Linking In

[Brad Hards]

On Wed, 10 Jul 2002 15:18, Bob Edwards wrote:
> Whilst there are several discrete links here and there around
> Canberra, there is no wider publicly accessible network as in
> some other cities (although there was a great deal of enthusiam
> once upon a time).
It seems that wireless community networking is a really cool solution looking 
for a problem. If that seems a bit harsh, then ask yourself what you want to 
use that networking for. The three possibilities seem to be:

1. play games. an admirable goal (although learning to cut code would be good 
too), but wireless isn't going to help much. Multiple wireless hops is going 
to make the latency suck (and because there aren't a lot of really suitable 
spots for links, the central transfer points will basically present a fixed 
bandwidth that everyone in that area shares.

2. share internet. Cool, but as long as there are download charges in 
Australia, then no-one is going to make their broadband open to everyone. You 
might be able to do a deal with your friends to split costs, but that isn't 
the same as a general community network. Case in point:
> btw. TPG Internet in Canberra are offering 512k/128k ISDN lines
> for $27/month _with a static IP_, plus download charges (not too
> unreasonable), but free uploads. You could get a lot of months
> of happy _static_ Internet for the cost of a wireless card etc.

3. Share content. This is about the only thing that I'd be remotely interested 
in (except if 2 was someone elses broadband). Peering proxy cache, or freenet 
or whatever. The downside is that areas without broadband [1] aren't going to 
have much content in the proxies.

Brad

[1] My thinking is based on the way in which Canberra is laid out. It is very 
hard to get over and around the ridges[2]. The areas that are newer (eg 
Gungalin) don't have much in the way of shortish lines of sight to anywhere 
with broadband, and Gungalin doesn't have any infrastructure support [3].

[2] Without Telstra tower, which is almost inconceivable.

[3] A few people with unidirectional or bidirectional satellite could fix the 
content problem though.

-- 
http://conf.linux.org.au. 22-25Jan2003. Perth, Australia. Birds in Black.