Welcome. UnwiredWeekly is a service for public Community Lans. Community LAN developments, news, hardware, software, deployments, people and events are compiled each Mondy. No rumor is too insignificant, no scandal is too big for your editor, Samantha Noz.

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Sirius' Trouble for Community LANS? http://80211b.weblogger.com/ Sirius, petitioning the FCC, is worried about cars that use both a satellite radio service and 802.11 devices like a wireless phone or PDA. The emissions caused by the phone or PDA operating on the 2.4GHz frequency could interfere with the satellite radio, officials say.

The satellite radio industry uses an adjacent frequency to deliver its service, using 2.32 to 2.34GHz. The unlicensed band, 2.4-2.483GHz, is only 55MHz away from the upper end of the licensed band, Sirius officials say, and could possibly overlap. As such, Sirius is asking the FCC to reduce the wattage of those unlicensed devices, to 8.6 u V/M, or the wattage gadgets expel to transmit their 2.4GHz signal. --

Cellular Companies: Fight or Switch?

The WLAN market for home and business will grow more 30 percent a year by 2006 (www.80211-planet.com/news/article/0,4000,1481_992001,00.html) --

Cell and W-LAN in a PC Card: Plextek's Marvel puts Tri-band GSM/PCS and IEEE 802.11b wireless connectivity in a PC card launched at the CTIA Wireless 2002 show (18-20 March). The PC card, will fit into any standard Type II slot in a notebook or laptop PC and will support GSM voice and SMS, GPRS high-speed data, and 802.11b connectivity. Nokia and others have announced similar chips. --

Atheros Ships Combo Chipset (http://investor.cnet.com/investor/news/newsitem/0-9900-1028-9045381-0.html) Atheros Communications delivered the industry's first chipset to support all three IEEE wireless LAN standards: 802.11a, the 802.11g draft, and 802.11b. The Smart Select automatically chooses the optimal RF technology (a/g/b), rate adaptation and error correction methods, power reduction and internationalization features, and security protocol for a wireless network, and dynamically adapts to changing conditions as the user roams within that network. Atheros Ships Combo Chipset Rolling Three WLAN Standards into a Single Solution; Support for 802.11a/g/b Facilitates Wide-Scale Wireless LAN Deployment

http://lists.personaltelco.net/pipermail/ptp/2002q1/subject.html

HiperLAN and 802.11a will now emerge as the globally supported standard, but with a few additions over the current release. The IEEE is adding DFS (dynamic frequency selection) and TPC (transmit power control), to meet the requirements of ETSI.

What if we pre-configured all of these boxes, had a big meeting where we walked everyone through configuring it for your home network, and sent you off home with a box that would work on your home network. Would people be interested?

It looks like the newest version of OmniWeb (v4.1 beta 1) works just fine with NoCatAuth. This is good news for the hoards of MacOS X users who thought they were out in the cold with OmniWeb ... or maybe I'm the only one. :-)

The Portland Hostelling International free node at 3031 SE Hawthorne in Portland is getting one of the donated Intel 2011b access Points. Chris the manager has ordered the QWEST DSL service and is already an Easystreet customer. The DSL circuit went live Feb 25th.

I've got the Multnomah Washington & County 1 meter Satellite maps on CD that I bought from the State on a whim. They're 8-bit color as well...<<.U of Kansas project http://www.ittc.ku.edu/wlan/ takes wireless coverage mapping to the next level. An arial b&w photograph has sections tinted various colors to show signal strength.>>

http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/has.html

Nokia today unveiled its first data product that brings GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) technology to laptops and handheld devices. The small but powerful Nokia D211 is a multimode radio card offering "always-on" Internet access within GPRS, HSCSD (High Speed CircuitSwitched Data), and wireless LAN (Local Area Network) coverage areas.

At about 8pm PST on Wed. Feb 20, Rob Flickenger accidentally fell from the roof of a two-story building, while attempting to set up a point-to-point 802.11b link here in Sebastopol. He was immediately taken to the hospital, where he was underwent surgery for severe internal injuries. He has since been taken out of intensive care, and is in stable condition.

The question is, what if anything can the creators of a wireless community network such as PTP do to contribute in their own small way to the acceptance of and demand for IPv6? Would it be advantageous to require that participating nodes support it? Would that introduce onerous complications and be an unwelcome and unproductive form of mission creep?

