I've been meaning to write this up since the Digital Dales event. There was a question from the floor from a BT guy about the issues of legal power rating and antenna design in the UK. Excuse me if I get my facts slightly wrong, and please correct me if that's the case.

In the UK as part of unlicensed use of the 2.4Ghz band we're allowed to use 30mW or transmit power and 100mW of EIRP power. EIRP is a measure of the effective power output of the antenna, so in broad terms this means we are allowed a 5db gain in the antenna itself. Now antennas with 5db gain have a very broad spread which makes this effectively unuseable for long distance links. So to remain legal while using a high gain directional, you need to reduce the amp power. this means that you get the narrow beamwidth and receive gain but without pushing too much power outwards. Compare this with the USA that allows 1W on the amp and 4W EIRP. The justification for the reduced limits is that the UK is more heavily built up and so there's more likelihood of overlap between users. But that ignores a major use of WiFi in long distance rural links.

Now from a practical point of view, it's easy to buy high gain antennas. Even by just wrapping a wire mesh or tinfoil parabola around the back of an APs rubber duck antenna you can get 15db. 10db is easily achieved with a simple cantenna. You can get almost 10db with a home made omni. Then by buying over the net you can get NICs and APs aimed at the US market with 100, 150mW or even 200mW output. So there's nothing really to stop you putting together a high power, highly directional link. Just what you need for getting 5-10km between church spires.

So what if you do break the law? Well I have it on good authority that the RA and the various other regulatory agencies treat the WiFi band as unlicensed and unregulated. There really not interested in dealing with or investigating interference problems. If you cause someone else a problem with interference, well sort it out among yourselves. So the onus is on us to play nicely. That means using reasonably well engineered antennas and not overdriving amps so that they spray out harmonics all over the place. It also means reaching agreement among ourselves about which channels we use. So if Costa and Starbucks have premises right next door and T-Mobile and BT Openzone have overlapping WiFi, whoever does the installation can just arrange channel usage to suit. And of course since Cisco and IBM probably did both, this is just not a problem.

It's tempting to get all political and ask (nay demand) that the power rules are relaxed so that we can compete with broadband providers in rural areas (for instance). But I wonder if the current situation of informed anarchy isn't actually better for everyone. Why shouldn't we police ourselves as long as we don't interfere with services outside the unregulated bands? The problem here is when the links are used for commercial gain by commercial organizations. It's one thing for an individual to play fast and loose with the rules. It's quite another for a Ltd company. [from: JB Wifi]

Are we a day late for the Link Sys Community Network ???

Just connect your linksys WiFi access point, leave the admin ID and password as "admin", leave the default SSID as "linksys" and you too can join the Linksys community network. [from: JB Wifi]

The new theme is now live.

If you yearn for the old school, then you can switch theme to the old design. Choose "Account" "Display Settings" and change theme to "Ecademy2". There's also a 2 column design for people who have a small screen or like a wide display. That's theme "Ecademy3".

If you have any comments, feel free to add them here. I you find any bugs or strange behaviour, please send me an email. The themes should work in any Internet explorer after V5, any recent Mozilla based browser. It still has one or two problems in Opera but is useable. The menus need Javascript, but there is a rather clunky alternate navigation if you have javascript disabled.

Hope you like it. [from: JB Ecademy]

What are we to make of this? A "friend" of someone who posts to the Inquirer anonymously, gets in to trouble with the City of London police for pointing a Pringles can "gun" at a building. Having stopped him they then don't arrest him but confiscate his laptop before releasing him uncharged. Subsequently, a company in the building accuses him of stealing credit card detail, resulting in possible criminal charges.

There's something distinctly fishy about all this. Suggesting that this story has been planted by a computer security company or consultancy would be clearly ridiculous, but it's the only explanation I can come up with.

And if there is a moral to all this it's that pointing things out of your car, that look like guns, while in the City is probably not a good plan.

Now clearly you don't want to get yourself into this situation as it's likely to be major hassle. But I can also see some major problems for either a civil or criminal prosecution. Which is probably what Kafka said.

