wireless
Anyone know any good wireless tools? Or articles on how to do surveys of wireless and plan the netwokrs? I was thinking of writing a book on the subject, anyone interested in co-authoring it? email me.
If someone asked you for your single best tool for planning a wireless network, what would it be? I would say knowledge on RF theory and how to do the math for all the different problems you need to figure out.
Do you have a spectrum analyser? I think those are your best tools. . .just some good planning and knowledge-site survey of what is out there now. Plan, test, model. Then re-plan using your knowledge gained, and test again. From there, scale that out gradually.
I would be interested if you find a good software program for surveys. I just tried out visiwave and it seemed ok but sort of basic. mostly for indoors it seems?
For 2.4 ghz, it is becoming a very saturated band! In a metro part of our town my laptop was picking up 32 access points (that was in windows networking, netstumbler would be showing even more!).
So you know the people in that area are overlapping frequencies and slowing down each other. 802.11b has what three non-overlapping channels? That doesn't leave much. We choose 802.11a to try to blanket parts of the city for city employee use. We choose it as it had more non-overlapping channels and less people using it. But it's not easy and requires lots of access points to get around buildings. It has less penetration of foilage per watt of output compared to 802.11b.
I think an important part for any outdoor 802.11b network now would be some type of system or management system that detects interfering access points-channels and switches to the less congested channel automatically. I haven't seen anything that does that. It would seem easy to do. . .the radio just listens to the frequency it is on, if there is another user there and the interfering unit does transmit often, record the average amount of traffic he sends. Then try to switch channels if average of other channels is less. Record the average through the day (of interference on the new channel) and see if that channel is less congested. If so, stay there on that new channel for a while.
There is so much noise on 802.11b in crowded cities it's not funny.
Did you hear about the earthlink networks in Anaheim and san fran? They want to cover the city with 802.11b for public use. They are building there network very rapidly I can tell you that, I see their Tropos units all over the place now.
They use motorola canopy backhaul using tropos mesh client equipment. The canopy backhaul uses 802.11a freq and 900mhz. The 900mhz should be interesting, I wonder when they will start breaking peoples wireless phones?
If someone asked you for your single best tool for planning a wireless network, what would it be? I would say knowledge on RF theory and how to do the math for all the different problems you need to figure out.
Do you have a spectrum analyser? I think those are your best tools. . .just some good planning and knowledge-site survey of what is out there now. Plan, test, model. Then re-plan using your knowledge gained, and test again. From there, scale that out gradually.
I would be interested if you find a good software program for surveys. I just tried out visiwave and it seemed ok but sort of basic. mostly for indoors it seems?
For 2.4 ghz, it is becoming a very saturated band! In a metro part of our town my laptop was picking up 32 access points (that was in windows networking, netstumbler would be showing even more!).
So you know the people in that area are overlapping frequencies and slowing down each other. 802.11b has what three non-overlapping channels? That doesn't leave much. We choose 802.11a to try to blanket parts of the city for city employee use. We choose it as it had more non-overlapping channels and less people using it. But it's not easy and requires lots of access points to get around buildings. It has less penetration of foilage per watt of output compared to 802.11b.
I think an important part for any outdoor 802.11b network now would be some type of system or management system that detects interfering access points-channels and switches to the less congested channel automatically. I haven't seen anything that does that. It would seem easy to do. . .the radio just listens to the frequency it is on, if there is another user there and the interfering unit does transmit often, record the average amount of traffic he sends. Then try to switch channels if average of other channels is less. Record the average through the day (of interference on the new channel) and see if that channel is less congested. If so, stay there on that new channel for a while.
There is so much noise on 802.11b in crowded cities it's not funny.
Did you hear about the earthlink networks in Anaheim and san fran? They want to cover the city with 802.11b for public use. They are building there network very rapidly I can tell you that, I see their Tropos units all over the place now.
They use motorola canopy backhaul using tropos mesh client equipment. The canopy backhaul uses 802.11a freq and 900mhz. The 900mhz should be interesting, I wonder when they will start breaking peoples wireless phones?
