If you're a HAM as are your friends, you're home free. However, the
necessity to approve any RF devices in any civilized surroundings
(frequency space is a valuable resource) and associated costs make
this project impossible in Germany. Can any Europeans comment?
> radio modem plans with a view towards building a bundle of them
> with about a dozen of my friends, and setting up a city-wide WAN.
Sounds like a good idea, what does the local legislation say? (In
Germany, I'm not sure even line-of-sight laser diode/LED links are legal),
heck, probably just operating boosted IrDA across the street will earn
you a hefty penalty (not that it's detectable, unless somebody rats on
you).
> The next step is to run this WAN into an internet feed. While
> having a high-speed link would be nice, I'm more interested in a
> permanent connection than a fast dial-up link. There are some
Ditto here. A permanent, symmetric ISDN equivalent is currently enough
for me.
> interestingly fast designs floating around, so hopefully I'll be
> able to implement a 100k+ link. I'm in Melbourne, Australia,
Are you considering a satellite ISP?
> fwiw.
[...]
> [ Linux box as router ]
> I wonder how much use the corel NC will be for this purpose? This
I don't know, the box is not very cheap. A salvaged i386/i486 board
with a single-boot/root floppy solution and a few NICs is difficult to
beat, pricewise. You probably can use the NetWinder's 1 MByte flash,
and take the minimal 16 MByte box for router, also, the IrDA
functionality is not bad. If diskless, it's very low power, so
you could run it off battery-buffered photovoltaics (which is
ideal in Oz). But the 10/100 MBit ports is not much for a router,
and the box is not _fantastically_ cheap.
> is basically my plan, I'd like to link up my neighbours, and link
> these subnets with my friends' subnets. Economies of scale are
> quite useful in this regard, and if I'll I'm providing is access
> to the net it's a hell of a lot less hassle than running an ISP.
Yup.
> > [robots ; transhumantech@ ]
> I've subscribed to this since it started, as far as I know. What
> do you mean by the "effort"?
Well, it is an effort to contribute ;) Apart from that, there were
supposed to be several contributers, depth-dragging the net for
information filtering/digesting in the process. Otoh, the list as is
already pretty noisy due to yours truly's lack of focus...
> Dwayne