And regardless of whatever arguments there may be back and forth, there has been no test case about wardriving and there's a reasonable possibility that any such test case would be thrown out as a waste of the court's time. And that's before you get into arguments as to whether Netstumbler or Kismet actually breaks the exact wording of the various computer security laws. And If they do, then it's highly likely that just having a copy of Win XP running on a laptop with a WiFi NIC also breaks those laws.

Or did I just get caught by Mike Magee's April fool?

Wi-Fi 'war driving' has hidden dangers : Recently a friend of mine decided to go war driving. You know, the ever so popular driving around and looking for wireless networks. He was testing out a new Linux program he got and happened to find some wifi activity in a business district. All of a sudden police cars and surround him and he is being cuffed. It seems they thought the wildly popular Pringles "yagi" he was using was mistaken for a gun or bomb.

However, upon questioning, they come to discover what he was really doing, looking for wireless networks. Suddenly he is being told that they were getting passwords and credit card numbers. These are complete and utter lies, coming from a joeshmoe-computersaremagicalboxes police officer. His laptop is taken and they tell him for now he is getting off "easy", without a 72-hour jail stay.

Recently he has found that the business he was outside of has claimed that he has been messing with their network for an extended period and has caused numerous problems that have resulted, claiming "experts" had to come and fix his "destruction". So now he is at the point where he has been advised to get a criminal lawyer. [from: JB Wifi]

For April, can we have a big push to survey the UK Wifi scene? Two suggestions where you could get involved.

1. Do a little mystery shopping to try and use the Public Hotspots in the UK and then post a blog here about your experiences. We need someone to check out and post about:- BT Openzone, Surfnsip, Internet exchange, Wialess(St Albans pubs), Megabeam, IOD and a probably others. That goes for any free and open hotspots you use regularly as well.

2. Do some wardriving, particularly of London, and post your netstumbler files to wifimaps and worldwidewardrive. For this you need a laptop, GPS, Netstumbler and a netstumbler compatible Wifi NIC. Collectively we ought to be able to get the same density of coverage that was managed for Manhatten. [from: JB Wifi]

We imported the Beyond Bricks members yesterday at about lunchtime. Unfortunately there's about 200 duplicates that I didn't spot. The effect for these people is that you can't login. I should have it sorted by lunchtime today, but if you're having problems just drop me an email. [from: JB Ecademy]

Anyone who uses the Club forums extensively will have discovered the "Next: My Threads" link that moves to the next most recent thread in all the clubs you belong to. If you post you'll have seen that a new post takes you back to the beginning. Well I've fixed it so that it remembers where you were and the link goes to what would have been the next thread before the post. [from: JB Ecademy]

Good simple paper on securing your home WiFi access point.

We could do with something similar for people who want to share their bandwidth but do it safely. [from: JB Wifi]

The Times Online has copy of today's supplement produced in conjunction with UKOnline on Broadband for Business.

I guess it will be useful to someone, but it looks like a lot of fluff to me. They are at least raising questions about ADSL and recommending SDSL. [from: JB Ecademy]

AP Wire | 03/27/2003 | Anti-War Protesters Take Digital Turn This story has hit the AP wires and is being repeated by news organizations all over the world. It's a quick summary of the use of decentralized technology such as SMS, cellphones, webcams, internet video streaming, blogs and such like to rapidly mobilize people and get the word out. Is this Smart Mobs, digital democracy or digitally mediated anarchism? [from: JB Ecademy]

Fascinating article with lots of links.DailyWireless - Streaming Wireless Cable?

But take a look down the left hand column. That's an amazing collection of WiFi links. [from: JB Wifi]

I'm telling ya - if you don't have a(n) RSS file, I ain't likely to return to your site. M'kay? [from: JB Ecademy]

: End in sight for UK IT tax holiday
A treasury initiative to give small and medium-sized businesses 100 per cent tax relief on IT purchases runs out at the end of the month. There is no sign from Chancellor Gordon Brown that he will extend the gig in the next Budget, accountancy firm Hacker Young warns.

Time to buy. Assuming you've got some cash. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've been thinking about internet VoIP (Voice over IP, Telephoning over the internet). It seems to me there are several barriers to widespread use.

