Building Wireless

Integrating Wireless Technologies Wireless access benefits business, employers, employees and consumers. Wireless technology improves processes by embracing new technologies. For employers and employees, wireless access provides the ability to communicate, access corporate databases, manage administrative tasks and enhance customer relations. ... [full story]

The Role of 802.11b in Better Living Through Telecommunications At about 1920, half the American population either lived on farms or in farming communities. Today that figure is less than 5 percent. What happened over the last 80 years? Obviously, ... [full story]

Few engineering books attempt to answer the big "so what?" of a technology. What is the social impact of 802.11 on society? The following sections point to a few social ills that can be cured by better living through telecommunications. ... [full story]

Potential Results of Ubiquitous Wireless Broadband Internet Service What would be the benefits to society of ubiquitous wireless broadband service? The possibilities are limited only by the imagination. The following pages delve into looking at where 802.11 could benefit government ... [full story]

Regulatory Environment for 802.11 Finally, another objecting view toward 802.11 is the fact that it uses unlicensed spectrum, which means any other competing service or appliance can introduce interference in the network, resulting in poor service to the end user. ... [full story]

Economics of 802.11 Money makes the world go around. 802.11 offers a number of economic advantages over wired networks. In enterprise networks where 802.11 is only marginally cheaper to deploy than wired networks, 802.11 excels over wired network technology in ... [full story]

Voice over 802.11 (Vo802.11) Segueing from QoS is the concept of routing voice traffic over 802.11 networks. The focus on QoS makes routing voice over 802.11 possible. Here is another performance parameter where 802.11 must match the capabilities of the ... [full story]

QoS on 802.11 Networks 802.11 networks are potentially capable of delivering QoS comparable to the PSTN. It should be noted that the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) have been losing phone lines to cell phone service providers at an alarming ... [full story]

Security Fixes for 802.11 Another major objection to 802.11 is the misperception that it is inherently insecure. 802.11 contains a number of security mechanisms; the most prominent is Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). Any network security plan must use an equation ... [full story]

Range as Limitation One of the first tasks of this book has been to overcome the misperception that 802.11 is limited in range to approximately 100 meters. The range of 802.11 is a function of power and antenna technology. In ... [full story]

Congressional Moves Toward Spectrum Policy Reform Contrary to the speculation that legislators would either not understand the potential contained in 802.11 technology or worse, seek to stifle its innovation for some unknown political objective, some members of Congress want to ... [full story]

Public Interest-The Solution The FCC should develop policies that avoid interference rules that are barriers to entry, that assume a particular proponent's business model or technology, and that take the place of marketplace or technical solutions. Such a policy must ... [full story]

Public Interest-The Problem The fourth and final element of traditional spectrum policy is the public interest standard. The phrase "public interest, convenience, or necessity" was a part of the Radio Act of 1927 and likely came from other utility regulation ... [full story]

Government Command and Control of the Spectrum - The Solution Historically, the Commission has had limited flexibility via command and control regulatory restrictions on which services licensees could provide and who could provide them. Any spectrum users who wanted to ... [full story]

Government Command and Control-The Problem The theory back in the 1930s was that only the government could be trusted to manage this scarce resource and ensure that no one got too much of it. Unfortunately, spectrum policy is still predominantly ... [full story]

Spectrum Scarcity-The Solution While analyzing the current use of spectrum, the Task Force took a unique approach, looking for the first time at the entire spectrum, not just one band at a time. This review prompted a major insight-a substantial ... [full story]

Spectrum Scarcity-The Problem Much of the Commission's spectrum policy was driven by the assumption that there is never enough for those who want it. Under this view, spectrum is so scarce that government forces rather than market forces must determine ... [full story]

Interference-The Solution The recommendation of the Interference Protection Working Group of the FCC's Spectrum Policy Task Force was that FCC should consider using the interference temperature metric as a means of quantifying and managing interference. As introduced in this report, ... [full story]

Interference-The Problem Since 1927, interference protection has always been at the core of federal regulators' spectrum mission. The Radio Act of 1927 empowered the Federal Radio Commission to address interference concerns. Although interference protection remains essential to the mission, interference ... [full story]

The FCC New Spectrum Policy The American spectrum management regime is approximately 90 years old. In the opinion of FCC Chairman Michael Powell, it needs to be reexamined and taken in a new direction. Historically, four core assumptions have formed ... [full story]

Interference Of course, interference is typically the state of the signal you are interested in while it is being destructively overpowered by a signal you are not interested in. The FCC provides a specific definition of harmful interference in Part ... [full story]

Power Limits Ideally, a well-engineered path has just the amount of power required to get from point A to point B with good reliability. Good engineering limits the signal to only the area being served. This has the effect of ... [full story]

Regulatory Aspects of 802.11 An objection often raised about 802.11 applications is that because the spectrum used by 802.11 (2.4 GHz for 802.11b and 5.8 GHz for 802.11a) is unlicensed, it will inevitably become overused (called tragedy of the commons) ... [full story]

Broadband Access and Telephone Services A previous chapter outlined the technical aspects of routing voice over 802.11. What are the economics of replacing dial tone provided by the telephone company with voice over 802.11? As Vo802.11 is VoIP using 802.11 ... [full story]

Consumer Benefits The most straightforward estimate of the value of the enhanced availability of broadband derives from information on consumer subscriptions to broadband services. Currently, no more than 8 percent of households subscribe to a broadband service; only slightly more ... [full story]

Producer Benefits One of the reasons many IP backbone carriers went bankrupt is that they could not deliver bandwidth to a broad market. The bottleneck to the last mile remains the access controlled largely by telephone companies with their ubiquitous ... [full story]

The Economic Benefits of Ubiquitous Broadband with Public Networks A wave of opportunity for wireless broadband applications is in the making. Most of it lies in the form of broadband deployment. In their April 2001 white paper "The $500 Billion ... [full story]

WISP ROI for Wireless Access via 802.11 A strong motivation for the deployment of 802.11 access could come from incumbent ISPs. Most ISPs have long been dependent on cooperation from incumbent telephone companies to deliver their services to their subscribers. ... [full story]

WISP ROI for Wireless Access via 802.11 A strong motivation for the deployment of 802.11 access could come from incumbent ISPs. Most ISPs have long been dependent on cooperation from incumbent telephone companies to deliver their services to their subscribers. ... [full story]

Making the Private Network Public-Layering If public access hot spots can be established by enabling existing and proposed enterprise WLANs to deliver public Wi-Fi coverage, the market would be much closer to making wireless Wi-Fi availability ubiquitous. This approach is ... [full story]

Reciprocal Compensation-Build It and They Will Pay You One critical building block for the propagation of 802.11 is reciprocal compensation. Wi-Fi users must be able to access wireless networks wherever possible in order for this technology to take hold. One ... [full story]

Turnkey Operators A promising approach to spreading the coverage of 802.11 is the turnkey of 802.11 services via firms that provide local operators with back-office services to overcome the chief barrier to entry for this marketcustomer service and network administration. ... [full story]