[Techtalk] wireless home network without router

[Miriam English]

Hi Alina,

Alina Friedrichsen wrote:

>> ...the future of peer-to-peer wireless. It looks like 2010 
>> might be the year for some really great things.
> 
> What do you mean?

"Wi-Fi Direct" which is really peer-to-peer wireless communication. The 
Wi-Fi Alliance (which seems to be a big industry cooperative) is getting 
peer-to-peer wireless into many commercial handheld computers and mobile 
phones. Soon anything might able to quickly and easily communicate with 
anything else without wires.
http://www.wi-fi.org/news_articles.php?f=media_news&news_id=909

It doesn't seem to include what I'd like to see, where anybody's message 
can hop from handheld to handheld across a wide area to its destination, 
but that might be the next step if enough people want it.


> For example you can compile, install and configure the olsrd. It needs to be installed on all computers respectively nodes. I can help you, if you want.
> 
> http://www.olsr.org/

I have only one wireless device so far, but out here in the Australian 
countryside (not the outback, but still sparsely populated) I have 
become interested in finding out how to share wireless communication 
among people. The big companies charge high prices for really bad 
service, with many places unable to reliably connect to the centralised 
systems. A mesh network would work really well out here... if I can work 
out how to put it together, and if I can get sufficient range -- people 
are often separated by distance and terrain. For example I can see only 
two houses from here, and they are on the other side of the wide valley 
I live in. But one house might be able to see other houses further up 
the valley in one direction and the other might see another house down 
the valley in the other direction. If we could hop signals home to home 
we might be able to connect hundreds of people who are otherwise almost 
isolated. I use a satellite connection to get access to the internet, 
but this is not suitable for everyone because of the cost, hilly 
terrain, and trees blocking line-of-sight to the geostationary satellite.

Very interesting topic. Thank you for your offer. I might contact you in 
the future if I have problems. It may be some months away though, as I 
have some other things taking up most of my time at the moment, like 
building a free (except for cheap materials) way to generate electricity 
from the sun day and *night*! :)

Best wishes,

	- Miriam

-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Website: http://miriam-english.org
Blog: http://miriam_e.livejournal.com