- Something that looks and feels like a phone but is attached to your home network and hence the broadband line. I'm slightly surprised that nobody makes something like this. I don't really want to put on a headset whenever I want to make a phone call or somebody calls me. Cisco have some VoIP handsets but they are priced at corporate rates.

- Simple easy to use software for VoIP from PCs. Are you listening Microsoft? Exactly why did you remove the support for third party voice systems from Messenger v5?

- A solution to NAT gateways/firewalls. I've never been able to make Microsoft's netmeeting or messenger work reliably from behind a NAT gateway. And for IVoIP we've got to be able to individually address devices behind the firewall. This either means a widespread use of IPv6 or workable relay servers that can cope with the bandwidth required

- A global naming/numbering standard. This is a similar problem to IM (instant messaging). We currently have 4 or 5 naming systems in IM with little interoperability between them. The early players in internet IVoIP are each developing their own naming system. I don't have a good solution to this, but we badly need one if IVoIP is to take off.

- A reasonably priced gateway interconnect between POTS (plain old telephone system) and IVoIP. I need to be able to make phone calls to people's existing phones as well as to internet connected phones. But this has to be global and it has to be at an acceptable price. Vonage are beginning to do this in the USA but I've yet to see anyone provide a truly global service. This will take a lot of coordination and peering agreements so maybe someone like Vodafone should kick it off. In theory, it should be possible to go via Internet to a point which is then a local phone call to any phone in the world. In some countries that might mean a POP in every exchange although in the UK we've now got a well established system for local call numbers available anywhere in the UK.

- QOS or Quality of Service. People frequently state that this is a big issue that will need fundamental changes to the internet to support. I don't agree. If VoIP is as good as cellphones I'll use it. And my early experiments with this suggest we've already got there. In any case, I'd rather see us throw more bandwidth at the problem than to introduce priority packets at the network level.

- The Telcos to embrace IVoIP instead of hiding their heads in the sand and hoping it will go away. Oh, right, it's never going to happen then. [from: JB Ecademy]

Is there a UK Cellphone number directory?

If not, why not? [from: JB Ecademy]

It's now roughly a year since BT cut broadband prices. So why is broadband still so expensive and when is the next price cut?

What we have here is a state sponsored duopoly between BT and NTL. It's keeping BT's wholesale price at around £15 which then means that retail is stuck at around £25 to £30.

When I ask these questions I'm frequently told that a major factor in the real costs are the upstream bandwidth charges. So when are those going to come down as well? In that area we've got a cosy little cartel of peering arrangements between a small number of players. Right through this industry we've got companies that have built up massive debt and have internal competing interests that mean they worry about internet usage cutting into their other profitable lines. There's no shortage of fibre or bandwidth but I believe they are doing just enough to stay competitive and maximise return in the short term. We badly need one or more of the major players to bite the bullet and go for volume by dropping the price dramatically. [from: JB Ecademy]

What if you're just outside the 5.5km from your local exchange and can't get ADSL. What are your options? Is ISDN available at a similar price? Is it worth trying to find a friendly near neighbour and (probably illegally) sharing their bandwidth with WiFi? Does Satellite actually work? Will BT roll out their mid band product for people like you?

Tell us what you've found.

[from: JB Ecademy]

From Michael Robertson of Lindows.com via The Doc Searls Weblog is another rant about lack of support for Linux in WiFi hardware. Is Intel's Centrino Techno-Latin for "No Linux"? ... Most worrisome is Intel's lack of Linux support for their new Centrino chipset which they've called their "most important announcement since the Pentium." Intel says that 300 million dollars will go into advertising this new product for mobile computing, but Intel isn't making the small investment to provide Linux drivers. [from: JB Wifi]

Locustworld - Breaking down barriers?

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Locustworld. I'm merely an interested observer.

The more I discover and read about Locustworld, the more interested I become. What they are trying to do is breaking new ground in all sorts of fields. It's also exposing the holes and issues in several technical areas that we currently take for granted.

What are they doing
On the surface, Locustworld appears to be a WiFi hardware manufacturer selling WiFi access points that are capable of forming a self-building and healing mesh. Each box can provide local coverage to WiFi devices. Each box may have a connection to the internet to provide a gateway to the devices it serves. Each box also seeks out other boxes and builds links and routes to them. The end result is a growing mesh of WiFi coverage that has multiple routes to the Internet accessible from any WiFi device within the mesh.

