mesh networking
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London to become Europe's largest WiFi hotspot
As if blanketing the rim of the River Thames with WiFi wasn't good enough to get us out of the office and into the park, the Evening Standard is reporting that the whole city of London will soon becomes "Europe's biggest wireless internet hotspot." As expected, some 130 base stations will be arranged in a sophisticated mesh networking setup, which will span "the entire Square Mile," subsequently giving about 350,000 employees in the area access to unadulterated wireless internet. Wireless gurus from The Cloud are working in conjunction with city officials to tie off the final steps, and while initial coverage areas will dwarf Soho and Barbican City, the map above shows just how broad the service could get. Unfortunately, this edition of citywide WiFi will not come gratis, as users who plan to take advantage will be kindly asked to fork over about £11 ($22) a month for access.[Via Inquirer]
Autonomous robotic fleas could create distributed sensor network
We've seen a fair bit of mesh networking approaches lately, and thanks to a unusual project going on at the University of California, Berkeley, the next great ad hoc network could be started by a horde of bugs. Sarah Bergbreiter has developed an "autonomous robotic flea has been developed that is capable of jumping nearly 30 times its height," thanks to what could possibly be hailed as the "world's smallest rubber band." Interestingly, the creator hopes that the minuscule bugs could eventually be used to "create networks of distributed sensors for detecting chemicals or for military-surveillance purposes." The Smart Dust initiative could eventually be expanded to grow wings, but for now the solar-powered bugger will stick to hoppin' via a "microcontroller to govern its behavior and a series of micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) motors on a silicon substrate."[Via BoingBoing]
River Thames' banks now WiFi-enabled via mesh networking
This one is most definitely for the kid in all of us. C'mon, at age seven, visiting the River Thames in central London is probably on the top ten most unexciting ways to spend a crucial week of summer vacation, but if you could snag a WiFi signal whilst the 'rents oohed and ahhed at all the lovely sights, now we're talking. Thanks to the Thames Online mesh networking system, bored children and internet addicts alike can disregard the beauty around them and focus more on things that truly matter, as the service stretches 22-kilometers (about 12.5-miles) along the banks from Millbank near the Houses of Parliament to the Millennium Dome in Greenwich. The system utilizes equipment from Proxim Wireless -- namely the company's 100 ORiNOCO AP-4000MR mesh access points -- and adding CCTV video surveillance cams, VoIP channels, and GPS capabilities are all in the cards. Sadly, this turnkey service is far from gratis, as users will be forced to hand over £2.95 ($5.79) for one hour, £5.95 ($11.68) for a day, £7.95 ($15.61) for a week, or £9.95 ($19.53) for a month of quasi-unlimited service.[Via WiFi-Planet]
SEEMesh and WiMA come together on 802.11s mesh networking
In a move all but totally shocking to these jaded writers, two wireless standard groups, SEEMesh (backed by Intel, Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo and TI) and the Wi-Mesh Alliance (backed by Nortel, Philips, and Thomson, among others) have actually come together in peace and love to combine their proposals for the IEEE 802.11s mesh networking standard into one single draft. Now, we all know how wack tech forums can delay standards ratifications -- or sometimes circumvent the process from occurring entirely -- which is why it's so nice that these guys took 802.11n's lead, kissed, made up, and came together to put the technology before the royalties. Oh, so what exactly is the 802.11s mesh networking standard do, you ask? It's a few things to a lot of companies, but it'll first be a boon to metropolitan WiFi networks, so base-stations will have a standard method of communications both to nodes (802.11a/b/g) and to each other (802.11s) when moving around data. Of course, that doesn't help cities that have already rolled out WiFi, but pre-S gear getting sold to cities rolling out in the near future could probably be expected to cut costs and increase speed to nodes.
