Someone much smarter than I, on Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 10:05:49AM +1000, spake thus.
Does anyone have any experience of "unwired".. .good, bad or ugly? My daughter is getting 12Kb on her dial up because of crappy phone lines and I'm wondering how good an alternative this is.
She has a Macintosh which the web site says are supported. Sadly, linux isn't mentioned - does anyone have any clues about linux connectivity? or does it just connect to an ethernet port like anything else?
As I understand it dave, unwired uses a nonstandard proprietory implementation of wireless.
I doubt you'll be able to connect it easily to a linux machine as it doesn't conform to the 802.11b standard I think it is. someone can correct me on that standard number at any rate.
hth
I use a wireless ISP here in Wollongong (Fish Internet - "Etherwave" http://www.fishinternet.com.au/broadband_intro.php). As I have a business connection plan, they provided me with a Cisco Aironet350 Workgroup Bridge (shweet). I simply plug it into my (Debian) firewall via a cross-over cable and that's it. Assign IP's to my network (I have a /27 subnet) and I'm done.
Their consumer product uses a less "flashy" box, which AFIAK has both USB and Ethernet connection options. Then, like most broadband "modems", hands out an IP via DHCP etc. The guys at Fish Internet don't officially "support" Linux, but their tech guys use it extensively and can unofficially provide $CLUE ;)
Bandwidth? I see up to about 2Mbps synchronous when things aren't too busy, but when all the script kiddies get on between about 3pm-6pm it drops off to about 256kbps. The ISP is clueful though, and will be de-prioritising P2P traffic in the near future as this is what sucks up the bandwidth during those busy hours. Even with the drawbacks of a multi-homed network, for $110/mth, 32 IP's, and 5Gb of data (their consumer product has a more "consumer" price)...it's not bad. Especially when you consider we can't get cable, *DSL etc. in our area.
So that's my experience with wireless broadband.
Cheers,
James -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