How are they doing it
Locustworld is actually not a hardware manufacturer. At the core is a Linux distribution using a whole set of open source tools. This distribution has been tweaked and trimmed so that it will run with no hard disk and can be booted from a CD or flash memory "disk". This distribution is freely downloadable and the CDs can be used to boot any PC with the right hardware into a MeshAP.

The hardware Locustworld is selling is outsourced and they have two designs based on commodity pieces. The main part is a small ITX motherboard with commercial flash memory and a commercial WiFi card. it's got all the usual keyboard, mouse, monitor, USB ports you'd expect and with no hard disk or fans there are no moving parts.

Administration is possible by connecting a keyboard and monitor but the main route to administration is via a central website. This handles address allocation, software upgrades and setting definition.

So Locustworld isn't actually a hardware manufacturer. From a hardware point of view, they're actually a reseller. So are they a software company? Well all their software is open source and almost all of it comes from elsewhere.

So why is this interesting?
Lets take a few points and dig a little deeper.

Hardware
All the hardware is off the shelf, commercial, commodity hardware. It's just the packaging which is unique. This sets them apart from the other WiFi AP manufacturers who use proprietary hardware all the way through. Even when they buy chipsets from Broadcom or TI, the rest of the hardware is a custom build. The problem with this is that this forces the AP manufacturers to also be software companies. Something I'm sure they would rather not be. The result for the customer is that even though they use the same chipset in almost the same design, you can't run Avaya software on Buffalo hardware. And you have to cope with the inevitable bugs, firmware upgrades and general flakiness because the software development always lags the sales and marketing need to get the hardware to market.

Device Drivers
There are a number of efforts in the Linux community to develop device drivers for WiFi hardware. However "There are no 802.11g or 802.11a cards currently supported by Linux. Avoid buying any kit from Atheros, Broadcom or Texas Instruments. Atheros have even issued a cease and desist order to the open source project for their driver. ..." So we've got a major limitation here where the manufacturers want to retain control and they write for Windows first, for the Mac if you're lucky and Linux last. This doesn't bode well for Linux desktops if you can't get device drivers for the latest WiFi kit. This also points up the limitations in a business model where software is used to keep hardware proprietary. It's understandable, but it's the customer and market who ultimately lose out.

Speed to market
Intel is issuing press releases about mesh networking in the labs but isn't shipping anything. Meshnetworks is spending VC money on marketing but haven't shipped anything (I think. At least that's how it appears). Nokia were working on a mesh networking system but pulled out. Meanwhile by using existing hardware and software a tiny UK company is shipping product.

Automatic Upgrades
I had a discussion about all this and asked why the WiFi manufacturers didn't follow Locustworld's lead and ship commercial hardware with Linux based open software. The response was that end users didn't want to cope with manual upgrades. But how is that different from the current situation where you're locked into firmware and software upgrades from people who don't want to be software manufacturers? The Meshbox system is designed to download upgrades automatically which surely is a better solution?

Security
Let's say you buy a WiFi AP that has a built in firewall, gateway, NAT, DHCP like the current round of combo boxes. Now let's say that Microsoft come up with a new Messenger that needs specific ports open or a specific MS product like UPnP. Will your AP supplier keep up with this? Let's further say that someone discovers a hole in a common system (like a Linksys router that has an easily broken password for instance), how well will your AP manufacturer deal with this? There's a very strong argument for either using open source software or software from a major manufacturer (like Cisco or MS) for anything that is used as a security gateway. Otherwise, who knows how long a fix will take to appear.

Naming and numbering schemes
Picture the scene. You fire up a MeshAP. So does your neighbour and you link them. You agree an IP numbering system between you. Later, another neighbour starts a MeshAP and uses their own numbering system. You find out about each other and link the nets and suddenly all your numbering has to be done again. So what's being built here is a walled garden part of the internet run by the end users. Unfortunately, the existing IP registries aren't set up to cope with end user addresses. As the Wiana
Faq says,

Current Internet address assignments are based on a hierarchical structure.

