Hi folks, I know most of my recent discussion here has been primarily technical in nature but I'd like to chime in on a few things if you don't mind. Also, I'm not trying to be curt so please try not to read too much in to my tone as this is merely brainstorming mode for me.
The discussion about 3650 gear is commendable but I'm not sure how it lets anyone reuse the existing SkyPilot gear without bundling it with additional hardware (and the Alvarion gear is probably on par pricewise with the SkyPilot hardware but I haven't gone that far down the path). It seems to me to defeat the point of anyone's convincing the city to repurpose the SkyPilot base stations if they aren't presented a fully baked proposal that will be able to provide connectivity to the most common denominator of users; 802.11a/b/g/n aka Wi-Fi Certified™. Since the SkyGateway and SkyExtender base stations already have their own 4.9-6.07 GHz backhaul radios, why reinvent the wheel? (freqs are per Sam's blog post as their data sheets only list 4.94-5.85 so it could be that their newer gear goes up to 6 GHz) So yanking the WiFi radios seems to be a waste of time as well since you'd be taking a $30-50 component out of a $400-500 base station. That's akin to telling the city that that they should pull the valve stems from all city vehicle tires before disposing of them. I think the real concern is whether the vendor charges an annual maintenance agreement for firmware updates and, if so, where do the funds come to keep paying it? If that's not a financially viable option can the firmware be flashed? That seems unlikely per the words of their CTO, Randy Frei, as quoted at the end of Sam's post regarding their newer CPE: "For instance, from your office you could point a Mini or Pro at the nearest SkyExtender and connect, not to the 2.4 Ghz WiFi interface that you formerly used, but via our 4.9-6.07 GHz synchronous protocol," explained Frei. "If it's not currently possible to cover an entire city, including inside homes, using just WiFi - then using a synchronous directional scheduled meshing protocol, built on top of WiFi chips, is the next best thing." Once all that's on the way to being resolved, you've only covered a small portion of the issue -- now you've got some gear to work with but what to do with it? If the city council and the general public are soured by MetroFi's deployment of a metro-wide MWLAN, how does one present a proposal that's going to get their attention? Are you going to concurrently deploy and manage a public safety MWLAN on 4.9 GHz? How do the Schlumberger parking meters backhaul to their payment center and if they operate on the available freqs, what's the security model (WPA2, VLAN, aplication layer PKI, VPN, some/all of the above, etc)? Does the WLAN really need to extend inside everyone's home/apt/condo/office/treehouse/basement or are public spaces sufficient? If end users want CPE to reach the public base stations, what's a reasonable model for establishing distribution/price/vendor/support for said CPE? Again, how does it all tie in to a budget for maintaining the base station hardware/firmware/network, end users trying to connect to it with city un/supported CPE, phone and/or email queue staff, specialized staff for public safety users, etc? Presenting one line/paragraph/page suggestions to the city council is not recommended at this juncture. It's a lot to bite off so it's no wonder that MetroFi barely got their toe into the base station and networking stages and were questionably succesful at any portions of those. -Gary --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Personal Telco Project - http://www.personaltelco.net/ Donate to PTP: http://www.personaltelco.net/donate Archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.wireless.portland.general/ Etiquette: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/MailingListEtiquette List information: http://lists.personaltelco.net To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
