intra-entity carriage is legal, i believe, without a carrier licence.

  Ben> if it's ubiquitous, and the infrastructure works, then they
  Ben> won't have to compete.... they simply provide services to the
  Ben> network, and they no longer have to spend big money setting up
  Ben> the network.  Costs go down, income stays similar, profits go
  Ben> up.  I don't think they'll complain.  Or is there something I
  Ben> haven't considered?

you've forgotten the millions (and in some cases billions) of dollars
in debt that they have to service which they spent on cable and are
about to spend on 3G.

it's not the fact that they don't have to spend the money for future
infrastructure, it's that they cannot afford to have consumers using
cheaper services because they no longer get the profit margins
required to service their debt and the stockmarket.

  Ben> One of the plans I've gotten told to get my head outta my arse
  Ben> for is the flying access point.

burt rutan (the guy who designed the gossamer albatross and the other
pedal/solar powered planes in the 80's) has a company that is building
a plane designed for this sort of thing.  i believe that someone is
planning to do this over Chicago (?) using three shifts of 8 hours.

see  http://angeltechnologies.com/

i've also heard rumours that some airlines are planning to look at
this: over the continental US and Europe, there are a huge number of
planes in the air at any one time.  if they ran a switch and a
transceiver dish each with some smart handover software, they'd be able
to provide a 24/7 coverage of most populated areas.

but this is getting a little off-topic ...

  Ben> Another consideration is the 802.11a stuff, with good line of
  Ben> sight (no fresnel zones to worry about, etc) pretty reasonable
  Ben> sized antennas should make 54Mbit access reasonable. 

with Proxim's X2 stuff, you get 108Mbits for the same card cost.  so
you can double these numbers.

  Ben> And multiple devices (up to 13) for 13 independant 54mbit
  Ben> channels... 702Mbits. That could probably scale to 2000 users
  Ben> with very good access, perhaps 5000 with acceptable, and nearly
  Ben> 13,000 with 56k+ access (though average use would dictate the
  Ben> number could probably scale to about 5 or 6 times this, and
  Ben> more if we could put up with congestion during peak times)

this is 5GHz gear -- does it have similar properties to 2.4GHz ?  or
is it more subject to weather interference, for example?  i know the
range that they quote is roughly half that of 802.11b -- why is that?

  Ben> Would you like to comment on feasability issues you see with
  Ben> the balloon idea?

the issue with satellite services is latency -- fibre is sooo much
quicker.  do people recall the old 700ms satellite hop to the US?

what sort of latency do we introduce at 10km up?

other than that ... i think it's a fine idea.  a few solar cells, a
newish laptop, a bunch of pringle cantennae, and the worlds biggest
wine cask bladder and we're off ... ! ;-)





d


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