Personal WANs and media servers

From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Mon Jun 29 1998 - 09:22:40 MDT


I'm interested in this too... am looking for a way to have
constant connectivity to my car/bike/laptop when away from
home, for purposes of telecommuting and media streaming
(also planning like 'gene to convert my physical media
into bits- anyone know of a cheap hardware MPEG-2 stream
encoder?).

I've investigated the commercial low power (unlicensed)
spread spectrum hardware out there and it looks like
it might be possible to setup a small cell of connectivity
by placing a omni antenna on my apartment roof and a
second one on my car, but I doubt the radius could be
more than a mile...

Dwayne wrote:
>
> Eugene Leitl wrote:
> >
> > I think permanent connectivity is not a pipe dream anymore, even
> > outside of California. Of course having a webcam, and NMEA feed from
> > a GPS receiver is the logical next step. Relying on cellular is
> > expensive, and radio modems are not ubiquitously available, not very
> > cheap.
>
> Not unless you build them yourself. I'm currently researching
> radio modem plans with a view towards building a bundle of them
> with about a dozen of my friends, and setting up a city-wide WAN.
> The next step is to run this WAN into an internet feed. While
> having a high-speed link would be nice, I'm more interested in a
> permanent connection than a fast dial-up link. There are some
> interestingly fast designs floating around, so hopefully I'll be
> able to implement a 100k+ link. I'm in Melbourne, Australia,
> fwiw.
>
> If anyone knows of useful spread-spectrum radio designs, or have
> any advice, please get in touch with me, and if people are
> interested I'll let them know how this works out.
>
> > Also, I don't understand why people do not turn fine-grain
> > providers, linking up with neighbour's housenets, offering mutual
> > router capabilities. One should think a (even diskless) i386/i486
> > 8 MByte Linux box with several NICs is not so very expensive.
>
> I wonder how much use the corel NC will be for this purpose? This
> is basically my plan, I'd like to link up my neighbours, and link
> these subnets with my friends' subnets. Economies of scale are
> quite useful in this regard, and if I'll I'm providing is access
> to the net it's a hell of a lot less hassle than running an ISP.
>
> > I distrust robots, though I've never used one. I think I'll wait for
> > learning neural nets which learn from looking over my shoulder. I
> > think people are the best filters, and I'd wish more people would
> > participate in the transhumantech@excelsior.org effort.
>
> I've subscribed to this since it started, as far as I know. What
> do you mean by the "effort"?
>
> Dwayne
> --
>
> return...to...the...source
> ddraig@pobox.com
> http://pobox.com/~ddraig

-- 
The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed.
                                                       -William Gibson
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