1. Home
  2. Wireless Networking
  3. Are simple wireless uses common anywhere?

Are simple wireless uses common anywhere?

Playing around with a spare wireless router (WRT54GS) I have, hooked it up to a stand-alone PC to do nothing except spit out MP3's, and started thinking: why isn't this more common?

What I mean is, using wireless as simple stand-alone information-spitting "boxes". No internet and no local network except for connecting users. The boxes would do absolutetly nothing except spit out information on demand. They would be read-only.

Places where this would make sense:

- Movie theaters: spitting out show times.

- Airports: spitting out flight/gate info BS

- Retail stores: spitting out "flyers" of current sales

Etc, etc. You can think of a million other places where it would also make sense.

Perhaps there are places in your area that take this very simple approach, but I've never seen anything around here do this. It would take practically no overhead at all for them.

It used to be that it wouldn't be too practical since not that many people carry around PDA's, but many people have Smartphones now...

Reply to
Eric
Loading thread data ...

Come on man settle down, you got to know that the whole world is not going to jump on the wireless bandwagon. :) Wireless is good and wireless is grate but wireless is not all of that.

Duane :)

Reply to
Duane Arnold

Understand that it's not a question of broadcasting a useful piece of information, it's a question of you client's ability to make use of what you have available.

In the scenarios above, I'd set up a WiFi access point, a minimal WWWebserver(*), and provide WWWeb browsing capabilities for the clients. Everyone who could see your AP would have a browser...

(*) Some of the WWWeb servers I've seen could probably fit inside the AP.

Reply to
William P.N. Smith

Certainly - your average router runs a web server just for self-configuration.

Reply to
Derek Broughton

Are you saying the PC is NOT connected to the Net but only broadcasting what the PC has on it?

Reply to
me

The reach is too small. By the time I'm close enough to the movie theater to use one example, I can just jump out of the car walk accross the parking lot and purchase my tickets (and of course read play times over the box office

fundamentalism, fundamentally wrong.

Reply to
Rico

They do, how do you think the web interface of a WRT54G works

fundamentalism, fundamentally wrong.

Reply to
Rico

Exactly. Its simply mininum of technology for efficiency. An httpd was also how I envisioned the above examples. You connect and your first http request gets redirected to a local page. No magic there.

Yeah, I had "ready-made boxes" in the back of my head that would have an embedded httpd, but where the information comes from is trivial -- whether its embedded or a just a local PC. Hell, even an old 486 running Apache will spit out text and light graphics faithfully.

I can think of many examples where I've would have benefited from being able to grab local information without having to deal with annoyance of going through the internet. Read-only is starting point, you could even get a little more complex. I..e., with the above examples (and these are just examples):

Retail store: Spits out sales info BS, but you could also look up a specific product by description or ID, and get a price check, location in the store (isle), and even available quantity at that store. No need to hunt down a clerk or one of those U-scan terminals.

Movie theater: Spits out show times, but also closed-captioning. Make some lightweight glasses with HUD's in them for CC, that the theaters would provide, and you've now opened the theater for the deaf.

Reply to
Eric

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.