Gus Wirth wrote: > Last night at the March Mingle I saw Phil Karn > <http://cache.qualcomm.com/karn/> and we had a discussion about some new > wireless repeaters he bought, specifically the Miraki Mini Repeater > (available from <http://www.netequality.com/>). One of his comments was > its usefulness in disaster scenarios, where you could have these things > matched up in a little box with a battery and deployed throughout a > building. My observation was that EXIT signs already provide the > infrastructure necessary to make this happen. They are nearly ubiquitous > in commercial buildings and they already have batteries in them that > could provide power for up to several hours. A retrofit kit for existing > signs and builtin for new signs could give a building complete wireless > coverage both in normal usage and in emergency conditions for a very low > cost. > > I'm registering this idea here so as to establish this as prior art. Any > other places I should register my idea? >
The idea of piggy-backing on existing exit-sign-infrastructure strikes me as very imaginative .. brilliant, even! :-) Now, however, I have a practical question. The repeaters are not exactly intended to be daisy-chained. From the (nice) docs page at netequality, <quote> If you only have a single internet connection feeding your mesh network, it is desirable to have the Gateway be as central to the project as possible. The reason for this is that for each Repeater you pass through to get to the Gateway the maximimum speed is cut roughly in half. </quote> So I would imagine that is a serious limitation. What say you? Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
