Ok so we go wireless. The original idea for internet protocol came
from packet radio which was an amateur radio thing. Granted the
bandwidth was not to be compared but I can easily set up an ad hock net
over several kilometers using a standard wireless adapter and a high
gain antenna which is nothing more than a tin can pressed into service
as a coaxial to waveguide transition feeding into the feedpoint on a
surplus primestar satelite tv dish giving plenty of gain for a line of
sight link over a fairly long haul with no amplifiers or anything other
than what is on the card. A server centrally located and operating on
an omidirectional antenna can serve many subscribers within a line of
sight path using this scheme. Repeaters can be added to expand the
network. Where there is a will there is a way.
See here
http://www.wwc.edu/~frohro/Airport/Primestar/Primestar.html
other useful network info here
http://epanorama.net/links/tele_lan.html
Joe
Michael Redler wrote:
Keith,
So, it seems as though the federal government (a.k.a. corporate
America) is threatened by the Second Superpower and is making
preparations for war.
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/31753/
The End of the Internet
By Jeffrey Chester, The Nation. Posted February 6, 2006.
America's big phone and cable companies want to start charging
exorbitant user fees for the supposedly-free internet.
The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an
alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and
nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded
service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.
Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are
developing strategies that would track and store information on our
every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing
system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency.
According to white papers now being circulated in the cable,
telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest
pockets -- corporations, special-interest groups and major
advertisers -- would get preferred treatment. Content from these
providers would have first priority on our computer and television
screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer
communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.
Under the plans they are considering, all of us -- from content
providers to individual users -- would pay more to surf online,
stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new
subscription plans that would further limit the online experience,
establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet
access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media
streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.
To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists
are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the
nation's communications policy laws. They want the federal government
to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications
services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or
governmental oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will
have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future. Ten years after
passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone
and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to
convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet
into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.
The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid than the cable
industry about its strategy for the Internet's future. Senior phone
executives have publicly discussed plans to begin imposing a new
scheme for the delivery of Internet content, especially from major
Internet content companies. As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of
AT&T,
told Business Week in November, "Why should they be allowed to use my
pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the
cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo!
or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"
The phone industry has marshaled its political allies to help win the
freedom to impose this new broadband business model. At a recent
conference held by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank
funded by Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other media companies, there
was
much discussion of a plan for phone companies to impose fees on a
sliding scale, charging content providers different levels of
service. "Price discrimination," noted PFF's resident media expert
Adam Thierer, "drives the market-based capitalist economy."
Net Neutrality
To ward off the prospect of virtual toll booths on the information
highway, some new media companies and public-interest groups are
calling for new federal policies requiring "network neutrality" on
the Internet. Common Cause, Amazon, Google, Free Press, Media Access
Project and Consumers Union, among others, have proposed that
broadband providers would be prohibited from discriminating against
all forms of digital content. For example, phone or cable companies
would not be allowed to slow down competing or undesirable content.
Without proactive intervention, the values and issues that we care
about -- civil rights, economic justice, the environment and fair
elections -- will be further threatened by this push for corporate
control. Imagine how the next presidential election would unfold if
major political advertisers could make strategic payments to Comcast
so that ads from Democratic and Republican candidates were more
visible and user-friendly than ads of third-party candidates with
less funds.
Consider what would happen if an online advertisement promoting
nuclear power prominently popped up on a cable broadband page, while
a competing message from an environmental group was relegated to the
margins. It is possible that all forms of civic and noncommercial
online programming would be pushed to the end of a commercial digital
queue.
But such "neutrality" safeguards are inadequate to address more
fundamental changes the Bells and cable monopolies are seeking in
their quest to monetize the Internet. If we permit the Internet to
become a medium designed primarily to serve the interests of
marketing and personal consumption, rather than global civic-related
communications, we will face the political consequences for decades
to come. Unless we push back, the "brandwashing" of America will
permeate not only our information infrastructure but global society
and culture as well.
Why are the Bells and cable companies aggressively advancing such
plans? With the arrival of the long-awaited "convergence" of
communications, our media system is undergoing a major
transformation. Telephone and cable giants envision a potential
lucrative "triple play," as they impose near-monopoly control over
the residential broadband services that send video, voice and data
communications flowing into our televisions, home computers, cell
phones and iPods. All of these many billions of bits will be
delivered over the telephone and cable lines.
