peer to peer wireless WAN?

[Matt Beland]

On Thu, 9 Aug 2001 19:13:51 +0200
 Pawel Krawczyk <kravietz at aba.krakow.pl> wrote:
> I was thinking about building medium size WANs based on
> peer to peer
> radio links and wonder if such technology exists already?

Yes. 802.11b.
 
> 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.

Look at what these guys are doing. They even make their
software available. 
http://www.seattlewireless.net/
 
> 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.

802.11b, 11Mb/sec, up to 15 mile range with the right
antennae, no licensing costs. Sound good enough?