<font color=red> RoamAD 80211.b network
<Maurice W. Interested in 802.11b/a. Here in the US, I have had my eye on this. Checked at Comp USA a month or so ago and also spoke with the man who repairs my PC. Something like his could me a good suplement to cellular/PCS. My thouhts are as follows:
1) Per my computer repair guy, he or most any skilled computer/software person can crack into a 802.11a network and use it. Some sites don't even have the security turned on, but those that do are easily cracked, He seemed to think that he could go farther than just using the network for free -- perhaps entering the system or monitoring the transmissions of other users wih little trouble. Having said that, I am sure corporations that want to secure their information will ask their ee's not to use it -- at least for company business. There are some thoughts that built in 802.11a scanning in laptops will get laptops banned fron airplane use due to possible interfearance with mission critical fleight systems.>
John, that's using the inadequate security systems. RoamAD has a secure security system. Nobody will be using it for free and people's data will be secure.
<2) Perhaps the security problems can be repaired-- can't say.>
Done.
<i/>>3) 802.11b cards and accessories are extremely costly for now in the US. Prohibitively so.
They are sure to be cheaper than the absurdly overpriced 1xRTT cards. If I can buy 802.11b cards here, two for US$100, they shouldn't break the bank in the USA. Admittedly those two were at a special price and the normal retail price at the store was US$80 for one - the dealer threw in another for $20 because it didn't have a CD etc with it. They are getting cheaper quickly. 10 months ago, my first one cost US$150 or so.
That's still a lot cheaper than the current Telecom New Zealand price of US$600 for a Gtran 1xRTT PCMCIA card.
<4) The high price that your provider charges ($5.megabyte) should be regarded as transitional. Time, competition and 1XEVDO will bring it down --probably by the time 802.11 can fix its problems.>
I'm not aware of any 802.11b problem at the moment. 1xEV-DO might bring prices down, but not as low as RoamAD's. But I expect that Telecom will continue with the Globalstar pricing plan = absurdly expensive so very few sign up, even when competition is eroding the business.
Even if 1xRTT or 1xEV-DO operators try to get into a price war, they'll lose. 802.11b enjoys free spectrum, no civil engineering, no town planning, no Resource Management Act bureaucracy and delays, tiny cell sites for better coverage, spectrum re-use in small radius cell sites for vast capacity in 80MHz bandwidth, cheap mass-produced electronic gizzards with no barriers to entry and no royalties to QUALCOMM, rapid buildout, scalable for geographic extension as demand builds, people already have or will have the 802.11b built into their notebooks and other devices, so there's no extra cost to get the necessary subscriber gear.
<5) Engineer has commented that having thousands of 802.11a sites defines a system not easy to keep in a reliable state pf repair. Further, the sites themselves must be linked to the internet--another source of unreliability. Further, each site is basically controlled by the property owner where the site is located and operates to whatever standards of service that property owner is willing to enforce--another way of saying that when everbody is responsible, nobody is responsible. Its hard to say how great would be the reliability and security problems of the whole patchwork system. I see it mor as a play system for kids and tean agers to inexpensively hone their skills. >
Maintenance is easy enough. Have a couple of technicians who do a daily round of cleaning air filters, fixing vandalized or otherwise disturbed equipment [which is on a roof or in a secure office environment, so it's not really very accessible to vandals, unlike most base station equipment], putting in new nodes, replacing faulty boxes [they are only little things - forklifts not needed].
When you say thousands, it wouldn't take that many to cover 40 square kilometres of central Auckland. It would be more like [this is my guess] 200. The magic is in the cunning phragmented photon delivery system. RoamAD isn't just a bunch of contiguous hotspots. This is smart stuff. It's not boosted power, it's smart stuff. So forget about thousands of antennae sprouting across the skyline. Radio waves diffract, reflect, absorb and repropagate, form interference patterns and make music in the aether. RoamAD isn't Ghetto Blasting Base Rap Gaussian noise, this is Mozart.
Linking to the internet isn't a problem either. Collect the signals and wirelessly send them back to a drain into cyberspace, or via fibre, or any number of ways, but wireless links in the same spectrum works fine. If somebody kicks a box over, it'll show up instantly and the scheduled maintenance can be interrupted and the technician diverted to fix it. As with anything, yes, it's bad if somebody busts the trunk line, so it's a matter of a bit of redundancy, multipath and rapid response.
Yes, it's a patchwork system, but so is a cellphone system. Fractals are everywhere in life. We manage them. We make them robust enough for the expected and some unexpected exigencies of life and within reasonable cost.
Walking around the test area, people are certainly very interested to see somebody cerfing around while wandering around, but the interest isn't limited to teenagers wanting to play.
Mqurice |
