[MLB-WIRELESS] [Fwd: The Wireless Lan (802.11) smoke-screen]

[Adrian Close]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Barry Park wrote:

> Paul Budde is the telco industry analyst guru.

Thanks for that, Barry.  I appreciate you forwarding it to the list.

> The Minister for Communications has ordered his department to investigate
> the potential of the wireless broadband technology, based on the
> international IEEE 802.11standard, for regional rural areas in Australia.

I think a good potential rural use of 802.11 is as a kind of community
bulletin board in country towns.  Low cost access.  Community focussed and
local so you might end up with some buy-in from residents.  We have a lot
of _flat_ country areas too, which makes deployment easier... ;)

> But what the Minister is now proposing is to broaden the market and start
> using 802.11 for much larger deployment ? for example, as an alternative
> to Telstra?s broadband network. While I would hope that opportunities do

Echoing this and comments made about the WISP idea in the "Building
Wireless Community Networks" O'Reilly book (thanks M. Borthwick), I'm not
convinced that 802.11 is a good base for a _commercial_ service.  What it
probably _is_ good for are community-based efforts, where best-effort
services is quite good enough and there are no SLA's invoved.

Of course, Megalink (hi Brendan!) might prove me wrong (and I actually
hope they do).  We'll see.

Adrian Close			email:	adrian at close.wattle.id.au
1 Old Gippsland Rd.		web:	http://www.close.wattle.id.au/~adrian
Lilydale, VIC, 3140, Australia	mobile:	+61 412 385 201


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