[LINK] Senator Coonan on 7:30 Report

[Adam Todd]

At 11:10 AM 19/06/2007, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
>Jan Whitaker wrote:
>>At 12:36 AM 19/06/2007, Saliya Wimalaratne wrote:
>>>Another thing that happens with increasing distance is the
>>>necessity of adjusting timing to suit longer distances -
>>>this pretty much doesn't happen with consumer-level kit and isn't
>>>part of the standard(s) as far as I'm aware.
>>
>>Saliya, how can the guy from Optus stand up in front of a camera 
>>and say such stupid things about the reasonable use of this 'new' 
>>technology for remote locations? Seems to me that if there are dead 
>>spots for mobiles because of lack of towers, there will be dead 
>>spots for wireless access. Or are they going to pay for high speed 
>>satellite data streams? Has anyone seen the detail of this 'new' 'plan' (sic)?
>Jan first: a point to point link is handled differently from a 
>mobile base station. If you can get (near) line of sight with WiMax, 
>you can get a connection; and yes, you may well need to put the 
>customer antenna high on a pole. I don't doubt reasonable 
>expectation of 20km, but I do doubt "20 km at high speed for many 
>users at low price".

Maybe they intend using each customer point as a relay/switch point?

Then the as the signal leaves Adelaide, it bounces to Customer 1 who 
takes their packets and onroutes the rest of the traffic to the next 
relay point.

It's what I've done in the past.  I use to coordinate a VZ300 network 
of computers around Sydney and the Mountains, I think we got as far 
as Newcastle in full duplex.

The Transmit was on one UHF channel and the RX was on another 
channel.  Nailed up and running 24 x 7.  (Yeah I know supposedly 
norti, but there weren't many people on the UHF band back then.)

We also use to use 27 MHz using a low channel and a high channel for 
the same purpose to get longer, but slower speed connections.  I 
recall that for the 27 Mhz hops we used the VZ300's native Tape 
Input/output jacks plugged into the headphone and mic of the AM 
Transmitter.  Careful adjustment of the volume control gave great 
results.  300 BPS :)  UHF was obviously a lot cleaner and we were 
able to get higher speeds.  I think we got around 4800 bps from memory.

I recall at one stage we were trying to transmit over Side Band, but 
the nature of sideband wasn't going to let that work :)  We tried hard though!

It's what Amateur radio operators use to do with packet switched 
networks in the past.

Anyway, that's how I'd be deploying such a network.  Saves massively 
on cost, although there are single point of failure, this applies in 
any network situation anyway, at least you'd know exactly where the 
failure is and wont' have to track it down.

And as a "box on the desk" solution, you could send a whole kit to a 
remote location by air drop to have it replaced by the residents 
without any difficulty at all.