Video programming is of foremost interest to both the phone and cable
companies. The telephone industry, like its cable rival, is now in
the TV and media business, offering customers television channels,
on-demand videos and games. Online advertising is increasingly
integrating multimedia (such as animation and full-motion video) in
its pitches. Since video-driven material requires a great deal of
Internet bandwidth as it travels online, phone and cable companies
want to make sure their television "applications" receive
preferential treatment on the networks they operate. And their
overall influence over the stream of information coming into your
home (or mobile device) gives them the leverage to determine how the
broadband business evolves.
Mining Your Data
At the core of the new power held by phone and cable companies are
tools delivering what is known as "deep packet inspection." With
these tools, AT&T and others can readily know the packets of
information you are receiving online -- from e-mail, to websites, to
sharing of music, video and software downloads.
These "deep packet inspection" technologies are partly designed to
make sure that the Internet pipeline doesn't become so congested it
chokes off the delivery of timely communications. Such products have
already been sold to universities and large businesses that want to
more economically manage their Internet services. They are also being
used to limit some peer-to-peer downloading, especially for music.
But these tools are also being promoted as ways that companies, such
as Comcast and Bell South, can simply grab greater control over the
Internet. For example, in a series of recent white papers, Internet
technology giant Cisco urges these companies to "meter individual
subscriber usage by application," as individuals' online travels are
"tracked" and "integrated with billing systems." Such tracking and
billing is made possible because they will know "the identity and
profile of the individual subscriber," "what the subscriber is doing"
and "where the subscriber resides."
Will Google, Amazon and the other companies successfully fight the
plans of the Bells and cable companies? Ultimately, they are likely
to cut a deal because they, too, are interested in monetizing our
online activities. After all, as Cisco notes, content companies and
network providers will need to "cooperate with each other to leverage
their value proposition." They will be drawn by the ability of cable
and phone companies to track "content usageŠby subscriber," and where
their online services can be "protected from piracy, metered, and
appropriately valued."
Our Digital Destiny
It was former FCC chairman Michael Powell, with the support of
then-commissioner and current chair Kevin Martin, who permitted phone
and cable giants to have greater control over broadband. Powell and
his GOP majority eliminated longstanding regulatory safeguards
requiring phone companies to operate as nondiscriminatory networks
(technically known as "common carriers"). He refused to require that
cable companies, when providing Internet access, also operate in a
similar nondiscriminatory manner. As Stanford University law
professor Lawrence Lessig has long noted, it is government regulation
of the phone lines that helped make the Internet today's vibrant,
diverse and democratic medium.
But now, the phone companies are lobbying Washington to kill off
what's left of "common carrier" policy. They wish to operate their
Internet services as fully "private" networks. Phone and cable
companies claim that the government shouldn't play a role in
broadband regulation: Instead of the free and open network that
offers equal access to all, they want to reduce the Internet to a
series of business decisions between consumers and providers.
Besides their business interests, telephone and cable companies also
have a larger political agenda. Both industries oppose giving local
communities the right to create their own local Internet wireless or
wi-fi networks. They also want to eliminate the last vestige of local
oversight from electronic media -- the ability of city or county
government, for example, to require telecommunications companies to
serve the public interest with, for example, public-access TV
channels. The Bells also want to further reduce the ability of the
FCC to oversee communications policy. They hope that both the FCC and
Congress -- via a new Communications Act -- will back these proposals.
The future of the online media in the United States will ultimately
depend on whether the Bells and cable companies are allowed to
determine the country's "digital destiny." So before there are any
policy decisions, a national debate should begin about how the
Internet should serve the public. We must insure that phone and cable
companies operate their Internet services in the public interest --
as stewards for a vital medium for free _expression_.
If Americans are to succeed in designing an equitable digital destiny
for themselves, they must mount an intensive opposition similar to
the successful challenges to the FCC's media ownership rules in 2003.
Without such a public outcry to rein in the GOP's corporate-driven
agenda, it is likely that even many of the Democrats who rallied
against further consolidation will be "tamed" by the well-funded
lobbying campaigns of the powerful phone and cable industry.
Jeffrey Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital
Democracy (www.democraticmedia.org).
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