Posts tagged with wifi

The last time I blogged about mesh networks was 5 years ago (almost exactly!). I was pretty pumped about the possibilities in those days — like the idea of creating a 2nd internet using mesh protocols, routing from house to house using WiFi, circumventing ISPs.... hey, it's still a cool idea, and maybe even possible still, especially with the excess capacity that we have with e.g. 802.11n. Latency would probably be pretty high..

Anyway, back then mesh was a DREAM but now it's a REALITY. The OLPC "XO" laptop for developing nations uses it! The perfect use case actually. And we have 802.11s, etc., etc... cool.

In the long run I expect that "self-forming" (if not exactly "mesh") networks over wireless will be a VERY important part of the internet and future networks, if not the most important way that data gets moved around in local and regional areas.

For my talk today, the slides are available . Lots of pretty pictures! I didn't do the three about WiMAX, WiFi mesh and WiFi though.

Downtime... I know... I'll talk about it later.

Witness the first mobile phone + wVoIP . This is a mobile phone with two radios, one for GSM and the other for Wi-Fi. So when you're in a Wi-Fi hotspot, you Skype. When not, you cell. It's brilliant.

The slight problem is that mobile operators are not going to like this too much. You see, it means that when people are at home especially, and also at work, and maybe at the coffee shop, they're not going to be paying for airtime.

But so what? The technology is so compelling that the public is going to be kicking and screaming until they get it. In case you're not up to speed yet, wireless VoIP is internet telephony that runs over a Wi-Fi style network. It's also know as wVoIP and Voice over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN... keep up the crazy acronym work, people).

Now so far Microsoft looks like it's doing very poorly in the mobile arena. But, they seem to be the leading OS for Wi-Fi enabled cell phones. And there's already a not insignificant number of Pocket PC style devices that are being used for wVoIP, even if they don't have cellular yet. And you should note that this first phone, jointly developed by Skype and some tiny manufacturer called i-mate, runs... Windows Mobile.

I certainly that Nokia et al get in gear on this one, no matter how unpopular it might seem with the operators. Because otherwise they might let microsoft out of the cage that it's been so cleverly manoeuvred into.

(Some notes... of course it's already being done in Japan . And check out this announcement: Orange to offer 3G, Wi-Fi palmtop smart phone again running .... Windows Mobile.)

My goal with the wireless-longhaul mailing list was to create a truly global list for discussing Wi-fi over long distances. Urban and rural. This month there was an exchange that I think shows it's worked at least somewhat. Looking at whois and google, one poster is from Istanbul, one is I think in Congo, one is in New Zealand and another is in California. Four people, four continents, and all different kinds of society.

Imagine there were some kind of mysterious link between open source and open spectrum. Now read this .

I just had this brainstorm that open spectrum should be thought of like an open source license. So that, the government would issue an open spectrum license for anyone to use a specific technology (e.g. spread spectrum) on a specific set of frequencies (e.g. 2.4GHz). But what would be the "Free Software Guidelines" for open spectrum? What is essential and what isn't to have open spectrum. If you're interested in the intersection of open source and open spectrum, check out (and reply to please :-) my post on the Open Spectrum mailing list at OpenICT.net .

Improving internet access in developing countries is a special report from the Development Gateway. It's special to me because they included my paper on Wi-Fi for rural communities. You can look at their copy (PDF) or at my copy (HTML).

Useful "newslog" on mesh networks

MIT's Media Lab has a weblog by interactive cinema group , where they use Nokia 3650 camera phones to make little videos. The videos are stored in a format that ends with .3gp and thus presumably has something to do with 3GPP. But they use the H.263 codec. The video is tiny, and the sound is poor, but it's a start.

The MMC card is a new alterative to CompactFlact and Secure Disk (SD) cards. It's a tiny little card that is designed for the cell phone market, and currently you can get up to 128MB cards. Incidentally, the Nokia 3650 accepts MMC cards. Someone uses it for something I consider a little odd Loud Thinking uses a 128MB MMC card to load simpsons and seinfeld onto the card, plugs it into the phone and watches them on the phone, on the train.

