If you really want to understand the feasability of a 802.11b pico-cell
network, you need to head over to one of the many wireless ISP mailing
lists and read what the professionals are saying (rather than listening
to "unsolicited pundits") Seeing as how you can't put more than 3
access points within proximity of eachother without causing an
unacceptable level of interference, you're going to have a very hard
time "coloring the map" (which is a four color problem, if I remember
correctly). A second set of unlicensed frequency is required along
with seperate back-haul equipment... an expensive proposition that is
not even legally protected from interference).
No offence, I don't have a lot of respect for most of the hair
brained startups that came to be and died during the boom times, but
anyone pinning their startup hopes on 802.11b have very real technical
hurdles to overcome (and not just the usually killer pitch and web
page that seperated most from venture capital).
The symbol 802.11 handsets (as was pointed out, are propritary) are
really only meant for indoor deployment where access points are
abundant, a physical backbone exists and where station distances
are only ~100m at a maximum. That hardly describes a potential
competitor to PHS. Even the breezecom equipment that supports
VOIP is only meant for fixed wireless installs (hence the lack of
a PCMCIA card the supports voice).
You know, it's funny... when 802.11b started to emerge as the clear
winner in the wireless LAN standards war, you saw all sorts of
articles pop up about how people were going to build wireless IXen
(WIXen). I saw seperate newspapers articles in the US, Australia
and New Zealand. Walker Wireless (the name hasvprobably change now)
in New Zealand came the closes to makeing it work (but then they
weren't a WIX). The crackpit in Australia faided away due to
rediculious Australia regulation of unlicensed frequency spectrum
(but they do have a strong amature freenet crowd) and there are a
handfull of freenet scattered around the US.... and through all of
this, the biggest potential for a ubiquitious free wireless net are
misconfigured access points!!! To get a feel for this, just STFW for
the newly coined term "war driving" or head on over to the shamoo
group's GAWD database. Just throw some VPN software on top of your
client, get an internection connection with a resonable amount of
bandwidth, buy a VPN appliance that can terminate 1000s of
connections and ride other people's bandwidth (and hope they don't
come after you). Interestingly nobody is using WiFi for voice (outside
of symbol). In fact, warehouse applications usually use a seperate,
non-line of site voice system to coordinate wokers... inventory
systems usually have substantial sore-and-forward capabilities to allow
continued operation when WiFi coverage goes away. If you look at the
power requirements for the cards, you'll find they're designed laptops
and barely usable in non-teathered PDAs.
I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but that's the WiFi state of
the art at the moment. Other standards with less througput than
802.11b are more promising (breezecom gear comes to mind in particular).
Some of the gear in the pipeline may remove some of 802.11b's
restrictions, but if it's an IEEE design, I have my doubts given their
work on 802.11b. Given the trend of using higer frequencies that
tend to be more line of sight, I don't see wireless LAN equipment
competeing with cellular any time soon (maybe if someone were able to
design a hack for all the Richochet gear comming on the market due
to the failed Metricom service or a well designed P2P routing client...
well then, maybe). Personally, I think there are some intersting
parallels (and compair/contrasts) that can be drawn from the failure
of Metricom in the US and the re-invention of PHS in Japan (the big
difference being the Richochet tranceivers were never minaturized
to the point that it could be put into a cell phone... hence the
failure and loss that won't be recouped during the chapter 11
re-org).
Josh White wrote:
>
> Two marginally useful points:
> 1. In Jan 1990 I worked on a startup called "Flying Packets" that was trying
> to build a "picocell" 802.11 startup here in San Francisco. We didn't make
> it, but lots of our ideas are being implemented now.
>
> 2. My friend Glenn has been following 802.11 rather closely. His comments on
> the 802.11 voice-over-ip thing:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Glenn Fleishman [mailto:glenn@glennf.com]
> There are actually already Wi-Fi handsets! But they only work with a
> proprietary system. Changing that shouldn't be a big deal. You only
> need 64Kbps!
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Glenn Fleishman, Unsolicited Pundit: read my work at http://glennf.com
> freelance reporter for The New York Times, Wired, Fortune, and others
> interested in wireless 802.11b networking? http://80211b.weblogger.com
> daily Web log on technology and about my life: http://glennf.com/blog/
>
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Received on Sat Aug 11 11:20:57 2001