From: Walter Watts (wlwatts@cox.net)
Date: Wed Mar 06 2002 - 11:30:40 MST
Widespread adoption of this concept of making a seamless hi-speed
internet network out of smaller 802.11(a or b) networks sounds very
appealing to me. Having had an 802.11b wireless network around home this
last 6 months has really impressed me with its robustness. With some
improvements to the WEP security (or lack of), this could be the key to
making broadband internet access the ubiquitous feature of modern life
that it should be.
--Walter
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www.nytimes.com
The Corner Internet Network vs. the Cellular Giants
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, March 3
The informal Wi-Fi networks that inexpensively provide wireless Internet
access are fine, as far as they go which is generally a few hundred
feet. But what happens when there are enough of them to weave together
in a blanket of Internet coverage?
What begins to appear is a high-speed wireless data network built from
the bottom up, rather than the top-down wireless cellular data networks
now being established by giant telecommunications companies.
Many Silicon Valley engineers now believe that it will be possible to
take the tens of thousands of inexpensive wireless network connections
that are popping up in homes and coffee shops all over the country and
lash them together into a single anarchic wireless network. Connections
could theoretically be passed from one Wi- Fi node to another, similar
to the way wireless phone signals pass from cell to cell, thereby
significantly extending the wired Internet.
Modeled closely on the original nature of the Internet, which grew by
chaining together separate computer networks, the technology known as
wireless mesh routing is being rapidly embraced in the United States as
well as in the developing world, where it is viewed as a low-cost method
for quickly building network infrastructure.
If the engineers are right, the popular and inexpensive Wi-Fi wireless
standard, also known as 802.11, could serve as the wedge for the
next-generation Internet, enabling a new wave of wireless portable
gadgets that ultimately blanket homes, schools and shopping malls with
Internet access.
Currently most 802.11 networks serve as individual beacons that provide
wireless Internet connections to portable computers situated within 200
feet or so of an 802.11 transmitter. What wireless mesh routing offers
is the promise of a vastly more powerful collaboration driven by the
same forces that originally built the Internet.
"The good news is that broadband wireless access will finally explode,"
said Nicholas Negroponte, the director of the M.I.T Media Laboratory.
"The social contract is simple: you can use mine when you are in the
vicinity of Mount Vernon Street, Boston. But I want to be able to use
yours when I am near you."
The technology is being driven both by a gaggle of ambitious start-up
companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere and by a hobbyist movement
that mimics the original Homebrew Club that led to the personal computer
industry.
Today, Tim Pozar and several of his friends are seizing the high ground,
literally and figuratively, in a movement that could undercut the
nation's cellular companies, which are investing tens of millions of
dollars in top-down, heavily engineered, digital cellular networks.
Mr. Pozar, a radio engineer, is a member of the Bay Area Wireless Users
Group, an active band of hobbyists who have been building free networks
in communities through the region. Mr. Pozar and some of his friends
have quietly begun obtaining the rights to place $2,000 wireless network
access stations on the mountains and hilltops that encircle San
Francisco Bay. If he succeeds, the network will be a starting point for
a wireless data network that could eventually spread all over the Bay
Area.
Significantly, what will set Mr. Pozar's planned Sunset Network and
those like it apart from the commercial cellular networks now being
constructed at great expense is that they will "self assemble" expanding
from one neighborhood to the next as individuals and businesses join by
buying their own cheap antennas that either attach to the wired Internet
or pass a signal on to another wireless node.
Mr. Pozar has even come up with a new acronym to describe his plan. In
addition to the existing terminology of LAN's and WAN's local and wide
area networks he is proposing the idea of NAN's, or neighborhood area
networks.
The so-called Nanny Networks are rapidly becoming the hottest thing in
Silicon Valley and internationally. There are now at least 19 companies
developing proprietary wireless mesh routing technologies, all trying to
replicate the original Internet in a wireless form.
It is not an easy task because the companies are engineering for a new
kind of design, with which they must route data packets over paths where
network nodes constantly pop up and disappear.
Moreover, wireless networks must overcome an array of environmental
obstacles that do not plague wired networks, including hills, rain and
trees.
Such networks, however, do have the critical advantage of economy of
scale. In contrast to the cellular data networks, in which every
customer is an added cost, in some respects in wireless mesh networks
the more users who join the better the network performs.
In the jargon of Silicon Valley, wireless mesh routing is potentially a
"disruptive technology," a new technology that is likely to upset the
existing order by using the same powerful economics of cost and scale
that initially drove the growth of the commercial Internet.
Already, companies like Mesh Networks, based in Maitland, Fla., are
selling systems of wireless routers, making it possible to create self-
assembling and self-healing networks that would cover an urban area.
There are also companies like Boingo Wireless and Sputnik, which focus
on software and services that make it possible for wireless users to
roam among networks. Similar technologies were crucial in the
development of the original nationwide analog cellular voice networks.
In Silicon Valley, companies like Skypilot Network, FHP Wireless,
Ultradevices, CoWave Networks, SRI's Packet Hop and others are all
developing networks that have the potential to weave together networks
made up of wireless antennas.
"We're going to start seeing more mom-and- pop Internet service
providers buying access points that will support 802.11," Mr. Pozar
said. "At first I thought it was going to just be geeks doing wireless,
but now everyone has one of these things deployed."
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