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Friday, September 13, 2002
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Wales becomes one of the most connected places on earth with Wi-Fi: This article on Welsh Wi-Fi represents the culmination of years and effort, including fights with British Telecomm. (Dave Hughes has long been involved with this.)
[80211b News]
From the original article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/wales/2251565.stm
Just 31% of BT's local telephone exchanges are converted to the high-speed digital capacity of ADSL technology because the telecom giant believes conversion is not commercially viable.
Taking its lead from similar projects around the world, Arwain uses 802.11b (wi-fi) technology to send internet data along an unlicensed portion of the radio spectrum.
Users in Cardiff are hitting speeds of 10mbps - about 10 times faster than ntl's fastest cable broadband package and enough to videoconference and watch high-quality web movies comfortably.
Network expansion
"This is something nice to give to the community," Arwain committee chairman Evan Jones told BBC News Online.
"It's a very good way of getting broadband to small but tightly packed communities.
But a greater proportion of metropolitan Cardiff is already covered than any other European city, Mr Jones added.
"Cardiff alone has more wireless broadband coverage than Denmark," he said.
....
Growing interest
Use of wireless internet is mushrooming, with community groups in London, Edinburgh, Brighton and Sheffield launching similar civic projects and with individuals getting switched on to the wi-fi cult.
Another venture, E-fro, is using a £100,000 Welsh Assembly grant on a Bethesda, Gwynedd, trial which is a model for networking 600 more communities around Wales and another, Dyfinet, is operating in the Dyfi Valley.
Trials at the National Eisteddfod and Royal Welsh Show during the summer attracted fevered interest from rural community members including farmers, who could use wi-fi to track livestock at remote locations.
7:02:24 PM 
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This post today at Slashdot has sparked a great pooling of notes about wireless campuses. Here are some highlights from a still-growing discussion.
One Glimpse Of The Wireless Future
 Posted by timothy on Friday September 13, @12:14PM
from the trapper-john's-alma-mater dept.
SemiBarbaricPrincess writes "Check out this story at wired.com about wireless networks on college campuses. The focus is on Dartmouth College." It would be great to see this kind of wireless community outside academia too.
(User #603160 Info) I go to a college at a university in Australia, and they have just spent AU $800,000 to secure our network. The efforts they have taken to secure the network this year have cost more than has been spent on the whole computer system in the past 14 years. In my mind this is damn stupid, because it took the IT club (in no way linked to the admin of the College) 13 min to bypass the new security measures, (while we were drunk(!)) This leads to the obvious question of why to bother. Can a system actually be made safe against people who really want to bypass it?
by Andy Dodd ((ude.llenroc) (ta) (7dta)) on Friday September 13, @01:30PM (#4252132)
(User #701 Info | http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/atd7/) |
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Roaming (and automatic handoffs) are one of the features that sets Cisco/Symbol/high-end Orinoco APs apart from many cheaper ones (Note: Such features are quickly drifting downwards to lower-priced units, I believe some Linksys APs now support roaming too).
Hopping from cell to cell (AP to AP) is the key to cellular phone systems having such high capacity. Need more capacity? Can't afford more spectrum? Drop your power level down and pack the cells more closely together.
If Dartmouth has 460 APs, that means that they are running at relatively low power levels, i.e. their network is quite segmented to distribute the load.
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by PureFiction (coderman@mindspring.com) on Friday September 13, @12:41PM (#4251818)
(User #10256 Info | http://cubicmetercrystal.com/) |
There are a few projects working towards this goal like the Janus Wireless Project [cubicmetercrystal.com]. This will provide not just increased internet access reliability and throughput (using multiple AP's and simultaneous associations) but also tight integration with common peer network services, like file sharing, music broadcasting using a broadcast FEC transport and playlists, even Voice over IP.
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I write this... (Score:2)
by Corvaith on Friday September 13, @12:58PM (#4251906)
(User #538529 Info) |
...from my Stats classroom, about 15 minutes before class starts, on my laptop, via the University of Akron's wireless connection.
I used to think this kind of stuff didn't matter. You use it once, and then after that, you wonder how you ever lived without it. No worrying about transferring files from lab computers back to my home computer, no worrying about missing messages, the ability to actually be productive during time when I'd normally just be waiting for stuff...
It's an incredible thing. What else can you call an innovation that lets a person read Slashdot at any time, from anywhere on campus? ;) |
Coverage at UF (Score:2, Interesting)
by numatrix ((jordan) (at) (denialofpurpose.com)) on Friday September 13, @01:04PM (#4251951)
(User #242325 Info | http://psifertex.com/drool/) |
We have a few hundred AP's on campus at UF, that cover a fairly large piece of a very large campus. The coverage map (mostly accurate) is online [ufl.edu], as well as instructions on connecting.