Wi-Fi networking is also creeping into the cell phone space. With 3G still in vaporware stage, people are trying to make do with 2.5G standards like EV-DO and 1xRTT. The speeds on these cell phone data standards aren't so great, and upload is quite low, maybe 40Kbps. (Thanks to Alan Reiter for some of this info and stimulating discussion). With hot spots spreading, and companies installing blanket Wi-Fi networks, people are starting to add Wi-Fi support to cell phones. Mostly these days it's for VoIP purposes, but data is data. In fact, at least one article already mentions video applications.

3GP is in my opinion too poor quality to be interesting. But, MPEG-4 ISMA layer-1 is a better looking video codec/format. I used it myself for the videos here. It runs at 50KBytes/s which is too much for a 2.5G network to handle, but fine for a Wi-Fi hot spot backed on a business DSL line. Also, the data rate is small enough that the previously mentioned 128MB MMC card could hold 45 minutes of video.

Put it all together and what you have is a "video phone" a cell phone with video capability. People might use them to capture moments on the street, with friends, at the club, etc. I don't personally have any interest in that. But lots of people already do this with their camera phones, so it seems reasonable to think they'd add video.

I was having all kinds of trouble with my Airport base station, the signal just wasn't cutting through the house and I would keep losing my signal and Mail would just complain and Camino would complain etc. So I switched the channel from 11 to 6, and now, no problem. I have four bars where I used to have nothing.

I just read Soekris Router Project . Soekris in case you haven't probably heard of it is a little company that makes these fantastic little PC-compatible chipsets that are totally solid-state, no moving parts, DC power, just the basics, a couple of ethernet ports, a PC card slot or two, a CompactFlash slot for the media, and a nifty-looking box.

And I am very impressed. I can get a Soekris , net4511 , for about $170, and a vpn1201 for about $70 and a CF card for about $50, all told, $300 for the hardware and it comes with a nifty looking box ( inside ) from Soekris. This is going to be with an extra twist from me because I want to install 6to4 support. I'll tell you why in a minute ;-)

OK, so first of all this slackwerks HOWTO is going to get me up and running with a totally secure IPSec based WiFi network. That's just cool. Instead of all this WEP/WPA/802.1x stuff I will have real end-to-end encryption running between me and my internet gateway (did I mention this magic box is going to be my gateway?). Then I set up IPv4 NAT on the soekris, and an IPv6 firewall as well, so it's now the ultimate gateway box. And, I set up 6to4 on the gateway, and configure my powerbook running OS X with ipv6. I've got a free ethernet port on the soekris to connect up local wired computers, and the wireless ethernet interface for my powerbook. What next?

Now I pull up ohPhoneX , an implementation of ohphone from the OpenH323 group which just happens to support IPv6. Since my powerbook is running over 6to4 it's not behind a NAT in IPv6, so I can send my overseas relatives and friends my powerbook's IPv6 address and they can directly connect to me. No more NAT nastiness, messing around with the DMZ, or whatever, it's a direct connection straight into my powerbook's globally addressable 6to4 address. Now I'm doing internet telephony, for free, over a wireless interface, and it's all totally autoconfigure.

It would be very sweet if lots of people got up and running with a gateway like this :-) Forget about Free World Dialup , forget about Vonage , forget about any kind of silly voice gateway. This is the end-to-end internet, not the InterNAT (or NAPT). I pay for my internet service provider to push the bits, and everything else is free. Even though most of the internet isn't running IPv6 yet, we can all use this setup (or a similar one) to build out the next-generation internet :-)

The COOK report interviewed David Hughes about Wi-Fi .

COOK Report: So is it safe to assume that you can buy an actual 11 megabit per second radio for under $1,000?

Hughes: Yes.

COOK Report: Way under a thousand?

Hughes: Yes. But there is a difference between buying a Base Station radio - that can handle hundreds of client radios, and a one IP/MAC address radio - for the client end. Both prices have come down rather dramatically, with client radios now below the magic 'consumer'$500 price point. Which happens to be what I had to pay for a 1200 baud Hayes Micromodem back 15 years ago.