[olug] washingtonpost.com: 'Free' Wireless Networks?

[puzzled at home.com]

    There is much, much more to it than you would think. Most of the
wireless gear out there uses 2.4 gig which is starting to get cluttered.
There is already one 802.11  wireless service that has either gone tits up
or changed hands (Citywide) and there will be a lot more before the
bloodletting is over.

    The 5.8 gig band is a lot cleaner but forget about $300 CPE - there is
a nice box from Adaptive Broadband that will do 10 mbit or ATM25 service
... $2200 without antena, mast, etc, etc.

    If you need to do long haul there are plenty of licensed band microwave
gadgets out there that will drive an OC3 for many, many miles but they
don't give this sort of stuff away, either.

    If anyone is genuinely interested in playing with this stuff I am
expecting a Cisco Aironet 340 base with two PCMCIA cards to show up on
Monday and I am angling for some Breezecom gear to play with after that -
if you want to test service between two points this is the month to ask me
to do a feasibility check :-)


   I could tell all of you what I am doing with all of this wireless stuff
... but then I'd have to kill you :-)


Jay Woods wrote:

> We could site several towers and use directional antennas to link up the
> towers in a net. ---Jay
>
> Eric Penne wrote:
>
> > I notice the sentence where a skeptic says "it wasn't developed for
> > wide open spaces"  when in fact Lucent has a contract with a local
> > company in Lincoln to build antennas for just that.  When I worked
> > there they were looking at an 8dBi Omnidirectional (every way but up
> > and down) antenna and when coupled with another antenna that is
> > identical (I don't think there was an amplifier) they had good
> > reliability up to 6 miles away Line of sight.
>
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