Re: Wireless for RV campground

On Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:53:09 -0800 (PST), westom1@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Useful reviews will typically discuss many items that Jeff
has listed - and with numbers. No numbers? Ignore that review.

Right! Numbers are everything and the only way to tell the
difference between quality and crap. Numbers are difficult to find
and may be inconsistent. The best I've found are on
SmallNetBuilder.com. For example, the WAN->LAN thruput for various
wired and wireless routers:
<http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/>
For thruput, they use:
<http://www.ixchariot.com>
which I can't afford to buy. However, I get similar numbers using
Iperf and Jperf:
<http://openmaniak.com/iperf.php>
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf>
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/jperf>

Unfortunately, there are some numbers that are useless. Most router
vendors don't bother supplying the measured receiver sensitivity.
There are plenty of reasons for this, but I don't wanna get into
minutiae. They just copy the numbers from the chipset vendor. One
exception is D-Link, which has apparently actually measured their
products:
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/rx-sens/receiver%20sensitivity.htm>
Note the wide variation in values.

Your system must support 802.11 B G and N. That is what future
customers will demand.

Demand? I recently screwed up and left the speed at one of my coffee
shop customers locked at 5.5Mbits/sec (on a 3Mbit/sec DSL line). I
think it was like that for at least 3 months before I noticed the
problem. Absolutely nobody complained, demanded anything, or expected
anything better. My customers ask me about the latest technology and
buzzwords which they read in the trade magazines and online, but
rarely "demand" any of them[1]. In my opinion, the trick is to supply
the best that is necessary to do the job, but no more. It's the added
acronyms, features, and functions that seem to cause me all the
problems.

For example, some missing numbers in this exercise are:
1. What maker and model equipment already exists?
2. How many users per access point? How many ACTIVE users per
access point?
3. How many access points to cover the area?
4. Any existing wireless networks in the park?
5. Do you have line of sight to all the camp sites? If not, what's
blocking the signal?
6. Tell me about the existing CATV system? Is it owned by the
campground owner or the cable company? If locally owned, is it a star
or bus topology? Is star, can each leg be isolated to provide
individual feed?
7. Does the CATV coax live in conduit? If so, how big? Do you have
room for gel filled CAT5? If so, you don't need or want wireless.
8. What level of service are you planning to offer? For example, if
you're going to offer 1Mbits/sec per user for 100 users with 10%
loading, you'll need a dedicated 10Mbit/sec backhaul. A cable modem
can do this, but there are restrictions on reselling the bandwidth.
9. What's on the trailer/campsite hookup? Room for a built in
bridge or switch?
10. Are there any financial or budgetary limitations? There always
are, but in this case, it might depend on what the campground charges
for the internet access.
11. Who's gonna adminstrate this system? With 100 potential users,
you have the equivalent of a small ISP (internet service provider).
You'll need all the traditional facilities normally provided by an
ISP, such as billing, administration, support, traffic monitoring,
abuse detection, abuse mitigation, installation, and troubleshooting.
Actually, running a WISP is more difficult than a traditional ISP in
that you also have a rather unreliable method of delivery. One leaky
microwave oven will kill the whole system. Also, who's gonna answer
the phone when a customer can't connect at 2AM?



[1] The exception are government and educational institutions. It
takes so long to get funding and approval that they tend to specify
technology that is well ahead of the state of the art. By the time
the system is actually purchased, the specified products are usually
commodity items. I recently commented on a skool system that
specified 10GigE, which is currently unobtainium. They're guessing 4
years to purchase, which is about right.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@xxxxxxxxxx
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
.

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