peer to peer wireless WAN?

[Pawel Krawczyk]

I was thinking about building medium size WANs based on peer to peer
radio links and wonder if such technology exists already?

The idea is to have a number of boxes with indoor or outdoor antenna.
For example in a city you could have such a box in each flat, in a
village in each house. The requirement is that they are far from each
other not more that say 200 meters, depending on what our hypothetical
wireless technology allows. So far it's quite similiar to what we
already have with WLANs.

The difference is that the boxes can forward packets for each other,
thus allowing distant nodes to communicate via the `router' nodes
between them. Many more ideas come to mind here like dynamic routing,
access control, traffic policing etc.

As for the wireless connection I was thinking about low-power radio
broadcast, so you don't need to get license and the big telcos can't
sue you as breaking monopolies (still in Poland...). The low-power
requirement implies relatively short distance, like 100-200 meters.
But that's quite enough with average distance between houses being
much smaller in areas where many people live.

Do you know technologies like this, existing already? What bandwidth
you can get with wireless links based on radio modulation? Thanks
for all suggestions.

-- 
Paweł Krawczyk *** home: <http://ceti.pl/~kravietz/>
security: <http://ipsec.pl/>  *** fidonet: 2:486/23