Re: wi-fi info

On Jul 15, 2004, at 1:38 AM, captgoodnight@acsalaska.net wrote:
>
> I totally agree! Way to much competition in this arena, BUT, if you
> were to move to a place
> like Iraq, Africa or some other technological challenged arena, you
> may make it work. I heard
> on 91.1 once about a wireless AP vehicle that cruzed around some
> streets in Africa so some
> of the "privileged" could receive/send e-mail during certain times of
> the day. This was of
> course in a really challenged area. If I remember correctly, the cats
> that started the project
> were looking into moving on to stationary APs, funded by
> science/government
> grants. Not millions at all, but a cool thing to do ;)
>
> Another thing to think about, of course :) is security! Open APs are
> MiM havens! I kinda find it
> irresponsible to open-up customers to this genre of attack without
> their knowledge of the
> risks, from the ISO/OSI frame of mind. SCARY! Kinda lame! - only my
> opinion of course.
>
> What would be fun, and kinda worth it, would be to take old computers,
> turn them into APs and
> be selfish with em, sure have em has "hotspots" (I growl when I hear
> that word!) but keep it
> quiet; a small grid of APs for the penguins ;) Just for the geek of
> it. Dorms at UAA/APU, misc
> free spirited offices...heh, who knows, think about the dialog with
> your boss over that one...
>
>
> Totally off topic; those airplane gurus in Fairbanks with that home
> brew airplane, in the paper
> today, was the coolest thing in a long time. That plane is awsome.
> Truly a super geek award goes to
> those birds! Incredible! I'm jealous, I wanna build a carbon fiber
> airplane too! WOW! I gotta take
> flying lessons, ohohoh, a flying AP! heh
>
> bedtime ;(,
> eddie

The only way that would work is if wireless technology (as i know it)
increased greatly, the advantages over having a system like that would
be.....I must scream that, THE COST WOULD BE HORRENDOUS, the only way
you could cut cost is if you had lots of these little things that would
route traffic between them, but where you get the space to put all of
these (i'm talking thousands around anchorage) or, you could have fewer
of these things with more expensive technology, to span the distance
better. Maybe i'm underestimating the power of wireless technology, but
as far as my experience goes, it takes a lot to get any kind of
connection rate that's worth a damn. A side note, if anybody does
decide to do this, anybody willing to pitch in for a CO-Located AP so
we could connect this sucker in to a rather large data pipe? I could
drum up hundreds of old pcs that would work perfect for a wireless
access point running linux, and nothing more, routing and firewalling,
but what about the antenna stuff? It's EXPENSIVE, and where would we
install this, the space on top of buildings around town and such would
be...expensive....And another thing, we'd need to be very thorough in
our coverage, because as soon as we're not, you're opening up holes for
maintenance/reliability HELL. Think if one goes down, suddenly, you
have a HUGE area that's down, and possibly a whole section of
anchorage, But if you had lots of these little things, they could
reroute traffic to others. And once the network is big enough, who's
going to maintain it? I would like to be able to spend all day out in
the field fixing one of these things, but that's not reality...we'd be
pumping soo much money into this, and never seeing any kind of return
on our investment. It's all talk...

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Received on Thu Jul 15 03:20:38 2004