[MLB-WIRELESS] Linux on DWL 900+ APs

[Ben Anderson]

>> At the moment, basically nothing.  The kernel boots, and that's about it.
>> There's a enough work to go to get things running, let alone the amount
of
>> work required to reverse engineer the drivers for the wireless interface
>> (which don't appear to be standard, it seems to be a cut-down/direct
>> interfaced chipset so the standard drivers don't work).
>>
>> Get your teeth dirty on some real hacking and give these guys a hand...
>> cool project..  I hope it results in more hardware companies being more
>> forthcoming with hardware specs and open firmware.   I don't get it -- 
what
>> does a hardware company lose by making their firmware open source?  (the
>> source is probably licensed to licencees of the design anyway, so they
can
>> make their own modifications...  why not make it open-open and sell even
>> even more boxes?)
>
>For starters they probably loose FCC approval. with software controled
>radios the FCC has this policy that drivers need to be closed pretty much
:(

That's interesting, because they're allowing mobile phones to be extremely
programmable thesedays.  Sure, it's not full source, but they are allowing
the devices huge amounts of leeway against what used to be a tight, tight
policy.

It only takes one black box out of china, and there to be a huge demand,
more than what the FCC can shut down, to change it's policy to be more in
line with public expectation.  That said, it probably is reasonable of them
to be cautious.  I wait for the day myself when bandwidth through the air is
bandwidth, there's one standard, you want a communications device, you add
xyz chip and voila it's networked.  A TV without a cable?  plug in an xyz
chip...  want mobile data/voice/whatever, plug in an xyz chip.  Out of range
of the tower?  No problems, because you're obviously in a less densly
populated area, switch to a lower, longer distance frequency band
automatically (albeit at lower bandwidth).
The advantages are there is no longer any need to have fixed frequency
allocations for the vast majority of applications, opening up huge chunks of
relativly unused/low used bandwith for everyone to use.  I mean, why
transmit uncompressed video, plus compressed video, plus high definition
compressed video.  Multiplied by 5 TV stations.  That's a _lot_ of
bandwidth.  Make it all digital, and give me cheap mobile data & voice in
the remaining bandwidth.

</rant>

Ben.



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