On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, Dave Howe wrote: > > http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/11/21/yourtech.wifis/index.html > Its a nice idea, but unfortunately gets easily bitten by the usual > networking bugbears > 1. large wifi networks start to hit scaling problems - they start to need > routers and name services that are relatively expensive, and ip address > ranges start to become a scarce resource.
The scaling problem is a valid one up to a point. The others are not. The biggest problem is people trying to do distributed computing using non-distributed os'es (eg *nix clones and Microsloth). There are other alternatives which are built from the ground up to be distributed. http://plan9.bell-labs.com > 2. no matter how large the new network becomes, it still needs a link to the > "old" network; Granted, up to a point. That point is when this network has more resources than the 'old' networks. At some point the old networks move over and start running from the new one. > almost all ISPs frown on use of home connections for sharing > more than just the owner's machines, and many consider using even unmetered > in a manner they didn't provision for (ie, using unmetered more than 100 > hours a month at the full bandwidth limit) as "abuse" and end the contracts > of those who do so. what you would need would be an ISP (or large > commercial) style contract with a guaranteeed bandwidth and dedicated ip > addresses - which do not come cheap enough to be worth giving away. Bullshit on the too expensive to give away. > 3. unmetered is only just becoming common in england, and is still mostly on > 56K modem. broadband is often *massively* underprovisioned, and quite often > all the connections in an area feed to a single fixed-bandwidth multiplexor > at the telecomms office, so adding additional connections doesn't actually > add any bandwidth at all. the *only* end user deal is 500kb down, 250kb up > shared amongst *50* people in your area (the uk has a telecomms monopoly > from a recently privatised company that has already forced two would-be > competitors out of the market). Even now (given expected usage patterns) the > mere existance of a microsoft OS service pack more than 30mb in size is > enough to throw available bandwidth per-user below modem levels.... Irrelevant since there are plenty of commercial feeds out there that are not ISP's. I keep seeing thes ney saying views yet the guerrilla networks just keep getting bigger... -- ____________________________________________________________________ We don't see things as they are, [EMAIL PROTECTED] we see them as we are. www.ssz.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anais Nin www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------
