William H. Magill on Wed, 11 Jun 2003 12:00:14 -0400


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Re: [PLUG] Re: Wireless LAN Coverage in The Suburbs (Jeffrey Mealo) & Free Wireless Access (William H. Magill)

On Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 05:29 PM, Jeff 'Jephree' Mealo wrote: 
In response to: "Free Wireless Access (William H. Magill)"

I don't know exactly what you were thinking, but why would you call me selfish
for wanting to share my bandwidth. You assumed I was asking to use it and
not contribute.

That was the impression I got from your original post. My apologies if I misinterpreted you. However, when the subject of "free wireless" comes up, that is normally what people are looking for... Internet connectivity without paying for it.

a) bandwidth is like electricity in every sense, use it or loose it
someone else might as well have what I'm not using b) why can't packets carry
a priority like processes do? Anyway I'm branching off into a completely
different subject,

The short answer is ... if you were running ATM network (not automated teller machine) then what you say would be true. However, the Internet wasn't designed to work that way. QOS tags, Quality of Service, which would allow prioritized packets on the Internet have been proposed, but by and large are not viewed as a good thing... They come along automatically with IPv6, but their importance is clearly expressed by the rapid adoption of IPv6 [Insert seriously sarcastic grin here.]

The adoption of Real-time IP -- VoIP or Video suffers from this lack.

The design of IP was a very different process than the design of ATM. The requirements were quite different as were the designers and their environment.

Also how much is a block of IPs exactly (let's say a class c network). 

Are you asking dollar cost (none as such) or number of addresses.

The mechanism for getting a Class B or C address is basically centered around proving that you have a need for one. Today, that is far more difficult than it was 10 years ago. Under IPv6 that changes slightly, but not all that much. What changes is the importance of a particular block. Because the addresses are constructed, they no longer suffer from the "Area Code Syndrome" -- massive blocks assigned because of the need for contiguous addresses, but which are then unused.

All that said, any Class C address today is carved out of somebody else Class B, which typically belongs to some ISP.... which means that you have to pay whatever they want to charge for them.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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