I like the concept of city-wide wireless access to the Internet. I dislike the notion of taxpayers covering the costs—either the capital costs or the operating costs. Government does some things well and other things poorly. Internet access provides a new set of examples of things governments do poorly.
An old WAP11 died quite suddenly today. Natural causes.
They say when your favorite dog dies, nothing helps with the grief like a puppy. So, this new one is smaller, faster and easier.
Highly recommended.
Did I mention how much faster it is. When the incoming pipe is only about 5Mbps, it seems everything on the LAN (10/100/1000Mbps) would be overkill.
However, this new one simply screams. It’s also more secure.
Imagine the advantages to space planners if they could see a nearly real-time map of where people congregate. MIT has provided just such a capability by mapping the users logged onto its wireless network. Uncertainty and speculation give way to time-of-day knowledge of where the concentrations of people are likely to be.
Slashdot is linking to this story about transmitting a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds. The article begins to answer the question, What Is Broadband?
How much bandwidth is required to stream a high definition movie that is two hours long to a home receiver that will play that movie on a 52 inch display?
Same question, but instead of streaming that movie, we want to download it in a minute.
The point is that our current notion of a domestic wifi cloud probably won’t meet many of the needs that we have. I remember 10Mbps Ethernet. I use 100Mbps Ethernet today, but my wifi throttles that to around 11Mbps.
Something tells me that really high definition video is going to require us to move 6 or 8 GB of data in a hurry.
Calculations if you have them, please!
Foxtails, mudflaps and curb feelers for your life!
