| William H. Magill on Wed, 11 Jun 2003 11:41:05 -0400 |
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On Wednesday, June 11, 2003, at 06:30 AM, Chris Magnus Hedemark wrote: The bright side to this may end up being 802.16, which should have better range and allow for a one-to-many relationship between a single Philadelphia node and many suburban nodes. 802.16 is not out there yet. However, towns like Swarthmore have enough of an interest in something like this that they would be likely to set up their own local mesh for town-level connectivity and worry about the back haul link later, if they didn't want to eat the cost of both ends of that link.
While you may not like the Phone Company, the Delaware Valley has extensive and ubiquitous "land line" coverage. It is far easier, cheaper and much more reliable to buy a T1 line from point-A to point-B than to do it via wireless. And if you need more than a T1 capacity, (cheap) wireless can't hack it. Period. The killer to all this, as in all networks, is going to be topology. It is the same problem which the Cable companies face. As long as nobody uses the service, then there is more than enough bandwidth for all. But, assume for argument's sake that you actually have 10 meg bandwidth, if you have 10 users, that means each one can only ever get 1 meg each. Once you start aggregating say 20 or 30 or 50 users performance is going to take a hit to the point where people are going to be constantly complaining. You can play the game, "Oh, they don't all use it at the same time." That's called the AOL answer. It is a true statement, just as my initial statement is -- as long as nobody uses it, there is plenty of bandwidth. Put another way -- a wireless back-haul, in an Urban environment, is a waste of time and energy. In a Suburban environment, it might make sense, maybe. In a rural environment, it will likely make sense. Wireless is a nice technology. I've been using 802.11b since it was standardized. However, the fact remains, it is NOT the solution to every problem, especially problems for which better alternative solutions exist. So while it makes sense for ubiquitous coverage in a roaming environment, it makes no sense for the point-to-point situation. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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