Wifi Caravan,Janus Wireless Project http://www.cubicmetercrystal.com/wificaravan/
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57763,00.html Wireless Caravan: A happy band of geek gypsies hit the road Friday. And they didn't leave their technology behind. Traveling in what they call the Wifi Caravan, five members of the Janus Wireless Project formed a rolling wireless network with the intention of maintaining a constant connection throughout the 14-hour car journey from Portland, Oregon, to San Francisco. En route to the CodeCon 2.0 programmers' conference, passengers in two cars sent e-mail and kept in touch on Internet relay chat, surfed the Internet and shared files. To break up the monotony, they streamed music between the cars using Icecast and played multiplayer games. They also did a little war driving to see how many unprotected wireless networks they could spot along the way. "Janus is essentially just a bunch of geeks with common interests," said member Steven Cockayne. "We are open-source advocates, some of us are programmers, and we also do quite a bit of research in the wireless field in order to make whatever we discover public domain in the hope that it can help better support the online community." The heart of the Wifi Caravan's mobile network is a custom-built multiprocessor computer running Linux. The entire system fits into a briefcase. Kyle Williams, a Janus researcher, said they were still tweaking the system five hours before departure. "Things are never done with us," Williams said. "As soon as a project is finished, we look at it and try to figure out how to make it better. And then we take it apart again. What can I say -- we're computer geeks. That's just how we are." According to Cockayne, roughly 130,000 miles of dark (that is, unused) fiber-optic cable lie between Portland and Seattle, most of which was put down by telecom providers who went out of business and no longer own the cabling. One of the Janus road-trippers' goals was to research that cable's potential. "There have been quite a few talks about the city (of Portland) creating wireless broadband connections off of the fiber in order to provide everyone in range with broadband connections at 11 Mbps for roughly $20 a month," Cockayne said. "Janus would like to help provide such a service. "We are basically aiming to eventually provide a similar ISP-style system, and would possibly be using the same means. So this trip is a proof-of-concept of sorts, to show that a 'wireless blanket' can be created and all tied to a central network with ease." Janus is also hoping the trip will prove the stability of mobile wireless networking. "We've done some extensive research in the field of wireless, and this seems to be the next natural evolution," Cockayne said. "A fully portable wireless network that functions similar to a small NOC (network operations center)" -- essentially a command center from which a network is monitored and problems are diagnosed and fixed. The Wifi Caravan has rolled out before, but on a smaller scale, with only one car carrying multiple laptops. The group will make its next caravan trip to Defcon in Las Vegas in August. As of mid-morning on Friday, seven hours after the caravan left Portland, all systems were still up and working. Janus members had maintained a constant, reliable connection between the cars, even when they pushed the speed limit by cruising at 80 mph. "We're not surprised. We knew this would work," Cockayne said. "It's just way more fun to test it on a road trip." __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ -- NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/
