[ILUG] DSL & NAN

[Justin Mason]

Niall O Broin said:

> Having a look a complify.org over the weekend got me thinking. It seems that
> we will have DSL available in Ireland in the not too distant future. It also
> seems likely that it will be priced at somewhat over a hobby price i.e. you
> won't simply be upgrading from SurfFree to SurfDSL (or whatever), though of
> course you'll be getting a different, hopefully better, service.
> 
> Now many people here on the list have said that they don't necessarily need
> a terribly fast connection, but an always on connection for a fixed rate.
> DSL should provide this, but at what cost ? Knowing this market, there may
> even be bandwidth charges - don't rely on charging in other markets being
> replicated here. So, what about a NAN ?

The 802.11 stuff provides both high bandwidth, cheap and low-latency
connections, so if anyone can get it working, it'll be a dream compared to
whatever the commercial companies can provide IMHO ;)

> No, I don't mean your grandmother but rather a Neighbourhood Area Network,
> probably based on 802.11 wireless. I know 802.11 has been mentioned here
> before, but I'm looking for more war stories. What is its real effective
> range, particularly when base stations and remotes may be in different
> buildings ? How good is the Linux support ?

Linux supprot is very good, but the hardware, and line-of-sight, is
trickier.  We've been talking about it for a while, but it's been quiet
recently -- check out the wan-dublin list --
http://lists.boxhost.net/mailman/listinfo/wan-dublin .

--j.