Wireless Wars

I don't think I have ever seen networking methodologies be so controversial as they are in wireless.
From a common sense point of view the use of non standard vs standards based 802.11 a/b/g/n make even less sense and the only reality that can be gleaned from this is the reality of the effectiveness of good marketing and network engineer ego.
If you couple this with the obvious lack of generalized understanding of what any of the acronyms really mean to device and end user performance you can very easily see how the FUD and confusion around this are allowed to persist and propagate. Bottom line is that you should NEVER sacrifice consistency for speed in production mission critical networks. The only excuse for this is lack of mission critical necessity, after all, if it is not important then use what you want.
But if it is important then it is important to make sure that someone besides the “wireless guy” make the call, also, that it be justified and in keeping with best practices.
I have yet to see anyone agree to use a beta patch on a production server, except under dire circumstance, most often these types of changes are coupled with a high degree of change control and a fair amount of approval.
Yet everyone seems very willing to be far more cavalier with wireless network design and authentication architecture, both of which are far more onerous and insidiously difficult to troubleshoot, diagnose and cause incredible end user dissatisfaction with the WHOLE network.
I would guess that this costs at least a billion dollars a year in lost productivity, wasted time and is a real talent sink because “if the wireless ain't working then I ain't working on anything else... “

KD5YDN

802.11 and Cellular - True Convergence?

The pile up

I was fairly new to Ham Radio and lucky enough to have a good friend who was willing to help me "learn the ropes" as it were. In my first year of having my General license I was offered the oppportunity to do something really extraordinary. I was asked to go to the Island of Dominique and DX from there. It was an amazing experience. I had traveled around the Carribean a fair bit but this island was new to me and was a bit more of a remote experience than what I was used to. However I had a great place to stay, it was a one room shack out in back of a main house but the shack was surrounded by a quaint garden of native flowers including bouganvelia and other climbing flowering vines. The building did not have glass in the windows nor air conditioning but did have a nice breeze that flowed through most of the evening and was well kept and airy even in the heat of the day. I arrived at the airport and as is customary had to show my temporary radio operators license for the country as well as explain the equipment I was bringing in and the frequencies I would be using. All of this had to be arrange months in advance and sometimes deplending on where you go is quite tricky. After all, you have to apply for a radio operators license in a foriegn country and this can take time and effort. But it was all worked out and correct for the immigration and customs people and I was allowed to proceed with my two suitcases crammed full of radio gear and antenna's.
I set up the antenna and radio in less than 4 hours and with a little twitching and fiddling with an extention cord from the coffee maker, (everything was 50 Hz 220), I was able to convert and plug in a 110 outlet for my radio, power supply and PC, Magic!
I had carefully placed my log book and my pencil, fly tying kit for the expected boring times and everything else close at hand and was ready to go. I had managed to make one short QSL with someone in Texas and my radio seemed to be working well, therefore I was looking to talk to a lot of people that day. What happened was incredible, I was CQing and waiting for a reply when I talked to a guy who posted my call sign and frequency on a well used DX spotting site. I guess I had not realized that Dominique was a fairly desirable QTH because all of a sudden I was innundated with request for QSO. It was my first real experience with a pile up, which is what happens when you have so many people trying to talk to you at once that it is really tough to identify an individual operator to talk to, basically everyone talks over each other in a rush to get a QSO before the band changes and they cannot, or you cannot, hear each other. This was so frantic that I actually experienced some pile ups that went for over 6 hours without stop. I talked to over a 1000 different people over the course of 4 days of hard radio work. It was great fun. I made a lot of mistakes but everyone helped get me through it and everyone was patient and well mannered while we worked as many people as I could. I would wake up at 8am get on the radio at 8:30 and would not stop until 2:30 am. a fairly exhuasting schedule. But one that was worth every minute of it. In the end my ears were sore from the head set, my voice was tired and I was plain worn out. Great Stuff! I would do it again in a heartbeat. I talke to 1000 people in over 70 countries and the furthest was antartctica and China, Australia. Lots of Europeans and Russians as well as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Truly a wonderful trip and one that I will remember forever.

Kd5ydn

Wireless networks - Part One, The Dark Ages - Wireless and Bow Hunting

I have been working with wireless IP networking since 1994, my first wireless modem was a Ricochet Modem from Metricom, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(internet_service), I was managing a network in Fremont and San Jose at the time and was constantly frustrated by having to dial in to Pacific Bell Internet Service in order to check on a finicky batch processing program for MRP that our company was using. I was looking for a way to do this wirelessly or at least on demand and started using this service. Looking back on it, it was actually pretty amazing stuff. I just happened to live in an area where they were deploying this service and decided to give it a try. I was trying to use wireless to solve a very real issue that I had and the service worked perfectly.
I am always facinated by the forerunners of actual mass adoption basically because it is often the case that we do not know what we have until it is gone. I remember that this service ran on 900 Mhz and had great range. It was very finicky to set up on Windows NT and required a serial port, Dial Up Networking Client and 3 toes of a rare south american bat to be put in the brew, but once you got it working, magic!
I bow hunt and had access at the time to a piece of property up by the Mount Hamiliton Observatory, I used to go up there very early and remember once sitting in my Ford Bronco in the dark and using my laptop to "dial-in" to the corporate network, check that the batch process had worked and then close up my laptop, put on my camoflage gloves, grab my bow and go hunting. I marvelled at how such brand new cutting edge technology could enable me to pursue such a base level and primative activity. Hey, it was not supposed to work, I was way to far from the modem I was using, but it did work through some environmental anomally that allowed the signal to bounce back and fore between my modem and the reciever on the other end, again magic!
One of the things that we need to remember over time is that it is the application of technology to enhance our lives that is important, not the technology itself.
KD5YDN