Result! The media club have installed a free access point in their bar downstairs. [from: JB Wifi]

The next wifi meetup is The Media Club, 131 - 151 Great Titchfield Street, London, on Wednesday, April 9 @ 7:00PM. Hope to see you all there.

The Media club has Ethernet internet access. If someone could bring along an access point, we could wifi enable it for the evening. [from: JB Wifi]

Interesting story here DailyWireless - Cable's Wireless ISP Plan about a Californian cable company that is putting Wireless units on the top of utility poles to get cable data access to near by homes. The unit filters out the data traffic on a cable TV system and then re-broadcasts it using either the 802.11a or 802.11b bands. This lets the cable company use existing cable infrastructure to service homes that are not directly wired with broadband. What's not clear from the article is what reception equipment is needed at the house.

A while ago we wondered here if there's potential for stripping and weatherproofing a Wireless Access point with an ADSL or Cable modem and putting them on telephone poles to provide instant and cheap public hotspots. Both BT and NTL are ideally placed to do this providing they have the backend billing mechanism in place. The other location that stands out and which we keep repeating is public phone boxes. These have the advantage of secure metalwork and power as well. this approach is already being taken by a telco in Canada.

Going back to the first approach, I have an example within walking distance of my home where this would make complete sense. The village of Stanstead Abbots is in the Lea valley, 3 miles from the A10 and 6 miles outside the M25. Like a lot of the area there's been a lot of new housing development that is atracting A and B class families as a dormitory town for the City and London. Bizarrely the local exchange is not ADSL enabled although NTL has some coverage. But typically the NTL cable goes past the end of the close and not into the new development. You have the situation where people with money and interest are less than 100m from cable but can't get it. And the capital cost to NTL of extending the cable is relatively huge. A few WiFi repeaters scattered along the existing cable route would provide coverage to several hundred homes. Hmm? If NTL don't do it, it sounds like a business plan to me for a micro-WISP. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if this situation is repeated all round the M25 along the edges of the green belt. [from: JB Wifi]

Boo-Hoo! I stopped in at the Wardour St starbucks on my way to the Ecademy meeting last night. And the T-Mobile service was no longer free. In fact, they're charging £5 for an hours access.

While I was there I saw 4 other people with laptops and talked to one of them. He felt the charges were OK as he could charge them back. So what we have here is exactly what I objected to, which is a business level charge aimed at business customers with an expense account. And it seems to be working When I suggested that it ought to be the same price as an internet cafe, he said he would pay extra for the ability to use his own laptop and not be surrounded by backpackers.

Maybe there is some money in all this after all. [from: JB Wifi]

sidewayZen: LAMP-posts: Bloggers, Portals, and Wireless

Hmm. Community websites with both Internet facing and Community WLAN facing function optimised to support the WLAN while using open source portal software. Interesting. [from: JB Wifi]

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]