Right now you can't send mail on port 25 from the Pioneer Square node. This is because I view spam as the single largest threat to our legitimacy right now. Once we get one of the possible solutions that were discussed here tested and working that restriction will go away. As for IM's I'm not sure, ICQ was working for Nigel last night when I was at Starbucks talking to him (around 6pm)

http://lists.personaltelco.net/pipermail/ptp/2002q1/012246.html The sun is out and the PTP wireless infrastructure is getting its first connected nodes in the Rose City area (Northeast of Hollywood). The goal: connect three houses in the area to each other. The house of Erik W. is the hub with two spoke nodes of Lucas S. (6 blocks away from the hub as the crow flies) and Steve B. (2 blocks away from the hub). The hub is a Lucent Silver card with 50 feet of LMR-400 to a Superpass 8db Omni on the roof. Its easy to stand in Steve's yard and pick up a signal from the hub node. The challenge is Lucas's connection.

http://lists.personaltelco.net/pipermail/ptp/2002q1/012270.html In preparation for the maps server being moved from it's long standing home at Matt Hickey's to the Personal Telco server I'd like people to test it's new home and offer feedback. You can find it here: http://maps2.personaltelco.net/ Any bugs we need to know about.

For the past month -- and for the next 500 days or so -- Free Radio Linux will transmit a computerized reading of the Linux operating system.http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/ "What we thought we would do is build a speech bot that would read out the entire Linux source code, live over the Internet."

DEMARC Technology Group is pleased to give you an update on new addition to our product line! DEMARC now offers a 100mW 802.11b Prism 2.0 PCMCIA wireless card! The card has two MMCX connectors for external high gain antennas. The card works with both Linux and Windows drivers.In addition, DEMARC is offering a PCI to PCMCIA adaptor base on theRICOH R5c475II chip set. http://www.demarctech.com/products/relia-wave-100mw-pcmcia-card.html

Rolling Three WLAN Standards into a Single Solution for 802.11a/g/b Facilitates Wide-Scale Wireless LAN Deployment. . Smart Select automatically chooses the optimal RF technology (a/g/b), rate adaptation and error correction methods, power reduction and internationalization features, and security protocol for a wireless network, and dynamically adapts to changing conditions as the user roams within that network. http://www.atheros.com/news/combo.html

okay while we're talking PDAs (my favorite topic), why not pick up a Fujitsu LOOX when it comes out. It runs Pocket PC 2002. http://pr.fujitsu.com/en/news/2002/03/12.html Its the first PDA that claims to be close to shipping that runs on Intel's XScale line of CPUs. Like the Zaurus it has a CF and a SD slot.

We have started monitoring our active nodes and some servers that provide services to the network. http://mon.personaltelco.net/ if you run an active node and are willing to have it monitored so we can begin to provide statistics on our network and get a feel for how well things are working (as well as be able to fix things promptly when they break) please follow the instructions to get yourself listed: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/SpongClientInstall The instructions are complete but pretty rough around the edges, feel free to improve on them or ask for more help.

For those who are interested in RADIUS backend implementation on NoCatAuth, this might be of some interest (after all, you do need a RADIUS server for testing...). Other than freeradius.org, there is another daemon, aptly named Yet Another Radius Daemon or YARD. Details at http://yardradius.sourceforge.net/

http://archive.nocat.net/list?mss:1023:200203:gglbhjkpeadbpiajaffk Last semester (Fall 2001) we implemented NoCatAuth (0.60) on one of our wireless networks as a proof-of-concept. The implementation was designed as an undergraduate independent study in advanced networks.The results of this course and all the things that we learned are documented to some extent in a report titled "" and is available in PDF format at http://verma.sfsu.edu/users/wireless/

http://www.sputnik.com/ http://slashdot.org/articles/02/03/07/221224.shtml?tid=99 LinuxCare founders Dave Sifry, Art Tyde and Dave LaDuke have started their second company: Sputnik . Basically, they have an ISO you can download that will turn a laptop with an 802.11b card into a wireless gateway. They also wrote a user-authentication scheme that reroutes all traffic to the gateway until the user logs in via a web form.

http://seattlewireless.net/seattlesummitarchive.ram FreeNetworks and Seattle Wireless hosted the January 2002 Summit and has it on video! It's a great review of the action http://seattlewireless.net/?SummitJanuary2002Wrapup

For SWN to work, there need to be a lot of "backbone" (A and B) nodes. Hopefully, providing a very dense mesh on which smart routing protocols will provide robust broadband performance even if indvidual links are somewhat unreliable and limited in BW. That's the future goal, I think.

An AP-less "B-zero" node ("BzNode"?) provides a service to the SWN community and a service to the node owner. In many cases, enough of a "win-win" to make everybody happy and enhance the network buildout.

With SWN they can get this just by being a DxNode pointing a directional (if needed) at a LOS CxNode or BxNode. Our job is to make it so easy to set up a BzNode that they will volunteer to do it just for the enhanced robustness or throughput of having 2 or 3 links in their windows.

