Ho John Lee’s Weblog

An interesting speculative article by Om Malik in the upcoming issue of Business 2.0:

What if Google (GOOG) wanted to give Wi-Fi access to everyone in America? And what if it had technology capable of targeting advertising to a user’s precise location? The gatekeeper of the world’s information could become one of the globe’s biggest Internet providers and one of its most powerful ad sellers, basically supplanting telecoms in one fell swoop. Sounds crazy, but how might Google go about it?

First it would build a national broadband network — let’s call it the GoogleNet

The article goes on to claim that Google has already been purchasing dark fiber from distressed telecoms such as AboveNet, and points out that the bandwidth-intensive services (print, video, music, voice) that lie in Google’s future make it increasingly attractive to consider becoming a network itself, both for control and to avoid transit fees by peering directly to end user ISPs.

I stopped by the BlackDog booth at Linux World today, initially drawn in by the spectacle of Tux the Linux Penguin riding on BlackDog’s mechanical bull. Not something you see every day.

The whole scene at the BlackDog booth had sort of a early dot-com boom circa 1996 feel to it. Here’s a company I’ve never heard of, with a relatively huge booth and lots of happy staffers recruiting riders for the mechanical bull, but almost no one bothering to mention what they were actually selling, other than large posters announcing “The World’s First Linux Server that will take You for a walk”. It took me a bit of effort to find a person who could explain what they were selling.

via Joi Ito’s Web:

David Beckemeyer writes about an R&D activity at Earthlink which has implemented dual IPv4 / IPv6 access on modified firmware for a Linksys WRT54G wireless home gateway router.

The Linksys WRT54G is inexpensive, widely used, and is similar to many other home gateways providing NAT routing and wireless access. (It’s also popular as a platform hacking wireless router code, as it runs Linux internally). After loading the modified firmware, the router still provides IPv4 NAT functionality, but in addition provides a publicly routable /64 IPv6 network, and can directly route to other public IPv6 networks via the experimental Earthlink IPv6 routing service. You do not need to be an Earthlink customer to use the free service.

Catching up on Abhishek Puri’s Broadband Blog, found this post referencing an old (1998) paper on setting up private ISPs in India.

Also another post regarding planned rate reductions on leased lines.

One of the long term challenges for the Kuppam i-Community program I’m working with is to make their broadband services economically sustainable, even though it serves a low-income, rural commmunity in India. While the program is making good use of wireless technology to bring down the costs of intra-regional connectivity, the cost of external internet connectivity has remained high, and has been dominated by leased line expense.

It remains to be seen whether the Kuppam program will be able to find a service provider to partner with in the region or whether it will need to form an ISP-like entity to provision and operate the network on behalf of the other community programs that are making use of the service. There have been numerous statements of intent by operators planning to provide wider access to broadband network service in Andhra Pradesh, although so far none are actually available.

I have liked the Sipura products since they first came out a few years ago. The SPA products are widely used by VoIP service providers (Vonage, etc) for their feature set, flexibility, and low cost. We have been testing out Sipura adapters on the Kuppam network for the past few months, with good results, and I just received a new SPA-3000 the other day which I haven’t gotten around to setting up for use with Asterisk yet.

Yesterday Cisco announced they will also acquire Sipura, which will be merged into Linksys.

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 26, 2005 - Cisco Systems® today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Sipura Technology, Inc. This represents Cisco’s first acquisition for its Linksys division, the leading provider of wireless and networking hardware for home, Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) and small business environments. Sipura is a leader in consumer voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology and is a key technology provider for Linksys’ current line of VoIP networking devices. In addition to Sipura’s valuable technology and customer relationships, their experienced team with extensive VoIP expertise will help build a foundation for Linksys’ internal research and development capabilities in voice, video and other markets.

One of the nuisances of installing wireless access points, VOIP phones, and other small networked devices, is the need for power in the vicinity of the device. This can be a major challenge, if you’re building a small wireless ISP using an access point on an antenna mast, which is why wireless user groups have come up with homebrew POE hacks. In the past, power-over-ethernet support has been for relatively expensive equipment geared toward commercial, large-scale installation, such as rolling out a building full of Cisco 7940 IP phones.

There are a some cheap power-over-ethernet adapters available now from Linksys and D-Link:

D-Link DWL-P200 (5V or 12V, list price $39.00)
Linksys WAPPOE (5V only, list price $39.99)
Linksys WAPPOE12 (12V only, list price $49.99)

Forwarded this morning from Andy Fitzhugh:

WiFi Wok and the Chinese cookware 2.4GHz repeaters (at Engadget).

As some of the comments point out, earlier versions of this appeared on Slashdot sometime last year, but the pictures with overlaid captions accompanying this writeup are quite nice.

Perhaps we can make some of these to go with the collection of coffee can antennas for the Kuppam wireless program, not sure how widely available woks or similar shaped metal pans are in India.

Not a new electronica group, but an ongoing project by New Zealander Stan Swan to make some seriously DIY WiFi repeaters out of — what else? — Chinese cookware, among other kitchen and household gadgets. Turns out cheap cooking scoops make great 2.4GHz parabolic mesh dishes. Who knew? We don’t see too many WiFi extenders with bamboo handles in the States — surely a missed opportunity for the wireless adapter market.

Advertised in EETimes, December 20/27, 2004
www.rabbitethernetize.com

Includes development board with RCM3720, 512K flash, 256K SRAM, 1MB Serial Flash, 33 digital I/O, full version of development software, TCP/IP stack, sample programs, AC adapter

Promotional price $99, normally $199.

Could be handy for building ethernet devices of various sorts.