The nice thing about the network here is that no mac registration is necessary. The wireless network is seperated from campus by filters that can only be broken through via VPN connection to the campus VPN server, or authenticated with their campus 'gatorlink' login. When we first developed the system, no commercial products existed to do what we needed (though today there are many); any web traffic is automatically redirected to the authentication server that allows the users to login with their campus login, and their mac is added to the auth table after a successful login. This makes the service easy to use, transparent, and compatible with just about every platform you can think of. Of course, no encryption by default if people choose to take that route, but that's why we offer the VPN as well. |
Education Possibilities (Score:1)
by retostamm (reto@retostamm.com) on Friday September 13, @01:18PM (#4252031)
(User #91978 Info | http://www.lingoteach.org/) |
Yes. That's cool.
But the Educational implications are way underrated. If there is homework, and you do it on your laptop and it's multichoice, the Teacher could look at the Homework due this week, see what's not understood, and help the Students understand this in the lesson.
The ordinary feedback is way slow (student brings homework, attends lesson, teacher can apply his knowledge only one week later. So, until you really know something it takes up to 3 weeks!)
If the Feedback loop can be shortened with technology, that'd be way cool, and this wireless technology puts the required infrastructure in place.
Now we just need open source tools, maybe like liblearn [gnu.org]. |
Wireless... in business and on campus (Score:1)
by mustangdavis on Friday September 13, @01:59PM (#4252362)
(User #583344 Info | http://www.coldfirestudios.com/) |
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I currently work for the University of Akron (http://www.uakron.edu) where we do have a wireless network on campus. I must say, the future is nice, but scarey! Yes, it is sweet being able to give presentations with a laptop using the 'net without having to find a network jack, but there are BIG draw backs as well. It is also cool (and a great use of time) to take a a laptop to meetings and read my email during portions of meetings that don't concern me without offending anyone at the meeting or to review my meeting notes (and take notes) without taking a pen to the meeting! However (now the bad news), anyone can pick up anything I type trough the laptop thgat is sent across the wireless net .... no encryption. Although the wireless net is nice, it isn't well protected. Security is something that most academic institutions seem to forget (damn academic freedon issues!) when using newer technologies. But ..., I do believe that your mac address has to be on record before you can connect to the campus net ... (I don't have any of my own wireless devices to try this with ... the shame!), which does help with security and network abuse ... a LITTLE ....
Re:Wireless... in business and on campus (Score:1)
by mustangdavis on Friday September 13, @02:02PM (#4252377)
(User #583344 Info | http://www.coldfirestudios.com/) |
| Oh, and I forgot ... the Universities (for legal reasons) have to be careful NOT to provide Internet access to people other than students, faculty, and staff. This is why the Universities must be careful to protect their wireless networks ... otherwise the local ISPs will sue them for directly competing with for profit business. Public institutions are not alowed to do that ... what a bummer for the guy that lives down the road from the computer center ... |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] | |
by Marcus Erroneous on Friday September 13, @04:49PM (#4253675)
(User #11660 Info | http://slashdot.org/) |
| My son goes to UT Dallas and has already adapted to wireless, pervasive computing. He leaves his laptop on while he moves around and has a new message to reflect his status. His new AIM away message is "brb, between buildings". |
My school is wireless (Score:1)
by CableModemSniper (cblsnipr@optonline.net) on Friday September 13, @05:22PM (#4253902)
(User #556285 Info | http://thegospeloflogan.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday July 23, @11:42PM) |
| I go to Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, and there is wireless everywhere (as well as liberal spatterings of 100TX RJ45 jacks) Every student is issued a laptop (the freshmen class, of which i am a member, gets ThinkPad T30s) The article is quite right about the lack of cell phone usage, most people just IM each other. The proffessors are also very technologically in tune. The math homework is submitted online and graded immediately. Computer science homework is also submitted online, as well as writing and humanites homework. I haven't been here long enough to know if this trend continues. We have Blackboard 5 system that provides access to course information (syllabus, homeworks, etc.) In fact my English teacher is using a forum feature of this system to have us submit our homework responses and discuss each other's responses. Of course there are "downsides", you'll notice people playing GTA3 during lectures, but its amazing how useful and pervasive these sort of systems can be. |
6:27:39 PM
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© Copyright
2004
Jon Schull.
Last update:
1/21/04; 9:26:11 AM.
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