So smart folks like Eric who are designing software kits to simplify node-building should keep this model in mind as well -- BzNode: two+ radios with routing and local ethernet, but no local AP.

Via Eden: http://www.via.com.tw/en/Products/eden.jsp REALLY tiny, lots of built in ports, and voila, you have an almost turnkey embedded solution. With prices for the higher-end boards targeted at <$100,and in bulk, the lower end versions for $50, this could be a nice setup for bridging nodes. Get some compactflash drives and load up a small linux distro.

http://www.seattlewireless.net/archive/ezmlm.cgi?mss:7024:200203:eahmahffbcobdcmeccpa I am finished building a Perl-GTK interface to a program called prismstumbler(.sourceforge.net)- And it does support signal strengths. Also detects 'private network' AP's... (note windows netstumbler CANNOT see private network AP's)

I will hand out the perl-GTK version now to members, but I just hacked the front-end that came with it, and the programming in it is horrible.... but it works...solidly... My .0000000000001 looks just like netstumbler- minus the colors (im fixing that, its sorta working on my devel version) and I plan to add gps coords (very easy with gpsd)

I agree with you that commercial companies will be (are in the process of) jumping into wireless mesh networking. It will probably take longer than six months becuase 802.11 crap is not the technology to use to do it. Wireless Local Area Network. Local. . . . what is coming quickly down the road is WirelessMAN . . . Wireless Metro Area Networking IEEE 802.16 sub 10 GHz. The recent meting in Helsinki resolved all but a few remaining issues and a draft standard is nearly refined. It's scheduled for passage on August 2nd and some companies have already designed systems that they say are firmware upgradeable to the standard. It's projected to be at least six months after the standard is approved before systems will come out and another three to six months for them to be tested and field trialed. So give it about 12 to 18 months from now for WMAN systems to appear. A lot of the effort initially can be expected to appear for licensed spectrum but the same standard applies to unlicesned as well.

MeshNetworks, Communique and other firms already have mesh networking software that they will soon be doing field deployments in multiple cities. Some of these will use 802.11 gear for "hot spots" and there may even be some fool hardy enough to try to do metro area networks using local network equipment. But the real push for metro area netwroks is much more likely to come when metro area network gear is available. Do what you can now with WLAN stuff but it's not everything you would want it to be. The real boom will come when the WMAN gear does seamless handoff using the same PCMCIA card to WLAN networks. That is also in the works and has already beendemonstrated by Flarion and perhaps others. Those multi-mode chips that arecoming avaialbe with find their way into gear soon and the next wave of multi-mode chips is likely to be WMAN plus WLAN capable. Think biggerbecause it ill soon be passe'

The TechTV feature (Tech Live) featuring NYCWireless, Wireless at SFSU, and the Pringles Can Antenna is now available partially at http://www.techtv.com/news/internet/story/0,24195,3366659,00.html

I finally got my RG-1000's on the $59 special, and in playing around with them, found that nobody seemed to have the newest versions of the firmware available anywhere. So, I've started collecting various firmware versions for both the Linksys WAP11 and Orinoco RG-1000 on my web site. Everything I've got right now is available at: http://www.natecarlson.com/wireless/

If you have any questions or comments, or more images you'd like to see on the page, please let me know. Current firmware available:

WAP11:

RG-1000:

I also have the 3 newest configuration utilities for the WAP11's on the site. Enjoy. :)

Carol brought this article to my attention, and while it doesn't directly mention any of our groups it does mention some of what we are doing. Forgive the cross-posting but I think this article is really interesting and if someone else has mentioned it I missed it.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/01/07/020107opcurve.xml

The most interesting part is about www.meshnetworks.com, that will be making a ~$35 chip that can add 802.11 mesh networking to anything (both the 802.11 and the mesh networking in one chip). They have been working on this for 5 years with $27 million from the DoD.

Last Wednesday of the Month, January 30th, 2002. Meeting Starts at 7pm. Topics:

There was an interesting article on Slashdot this morning about opensource.instant802.com http://slashdot.org/articles/02/01/18/1457208.shtml The upshot is that you can flash a cheap 386 based AP (SMC/USR) & turn it into "a linux-based access point providing full wireless services, including multipoint to multipoint wireless bridging (802.1d), while at the same time distributing fully standard 802.11b connections to end users."

Lars Aronsson The way positioning works in GSM is that the telco knows the geo coordinates of their base stations, so they (big brother) know where you are. However, they cannot sell this information without your consent, because that violates European privacy laws. And the GSM protocol has no standardized way of letting your phone know its own coordinates (in which case it could have been used as a GPS device). So all the fine talk about positioning services is in a limbo. The right way to solve it would have been to let the subscriber own his coordinates, having an easy way to submit it to various services (consent at the press of a button).

