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List:       wireless-dc
Subject:    [wireless-dc] Area Network
From:       Serge Wroclawski <serge () tux ! org>
Date:       2001-11-02 3:21:14
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There's an interesting issue here, which is that several people have
expressed that they're not in the immediate distrct area, but they want to
be part of a freenet... So I'm suggesting the name be changed to MAN,
Metropolitan Area Network, or possibly MWAN, for Metropolitan Wireless
Area Network.

As for coverage... There was an early suggestion (I'm sorry, I forget who
it was), but a very good suggestion was made about distance and location.

I played around a bit with xplanet, but I can't see a way to make it zoom
into a given location.

What I was looking for was to collect the locations of people and try to
map them out in a graph[1], with the weights being the distance to various
other people. I think this would be useful, but not essential.

I'm also not going to be able to set up an AP in the near, near future,
since I'm planning on leaving my current location in the summer for a
bigger place.

I think this has spawned three issues, which people have begun to discuss:

1) The physical aspects of the network:
	- How many nodes in a given space?
	- How daunting will the physical setup be?
	- What kind of network bandwidth will a given node need, what kind
	  of connection will that require?
	- How much is this going to cost?

2) The logical aspect of the network:
	- What wireles technology will be used?
	- What meshing protocol will be used?
	- What (if any) authentication method will be used?
	- What (if any) encryption or tunneling will be used?
	- What (if any) anonymizing will be done?

3) The political aspects of the network:
	- Who's going to pay for all this?
	- Multi-tiered use (ie paying people get better service)?
	- Legality as connects with various ISP agreements.
	- Authentication and Logging?
	- Legal issues associated with network abuse.

So, that's plenty to think about, and I think people may want to tackle
all of them as best as possible, and perhaps look to other groups for
inspiration (that's what I've been doing for the past few months).

- Serge Wroclawski

[1] A graph as in the data structure, not a picture representation

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