Interesting CNN piece about 802.11b density in cities and on campuses. As more people purchase and establish wireless networks at home, work and school, the signals begin to overlap and confuse the receivers (after hearing David Reed's lecture on Open Spectrum at ETCON, I no longer say "interfere with each other," since, according to Reed, "two radio signals that pass through one another do not harm each other — there is no interference with radio waves, only confusion by receivers").
I was out with Howard Rheingold (who's also speaking at Reboot) and some of his Danish pals from his online community last night, and we got to talking about this. My feeling is that there are two very simple measures that can in large part solve this:
- Bundle NetStumbler with the configuration tools that are shipped with wireless base-stations, revising the app so that after taking a survey of the nearby 802.11b spectrum, it makes a recommendation as to which channel the base-station should run on.
- Bundle NoCat or another captive portal app with the base-station firmware, so that users who stumbled upon a network could easily get contact info for the base-station's operator. That way, people who are thinking about adding yet another, redundant access-point to an already saturated location can instead make contact with nearby operators and ask if they mind sharing their connections, perhaps after splitting the costs.
Of course, there are a lot of very ambitious solutions to this, too: opening up more spectrum, revising the 802.11 standards to allow for automatic back-off on busy channels, switching to ultra-wideband technologies, etc. I'm sure that in the long-term we'll see all of these approaches tried, but in the meanwhile, I think that simple software fixes can go a long way to solving the problem.
(via /.)