During the dotcom boom, several small (naive) companies invented wonderful applications for GSM positioning, only to find that GSM operators didn't want to share or sell their subscribers' geo coordinates. Even if the service provider had the subscriber's consent, the telco wouldn't let go of the coordinates that they "owned". Lesson learned: Don't be naive when fighting with giants.

Dana Spiegel

I apologize for the long delay in getting the ball rolling, but my duties at my new job have kept me quite busy for the last month and a half. I am now ready to help catalyze the creation of the new Community Applications SIG, and am providing below an initial outline and action plan for what we would like to accomplish over the next year. Of course this is a group effort, and I implore anyone who is interested in getting involved to speak up and start thinking out loud about these ideas (and others that I'm sure many of you have)! I will be at the next meeting, and look forward to talking more about Community Applications.

Action plan for NYCwireless Community Applications:

The goal of the Community Applications SIG is to support and grow the NYCwireless community through online applications that can make online community more visible, and leverage the unique qualities of the NYCwireless fixed wireless network. The functionality of these "Community Applications" should be made available in stages, and should build extensible, easy-to-use, and growable infrastructure, and should be built around certain core values:

To this end, it is not good enough merely to rely only upon pre-existing applications, but to carefully evaluate the goals of a particular service, leverage existing systems when appropriate, and build new, open applications to support community.

Key components of the NYCwireless network:

Infrastructure components we may need in the future:

Key development areas:

First steps:

users)

(user information should only be used to expose usage of the network, and include opt-out ability. Information is also used to fulfill social contract)

node (anonymous or otherwise-users who opt out of broadcasting their own information should not see information about others) and perhaps other information

existing IRC server)

comes online, and where.

NEWINGTON, CT, Feb 11, 2002--The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance--WECA, an industry coalition--has petitioned the FCC for additional 5-GHz spectrum to make more room for radio local area network (RLAN) systems and other unlicensed Part 15 devices. The FCC put the WECA petition on public notice in late January, not long after it was filed. WECA seeks to extend the available spectrum to include 5.470 to 5.725 GHz. The Amateur Service now shares 5.650 to 5.925 GHz on a secondary basis with government radars and nongovernment fixed satellite uplinks. The ARRL plans to comment on the WECA proposal.

Amateur Radio Relay League's story: http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2002/02/11/100/?nc=1

The FCC would like to hear comments from both sides of the fence. Here is the information on how to make your voice heard:

Public Notice regarding WECA petition for rulemaking to add the 5470-5725 MHz band to the U-NII rules. http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi?native_or_pdf=pdf&id_documen t=6512980202 http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-219529A1.pdf FCCs Rule Making Process http://www.fcc.gov/rules.html

Fr: Sky Dayton

Some of my friends who are on this list have forwarded a few recent messages to me and asked if I would comment directly.

We all share a common mission - to build the next frontier of the Internet, which will be wireless, ubiquitous and disruptive to incumbents who are holding all of us back. Like TCP/IP before it, Wi-Fi is a single unifying standard that will enable thousands of companies, entrepreneurs and individuals to build the Wireless Internet.

I don't think any of this is new to you. You are the vanguard of this next frontier. With Wi-Fi, a few hundred dollars and some ingenuity, you're doing what used to cost billions of dollars in spectrum fees and equipment.

Thousands of entrepreneurs and enthusiasts are already setting up public Wi-Fi nodes. Many are charging for access, and many are not. In either case, there remain significant barriers to use: it's hard for the average user to find networks, connecting is difficult, and the typical short range of Wi-Fi hot spots leads to inevitable network fragmentation. Thus, there isn't a lot of traffic on most public Wi-Fi nodes (commercial or free) today. This needs to change for the revolution to take hold.

Boingo's mission is to make finding and connecting to the wireless Internet easier for people. We're accomplishing this through software, by bringing all commercial Wi-Fi hot spots together into a network that a user can access with one account, and by wrapping the whole experience with great 1-800 tech support.

In addition to making it easy for users to find and connect to commercial Wi-Fi networks, we use the same infrastructure to help users find and connect to free community networks that ask us to list them. Of course, we don't charge anything for access to these nodes unless the node operator wants to become a commercial node (will get much easier soon as discussed later). Either way, it is clear that commercial and free Wi-Fi networks will co-exist.

