Hey guys I'm jumping into the middle of a thread here, so if I've missed stuff please forgive me. My mailbox has been pretty busy since yesterday. :-)
On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 07:15, Michael Sims wrote: > PersonalTelco.net missed a *major* opportunity to educate the public > about public wireless and spread spectrum technologies by responding to > the reporter's question and complaining about degradation of service. > The better response would go something like this: First off some facts. This news story was not instigated by us. We were talking about what we should do about the T-Mobile AP being on the same channel at one of our monthly meetings and it so happened that a reporter from the Oregonian was at the meeting. He followed up quickly after the meeting and things flowed from there. >From your comments, I suspect you haven't dealt with the media much. It's really hard to control how the article comes out and it takes a LOT of practice. Nigel's better at it then I am, and I've learned a *LOT* in the last year. One of the first things you learn is that you basically can't control or offer suggestions of what they should talk about. Even the friendly reporters who like you don't really listen. By and large *ALL* reporters care about is controversy, we've been courting/begging/cajoling the Oregonian to do a decent story about us for over a year. This is the first time they've even overly interested in returning our calls. The best you can do is not mention things you don't want them to talk about (which is often hard because you have to wiggle around topics or straight out confuse the issue) and repeat the things you do want them to talk about as often as possible. In this case what you see in the article and the KGW news clippings is the result of at least 3 hours of talking with me, probably an equivelent amount of talking with Nigel and misc. talking with other members. We all stressed that this was *NOT* a technical issue, it was a political issue. And that the technology was dealing with this fine (for the time being). > "Even though Starbucks is offering their service on the same band as we > have been for the last few months, both services can be operational at > the same time due to a concept called 'spread spectrum', which nearly > eliminates interference between radio transmitters and receivers > operating on similar frequencies. In fact, Starbucks patrons can simply > continue to use our free service in the store if they don't feel like > overpaying for internet access while they're overpaying for coffee." > > Promoting the idea of "interference" is just asking for community > wireless to be shut down in favor of commercial interests. I'm sure the > 2.4Ghz band would bring millions in an FCC auction. Interference may not be the best technical term to use, but it's one that the layman understands. Contention for bandwidth between multiple AP's/clients *IS* a real problem. It's not (yet) much of a problem at the Pioneer Square node because neither AP is heavily used, but there is only so much physical spectrum available on channel 1 and more users on that channel means more contention for bandwidth. If spread spectrum was a panacea there would be no need for multiple channels, and everything could just happily exist one channel. Adam. -- "Make the invisible visible. Let people see." -- Bruce Sterling -- NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/
