Eric Hildum wrote:
>
> The problem is that no one seems to be making the needed underlying
> infrastructure to do the seamless roaming .
Have you used netstumbler lately? The "reconfigure automatically" is
about as close as you can get to seamless roaming across unsuspecting
access points as I've seen to date. It even works better than some
vendors' homogenous roaming features.
> What is needed is something like
> IPunplugged's <http://www.ipunplugged.com/> roaming system for GPRS/WLAN
> roaming for CDMA/UMTS, PDC, and PHS.
What's needed is an RFC, not some closed propritary solution that gets
implemented on certain handsets' firmware. Think NoCatAuth plus two
ethernet ports on the access point. Maybe even a simple modification
to DHCP. RTTP Request to Tunnel Protocol, GAP Guest Access Protocol,
PPFAP Pay Pal for Access Protocol or LMLAPUYBP Let Me Look at Porn
Using
Your Bandwidth Protocol or something like that.
> If anybody knows of companies working in this area, I would be very, very
> interested to hear about them.
I'd suggest that you load netstumbler on a laptop or ministumbler on
a PDA and go for a drive/walk. Write a batch file to wget some web
page to a filename based on SSID and see how many copies you have at
the end of 30 miniutes. We're pretty damned close to already being
there. Admittedly, netstumbler is a little to big to go embedding it
in phones and what-not, but as phones fatten up, this will be far
less of a problem.
Also, FYI:
On one random 1km stretch of load in Japan, I stumbled across 8 access
points where 6 months ago there were only 2. Some of my predictions
about 802.11b doing nothing but raising the noise floor are starting
to come true (802.11b makes PHS look absolutely spotless; the *only*
thing 802.11b has going for it over PHS is that 1) the bandwidth it's
connected two is far better than *any* of the PHS bandwidth providers
and 2) it's "free").
Another trend I have noticed is the precentage of WEP enabled access
points seems to be declining (now that everyone *knows* it's broken,
why go through the hassel of enabling it).
Received on Fri Jun 7 00:35:37 2002