A few of the free community folks have asked Boingo what benefit they receive by us promoting their nodes to Boingo users. Our customers and free software users (and thus Boingo) certainly benefit from being able to access the Internet in more places, but to the degree free community nodes want more traffic, they also benefit by listing in our database. If a node operator doesn't want more people to know about their nodes, then we won't list them. In the end, everyone benefits from the rising tide of more people using Wi-Fi to bypass traditional means of access.

We've received some suggestions about making sure the free community "brand" comes through in the Boingo network sniffer, and that is actually already the case. The identity of those networks belongs to the free communities, not to Boingo, and they are promoted accordingly.

Boingo's free software helps users find and connect to private and free community networks whether or not they sign up for access to our commercial Wi-Fi hot spots. We hope lots of people take advantage of this - which will accrue to the benefit of everyone in the Wi-Fi space.

Boingo is a little like a search engine for Wi-Fi networks. Like the early days of Web search engines, there are misperceptions about the nature of our business and our relationship with everyone else. Remember when content sites objected to being listed in search engines? That objection quickly melted away when sites realized that search engines would become the primary source of traffic on the Web. Boingo is a source of traffic for commercial and free community Wi-Fi nodes.

For free community operators who decide they would like to evolve to charging for access to their nodes, Boingo can help. We are working on technology that will allow them to utilize our back-end systems for authentication, billing, roaming and settlement. We can't easily do this today without requiring the node operator to buy expensive gear. But inexpensive solutions are just around the corner. You can bet we'll fight to keep DSL and cable providers from shooting themselves in the foot by prohibiting "resale" through Wi-Fi.

Finally, we are working on additional versions of our client software to support more platforms, including Mac, Linux and PocketPC. We decided to launch with Windows support initially because we are a small company with limited resources. Based on the enthusiastic response to Boingo thus far, we have accelerated our development plans for these additional platforms.

I hope I have helped paint a clearer picture of our mission and how we fit into the revolution we are all fighting for. Since I don't get to this list as often as I should, I appreciate hearing from you by email at sky@boingo.com <mailto:sky@boingo.com>. Also, Colby Goff is our able director of network partnerships and he is available at cgoff@boingo.com <mailto:cgoff@boingo.com>. Colby is working with commercial and free community groups all over the world.

Thanks for your time.

Sky

After our last monthly meeting and the discussion of Boingo, I've sent the following email to Boingo. I would urge the members who were not at the meeting to be unifed with NYCwireless in their stance on Boingo. If you have already submitted your node to be listed, you may want to send a letter revoking that permission, as I plan to do. Hopefully Boingo will decide to be more supportive of the community networks than just offering a branded version of their software.

--Terry

CTIA Wireless 2002

The 2002 Game Developers Conference (GDC)

SBAY Geek Ride

JavaOne

Mobile Entertainment Summit

GPS-WIRELESS 2002

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

2002 World Wireless Congress

Invent 2002

Eye For Wireless 802.11

SuperComm 2002

Bluetooth Congress & Expo 2002

Eye For Wireless 802.11

O'Reilly Open Source Convention

You can find me scratching around community LAN archives including:

(1) BAWUG http://lists.bawug.org/pipermail/wireless/ (2) Boston Wireless http://www.bawia.org/archive/ezmlm.cgi (3) FreeNetworks.org http://www.freenetworks.org/ (4) Linux-wlan http://macdaddy.lists.linux-wlan.com/pipermail/linux-wlan-devel/ (5) NoCat http://archive.nocat.net/list (6) NYC Wireless http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/ (7) PersonalTelco http://lists.personaltelco.net/pipermail/ptp/ (8) Seattle Wireless http://www.seattlewireless.net/archive/ezmlm.cgi/0

I also check out the news at:

(1) 80211-Planet http://www.80211-planet.com/ (2) Practically Networked http://www.practicallynetworked.com/ (3) Nowirenets.com http://www.nowirenets.com/About/index.php (4) O'Reilly's WirelessDev Center http://www.oreillynet.com/wireless/ (5) Glenn Fleishman's 802.11 Weblogger http://80211b.weblogger.com/ (6) Wireless ISP Association http://www.wispa.org/index.php (6) HomeNetHelp.com http://homenethelp.com/ (7) HomeToys http://www.hometoys.com/reviews.htm (8) Network Computing http://www.networkcomputing.com/1108/1108buyers2.html

MISCELLANEOUS:

Mapping: http://wigle.net/gpsopen/gps/GPSDB/ Nationwide wireless network database and mapping. WiGLE: An online database which accepts "stumbles" or "WiLDs" in the "wi-scan" and "wi-scan with extensions" formats (GPS tagged data about wireless networks). Netstumbler, dstumbler, and other clients generate data in these formats. Data is stored in a database, locations are triangulated, and data is shared via web requests.