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Re: [LUG] forum?

 

Tom Potts wrote:
>
> Dependence on telcos will result in all sorts of ill thought out stupidity - 
> there are moves afoot to sideline P2P 'in case someone uses it for 
> downloading music that only costs 10* the price the musician gets for it to 
> keep the parasitic music industry going and no other reason'  OK so we can 
> run everything over port80 using tunnelling but  belts,braces and pringles 
> aerials .... I can see 54Meg point 2 point connections costing  <£100 for 
> 10km reach...

Speaking as someone who helped build 10Km wifi links, we did it for
cheap, but it wasn't easy. And cheap is a relative term - antennas and
decent cables/connectors cost money - fortunately our radio guy had all
that already.

54Mbps may be the spec on the devices, but over long distances WiFi
can't do that (nor can WiMax do its 70Mbps over distance). Some Intel
wifi devices use to let you tweak the algorithms for transmission, and
we got significantly better than 56Kbps out of the links, enough to call
it broadband and connect a few cottages.

I think you are stuck with licensed radio links for most performance
networking - like - urm - the telecoms companies do.

>> When I see churches in rural areas, I see a big communications tower (you
>> can hide a wifi antenna very easily)

Urm since wifi is predominantly line of site - you can't really hide
them. Although I know this guy who can make very stylish antennas for
you, and know which guttering has the best microwave properties if you
prefer the weatherproofed look.

One church let us stick a satellite dish antenna on their tower for
demonstration purposes, but I'm guessing that we wouldn't have got
planning permission for a permanent fixture.

What I never realised was that many prominent hill tops have regular UK
power sockets on top of them, to plug in all the radio gear. The radio
hams have been here (there) before. So often it is just a case of asking
whoever is paying the electricity bill.

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