Governments and WiFi

11 January 2006

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.

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Fat Pipes Plus

2 December 2005

Linksys Wireless Router 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.

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Real Data

3 November 2005

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.

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Half a Second

30 October 2005

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?

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What is Broadband?

13 October 2005

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!

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