700 Mhz Spectrum Auction

Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wolfgang.rupprecht+gnus200708 at gmail.com
Thu Aug 2 18:28:41 CEST 2007


Ian Stirling <OpenMoko at mauve.plus.com>
writes:
> So you missed the earlier comment from someone who has problems with
> wifi working reliably due to overloading?

It would have been hard for me to miss it since I was the one that
made it. ;-)

> Consider that if current wifi went through obstructions, and had a 4
> fold range improvement that you get 16 times the interfering stations.

Actually, I'm a greedy little b-stard.  I want N-times increased
coverage and well over N-times as much spectrum. The whole cellular
pricing structure hinges on folks not having any alternatives.  There
is *lots* of spectrum and the public is shoehorned into a few small
~100Mhz bands.

> You cannot expect performance similar to managed networks on unmanaged
> networks.

There is nothing magical about the cell-tower firmware that free/open
access point code couldn't also do.  You want power control, WIFI
could do that if needed.  You want hand-off to other frequencies, open
sourced code could do that too.

> However, it only takes two users streaming files between themselves to
> kill connectivity for everyone else.

There is nothing preventing fair-share routing/filtering.  This is
actually a common filter that both Linux and BSD kernels have
available in their IP filtering subsystems.  In fact, there is a lot
of research on various different "fairness" algorithms.  This is one
of the things that open-source will almost certainly do better since
there are tons of competing ideas and tons of research papers.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht                http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
IPv6 on Fedora 7 http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/fedora/ipv6-tunnel.html





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