The Seattle Wireless Network had a huge meeting yesterday with presentations by founders and leaders of most of the large wireless networks in the world. Amazing group of guys, one after another from BAWUG (www.bawug.org), the London Consume net, NY wireless, BC, Portland, etc. including developers of the 802.11x specification, Nocat (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2001/11/09/nocatauth.html)

These guys are building fabrics that will route at 10Mbps all over their regions for free. The meeting was streamed over the internet live. There are photos which you can find in the list archives of Seattle Wireless, http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/FrontPage There were approx. 100 people.

My understanding was these folks had all come to Seattle for meetings, to working on global coordination of IP spaces, routing, stuff like that.

There are some fascinating technical differences between the wireless networks in different cities.

Driven by circumstances ------------------------ In the UK for example, Wireless ISPs (WISPs) cannot happen because 802.11 is strictly nonbusiness. And, 802.11 is limited to 10 milliwatts (1/10th of the US). Internet access is killingly expensive; many APs are underground activities.

NY for example has a horrible deficiency in line-of-sight connectivity between buildings, and a relative surplus of megabit internet access by corporations so it has mostly access points (APs) hanging off DSL and T1 lines.

Driven by culture/technical differences ------------------------------------------ Seattle generally regards DSL sharing as out of scope and generally distasteful. Seattle seems to be building a routed network with lots of APs supported by lots of crosstown links with highly directional antennas. Seattle says they're just going to build a whole parallel, free, internet. PersonalTelco in Portland seems to believe in an ideological purity of omnidirectional antennas, with a long term vision of mesh networking. I seem to understand Seattle would have Nocat portals as the prevailing practice? Where Portland would be more like a self- organized Nokia Rooftop network http://www.wirelessnewsfactor.com/perl/story/12619.html (Rooftop constructs mesh networks on the fly. None of the free wireless networks are anywhere near the "Rooftop" capability.)

My understanding is that the mathematics of mesh networks and swarmcast demonstrate an interesting phenomenon that the more nodes who stick their antenna into the cloud, the more routes appear and there is a virtuous circle of improving performance.

Instead of heat death, from congestion you get a virtuous cycle of greater capacity. Fsckin unbelievable. Unregulated, and all but unregulatable. Just like oral speech and visual eyesight-- except having unlimited range.

I sat next to Tim Pozar, got a free 20-mnute tutorial on long distance links. His team has transbay links of 15-20 miles in the http://www.bawug.org community. We need some 5 mile links across a lake to reach SWN. Tim's a founder of BAWUG and his papers are at http://www.lns.com/papers/

Imagine the possibilities! No. Plan on them.

Todd

------ Meeting Announcement --------

From: mattw@seattlewireless.net Subject: SeattleWireless: Special Meeting 01/06/2002

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Wireless Meeting in Georgetown!

http://www.seattlewireless.net/?SummitJanuary2002

The WirelessSummit is your chance to meet organizers, contributors vendors and enthusiasts from other wireless groups across the western world. If you can only make it to one meeting this month, this is the one to be at!

You will hear from group leaders and contributors, See cool hacks, Check out the latest hardware and software and you may even get FREE STUFF!

Which Wireless groups will be represented?

- BAWUG (San Francisco) - BCWireless (Vancouver, BC) - Consume - NoCat (Sebastapol, CA) - NYC Wireless (New York City) - PersonalTelco (Portland) - Austin Wireless (TX) - and of course, SeattleWireless :)

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