The existing Internet registries are not set up to deal with networks where every part of the network is owned and operated by end users.

A large scale ad-hoc wireless network is a different physical medium to the classic Internet

Existing Internet "trust" is achieved out of band, there is no per address authentication.

Significant fees are required to obtain IP address ranges.

"Applications for wireless address space were refused and the structure of these registries does not facilitate addresses for end users. Even with IPv6, allocations are described as "limited"."

Now there's plenty of other current problems with IP addressing and NATed gateways. On one level we really want to have every internet connected device to be uniquely addressable. Particularly for technologies like Voice over IP. This also brings with it huge security and safety issues because we're currently relying on firewalls to protect these end devices. IPv6 was supposed to solve all the naming problem, but the upgrade path is awkward and there's still hardly any support out there from the existing infrastructure. Like DNS, this needs to be decentralised outwards, but is currently mired in political and commercial interests.

Locustworld's solution to all this is to set themselves up as a registry for the 1.*.*.* range mostly because they needed something and there wasn't anything else out there. But this is already causing conflict with other groups who need to see more formal arrangements and are concerned about Locustworld's longevity and status. It's also distinctly sub-optimal as a long term global plan.

Business Plan
How do you bootstrap a hardware company without using large quantities of VC? Simple, don't produce hardware, produce software. Locustworld produced a hardware spec, but they have no hand in the hardware production except as a reseller. Ok. So how do you build a software company that sells free, open source, software? Simple again, you don't sell software, you sell support. So is there anything here at all? Well a tiny company is shipping product and changing the world. If they can make a living from this then do they actually need 1999 style capital?

Broadband provision
Again, picture the situation where numerous private individuals start installing Meshboxes and linking them together. Some, but not all of them will add in a cable or ADSL link to the internet. Right now this is almost certainly breaking the T&Cs of their broadband provider. In the labs, Locustworld have got aggregation working so that a mesh with 3 ADSL lines could provide a burstable rate of 3* ADSL speed to any device in the mesh. From the broadband ISPs point of view they are potentially losing customers and being hit with more bandwidth demand. But look at it another way. They could install MeshBoxes themselves as a last mile or long mile solution and achieve cheaper rollout and provision while also getting coverage outside their current areas.

This particular battle is just starting as the Telcos get increasingly concerned by WiFi usage at the edges of their network. Locustworld makes all the arguments harder. If we now factor in the hotspot providers as well and note that they are frequently the same telcos, we have another problem. To take an example, Meshboxes could be used to extend the Bryant Park free WiFi up through Manhattan and in the process, cover the same area as all the Starbucks and McDonalds hotspots that have recently been announced.

Is this real?
Reading the mailing lists, and observing, there's no doubt that Locustworld have a fascinating product. There's also no doubt that it's not quite ready for primetime yet. I'm concerned that the very small team may get overstretched

I've just seen this on the MeshAP mailing list.

Don't bother looking at any cards unless there is Linux support.

If there isn't, it is because the manufacturer refuses to release the specifications and should be pressured in to doing so.

There are no 802.11g or 802.11a cards currently supported by Linux.
...
Avoid buying any kit from Atheros, Broadcom or Texas Instruments. Atheros have even issued a cease and desist order to the open source project for their driver. ...

Feel free to flame the manufacturers, vendors and chip producers. The more sales they lose as a result of this policy, the better.

Atmel is Linux friendly and has good driver support. Lucent and Prism2 also have good support.

So what we have here is the most innovative uses of WiFi being blocked by the hardware manufacturers. We shouldn't expect the hardware manufacturers to be good at software and it's quite hard to see why they should even want to be in the software business. But deliberately blocking software development and refusing to release specs that allow software development seems fairly stupid.

I had a discussion with Glenn about some of this and suggested that it would make sense for the AP manufacturers to base their AP boxes on commodity PC hardware and then to outsource all the software development to the Open Source movement. He felt that end consumers wouldn't want this as they wouldn't want to have to cope with software upgrades. But frankly the current situation of repeated firmware upgrades to deal with bugs is just as bad. [from: JB Wifi]