[Reader-list] Re: Wireless LAN

[Arun Mehta]

Brilliant, Devdas! This idea of setting up a 802.11b network among the 
Bombay Linux crowd needs to be emulated.

Wish you all the luck. Aren't there people on these lists, that might wish 
to join? Think about it...

You spend maybe Rs. 20,000, once, which puts you on a broadband wireless 
network, that can carry audio (whatever your sound card happens to be 
playing), video telephony, and best of all, you'll can share your Internet 
connections!

Imagine, that 50 people join, and on average, each of them has a 
connectivity to the Internet of 1K -- that really is a modest estimate. 
Now, imagine that at a time, on average, 10 of these 50 are actually using 
their connections. That means, that if everyone shares, each of these 10 
get 4-5K of bandwidth for free, to use in addition to their own!

I can only urge all of you to pass this on to friends you know in Mumbai, 
who have a techie bent -- after all, you will need to do some tinkering 
with wireless equipment, IP addresses and stuff.

Remember, that the best telecom in a disaster-prone area is 802.11b -- it 
is merely Ethernet in the air, runs TCP-IP, so is as robust as the Internet 
-- no central server. If there is an earthquake in your town, the surviving 
nodes will quickly be able to restart communications, if at all there is a 
break!

Oh, and if other people would like to start something like this in their 
own cities, do get in touch with me? consume.net has a database of people 
that want to be nodes, so we could either just enter ourselves into their 
database or start one of our own for India.

And if people are interested in starting something like this in Delhi, I'm 
eager and willing to push this idea forward here. Why doesn't the Delhi 
Linux Users Group initiate something similar? Raj?

Arun
At 8/27/2001, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
>On Mon, 27 Aug 2001, Arun Mehta spewed into the ether:
> >
> > Well, it depends on the topography: the basic cost factor in the hw is how
> > much power you need to expend to reach your neighbors. 802.11b is legal in
> > India, the card I believe, is under $200, add a couple of hundred dollars
> > for a good antenna and cable? That's the fixed cost.
>No, the idea is to hook up the Mumbai LUG. The concept is to hook up as
>many luggers as can afford the cost to an always on high speed network
>for fun. Range will be about 120km diameter. We will probably be
>assembling our own hardware from scratch as well.