Covers SFLAN and BARWN.... Tim -- Free Wireless Everywhere Tech visionaries' new project mirrors roots of Internet Neil McAllister, Special to SF Gate Friday, January 23, 2004
Brewster Kahle wants to network San Francisco. All of it. "Basically, what we want is the expectation that if you open your laptop or personal digital assistant (PDA) at any given place, you have access to the open Internet," he says. And, for Kahle, a slow network isn't going to cut it. He wants to move data at the speed of DVD video. "Search, click, see movies," he emphasizes. "Now, we're not quite there yet. But that's the idea." It sounds like every broadband Internet service provider's fantasy, but it's maybe not as far-fetched as it seems. Over the last year or so, small, gray plastic boxes have begun appearing atop homes and businesses around San Francisco. Roof by roof, they're bringing Kahle's vision of ubiquitous wireless-network access closer to reality -- no telephone companies or cable providers required. The boxes are the work of two local research ventures, each with the goal of improving understanding of, and applications for, wireless networking. One is SFLan, a project of the Internet Archive, the nonprofit organization Kahle created in 1996. The other is the Bay Area Research Wireless Network (BARWN), founded by networking consultant Tim Pozar and partner Matt Peterson. Pozar and Peterson designed the hardware shared by both projects as a means to deploy a new kind of wireless network. Inside each gray box are typical components for a wireless access point: off-the-shelf 802.11 network cards powered by a small, single-board computer. But, rather than creating traditional wireless hot spots like those found in hotels or coffee shops, Pozar and Peterson's boxes are engineered specifically for long-distance, outdoor applications. Each box incorporates two high-gain antennas. The first is omnidirectional, acting as a beacon of wireless connectivity to the immediate area. The second points straight at the nearest neighboring rooftop box, or perhaps to the locus of BARWN's most ambitious project to date: a powerful antenna high atop San Bruno Mountain. In this way, each box is linked to a larger network, forming a completely wireless backbone extending across the City and to neighboring municipalities. If you're close enough to a rooftop box (say, within a thousand feet), a laptop or PDA may be all you need to join the SFLan network. More likely, however, you'll need additional amplifiers or after-market antennas. The high-gain directional antennas in the gray boxes themselves, for example, can see each other from 2 miles away, or pull down a signal from the San Bruno Mountain site at a distance of up to 8 miles. Once the connection is made, you have an effective replacement for traditional broadband. "You're still going to need something that repeats the signal inside your house," explains Kahle. "You'd put one of these [boxes] up on your roof as a replacement for DSL or cable, and then you'd bring a wire down into your house to either plug in to your own router or hub or to connect to your computer." At the same time, the box would rebroadcast the signal to your local neighborhood while paving the way for the next rooftop node to join the network, forming a daisy chain. [...] -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
