I’ve been doing a lot of talking with people, but I’ll attempt to get thing documented. It’s been very hard to check mail and update the blog. Internet access at the apartment we are staying in is non-existent, so it has been the quiet place where I can formulate thoughts to paper.
Friday, I spent most of my time in the wireless4development track. There was a lot of talk about 802.11 basics, getting people up to speed with both technology and the wiki, some WiMax overview, meet and greet, etc. I did a impromptu show and tell of the metrix boxes, and everyone seemed excited about getting linux on the rooftop and pole.
The Mayor of djursland officially kicked off the festivities, and there was a segment on the national news about the conference.
There are 36,000 households in the djursland. There are 1700 on the wireless network. Their organization is funded with government money because it is a simple area, relying on tourism and farming. They make their own antennas and assemble all the equipment themselves, and they have quite a workshop. The network is made mostly of simple access point devices so they have gotten the cost down to 2000 kroeners a node (I think it roughly translates to about 135 euro). Equipment is owned by the djursland.net and loaned to the users. Access to Internet is provided for 100 kroeners a month ($30 Euro). To get DSL would cost about four times the cost, and is not available in most areas. With this home built equipment, they have built 126 cells that have a range of about 1.5km a piece.
Plans for the near future include 802.11a, and to do some node setup as part of the coming workweek.
Saturday, I have been involved in many ad-hoc breakouts as well as doing the sit-down sessions. Like most conferences, all the really interesting ideas percolate while free-forming.
There was a big discussion on the Pico Peering Agreement, and most people are happy with the ideas that it represents as a declaration, but it was mostly agreed that it should not be considered a ‘contract’. One task discussed is to implement the peering agreement in a technical way, so you could automatically determine if another node met your peering criteria and then set up peering without operator intervention. Discussions on service limitations as well as port blocking brought this to something of a rathole status since the tools to determine best route on a port-by-port level would be extremely difficult in a technical sense. My input was of course, that most local peering takes place on a handshake “don’t be a jerk” sort of a greement, and although formalizing is nice, and may be necessary in the future, that it is rarely needed at this time.
Out of the scheduled talks, I was very interested in what Julian Priest and others on his panel had to say about their projects. The state of wireless london has changed dramatically in the past four years, and I will write about this much more in the coming posts, as it has been the case in most densely populated metro areas.
Another speaker, Dr. Arun Mehta had two things that I think are particularly interesting, and I just had to pass along.
One, is that he just had learned the danish word Boevl, which translated means: - I have a problem that I have to fix myself
And also, that of all the countries, India probably has the worst regulation ever… any device transmitting more than 1mW needs a license.”
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