Would it be possible to blanket a city or metropolitan area with these things and build a city wide intranet?
It appears that the major ISP's are about to switch to metered service (charge for each gigabyte transferred).
I'd like to use 802.11n to create an alternative to the Internet.
Apple's Airport Extreme can handle 50 connections... What if you were to create groups of 25 Airport devices, each with a persistant connection with each of the remaining 24, plus a connection to a neighboring group of 25 Airport devices. This leaves each Airport with 25 open channels for wireless users.
Could this work?
If not, are there any low cost (< $300 each person?) alternatives that could scale up to a large city?
Major ISPs and capping. That's not going to affect umm...like about 95% of the users.
802.1n is merely a wireless specification, nothing more and nothing less. It is not a "alternative to the internet". As far as range or coverage goes, it is no different than 802.11g.
Nevertheless, how do you expect to connect your Airport Extreme to the internet without connecting via an ISP in the first place? A dedicated backbone connection? How many hundred of thousands of dollars a year are you willing to spend?
Blanket a city? Sure...as long as there is an access point every other block. Its called a mesh and a mesh network does not scale very well.
Yes. The procedure is well established. This is the perfect time because it's an election year. Simply purchase a suitable politician searching for re-election. The politician proposes to supply *FREE* wireless internet to those that need it least (low income, poverty, etc) and bury the rest of the users in advertising. The politician will use it as a campaign promise. There were previously several companies willing to actually setup and install such a system. While Earthlink has dropped out, there are still a few that seem to think they can make money on free wireless.
Once you have your politician and free service company in place, you need to generate interest in the project. Press releases, promises, and claims should keep a PR person busy. Lies and science fiction performance claims are acceptable as nobody really understands the technology.
Yep. The fat pipe just isn't fat enough for P2P, IPTV, and other high bandwidth services. We're well past the point were user restraint and common sense can be relied upon to prevent overload.
802.11n is all about speed, not range. Typical range for the slowest
802.11n speeds are about 30-50 meters maximum (depending mostly on antenna gain). To supply such speeds, you'll need a huge number of Apple Airport Extreme routers. The current science fiction technology for 802.11b/g is about 3-7 access points per square mile. That's what the initial technical proposals usually contain. When installed, it usually turns out to be more like 40-50 per square mile. If you insist on 802.11n, it will be even more. How many square miles were you thinking of covering?
Real outdoor access points are made to handle 2000 MAC addresses. Not all of these are active, but the MAC address table has to be sufficiently large to handle this number. In terms of traffic, the rule of thumb is: 100 users doing light email and web browsing. 10 business users doing whatever business users do. 1 file sharing user hogging ALL the bandwidth In short, the Airport router is not designed for a large number of users. I just checked an AP in the middle of a large shopping mall. It shows 15 active connections and about 80 inactive MAC addresses. That's about typical.
Nope. Never mind the political, financial, or logistical reasons. It won't work on the technical reasons. Figure out what you want to do first. Then figure out what equipment you need. Very last, you figure out what vendors hardware you're going to buy.
Actually yes. See any of the WiMax solutions. They're made for doing exactly that. The problem is that you need to buy or rent a very expensive WiMax license. Think millions of dollars for just the license. Despite this, Sprint-Nextel and Clearwire are throwing millions into WiMax.
I'm all ears. How does 802.11n modulation offer longer range with all else being equal? You do know that below some signal to noise ratio (or error rate) 802.11n routers revert back to 802.11g? 802.11n is all about speed, not range.
Incidentally, if you think the beam forming technology pounded into the Pre-802.11n specification offers more range because of better antenna technology, that's also wrong. The PCB antennas used in most commodity routers do not offer any gain improvement over a rubber ducky. Even when pointed at the client radio, there's no range improvement. There's a substantial improvement in reducing reflections and multipath with beam forming, but that does nothing except in an enclosed room.
Ok, so how does going faster (spatial multiplexing) increase range?
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