San Francisco Wireless Broadband

11/25/2002
I suppose it's time for an update to this page. The access point at my house is still up, but I don't really keep tabs on it, so I'm not sure how many people (if any) connect to it. Just a DSL line behind it.

Over the summer and into the fall, I talked with many people about the possibility of setting up various commercial or co-op wireless Internet access providers, but by and large, the motivation seemed to be lacking.

A fixed wireless service provider would be fairly easy to set up, however, most consumers have doubts about the reliability of wireless service and have no compelling reason to choose it over cable or DSL. Fixed wireless could be profitable in areas where other broadband services are not available, but don't expect a windfall.

Mobile wireless service would probably generate more demand and you could charge more for it, but truly ubiquitous coverage would require a huge infrastructure build and more capital than even large corporations can come up with. I think Ricochet/Metricom proved a valuable point.

Companies like Boingo and Joltage have an interesting concept -- I'm curious to see where that goes. The only problem is, I don't want to have to pay for a Joltage account, a Boingo account and accounts with 200 other providers who are also piggybacking on this idea. I want to pay once for one account and have it work wherever service is available.

That said, I've moved on from wireless to other endeavors. Look for my upcoming article on the high-altitude weather balloon that I built and launched.

6/25/2002
The 3.5 mile link to my employer is no longer up since I no longer work there. I do have DSL installed now, so SFWBB node 1 is still available, just without as much bandwidth behind it. I expect that one or two other SFWBB nodes will be coming on-line shortly. For now they will have their own, separate connections to the Internet, but we will be discussing how to acheive a mesh network so that one node's wired link can serve as a backup for another node.

Know anyone looking for a really good network engineer? Here's my resume.

6/11/2002
The sector antenna for SFWBB node 1 is horizontally polarized. This is an important piece of information if you're trying to connect, because your antenna will need to be horizontally polarized as well or you will get virtually no signal. After I realized this, I successfully connected from ~1.75 miles away on the roof of my company's corporate offices at 12th & Market using a Lucent card in my laptop with one of my homebrew ravioli can antennas.

6/10/2002
SFWBB node 1 is now operational. I've got a 14 dBi sector antenna mounted on my roof connected to a Linksys WAP11 in a waterproof enclosure. The antenna has a 95 degree beamwidth and covers a pie-slice-shaped area. One side of the "slice" extends from Twin Peaks through Corona Heights, Duboce Triangle, Lower Haight and down Van Ness toward the bay. The other side of the "slice" extends from Twin Peaks, towards Dolores Park, Mission, south of Potrero Hill and off toward Hunters Point. Anywhere in between these two "lines" should be within the coverage area, assuming line-of-sight is available.

If you're planning to connect, I just request that you send me the hardware MAC address of the device you'll be connecting with so I know who you are. Here's the info you'll need:

Location: N37.75758 W122.44406 elev: ~500 ft. AMSL
Antenna polarity: horizontal
SSID: SFWBB
IP/DNS: provided via DHCP

I'm still hoping to get some other nodes up and running. If you have line-of- sight to me and also to other parts of the city I cannot see, please get in touch to discuss setting up another node.

5/31/2002
Greetings! Thanks for coming to check out this site. If you're looking for the original story of how I set up a 3.5 mile 802.11b link to my house, it's been moved here.

The story appeared on Slashdot on the evening of May 29, 2002. I hardly expected Slashdot to accept it when I submitted it. It also propagated to several other sites, including DSLReports.com. My vpizza.org server was slammed pretty hard starting at about 21:00 PDT on May 29 when the story hit Slashdot and stayed that way through most of the 30th as well.

To date, I've received more than 100 e-mails in response to the story. Some of them were "Right on!" general encouragement e-mails, some were asking specific questions about various 802.11b set-ups, but many were from local folks who are also interested in getting a community broadband network off the ground.

In response to the level of interest that the story has generated, I've done two things:

1) I've created a mailing list specifically for the discussion of planning and constructing a wireless broadband network in San Francisco and the greater bay area. I'd like to see this go beyond just one access site at my house covering just the northeast corner of San Francisco. It's become obvious that a place is needed to discuss that effort if it's going to proceed any further. An info page and subscription form for the mailing list can be found at http://lists.vpizza.org/mailman/listinfo/sfwbb. I will try to make some initial posts to get the discussion moving.

2) I've ordered a 12 dBi sector antenna and a 9 dBi omni antenna which will be connected to another Linksys WAP11 at my house. The sector antenna has a 95 degree beam width, which should be just about right to cover the area of the view from my house. The omni will provide good coverage for nearby folks who are behind me and higher on the hill. This should hopefully be enough to get "Node 1" going at my house and allow some people to actually start using the bandwidth. Hopefully all of the gear will arrive mid next week.

Thanks again for all your support and interest! I hope to be hearing from many of you soon on the mailing list.

-j
jmeehan (a t) vpizza (d o t) org


Updated: 14:13 PST 2002/11/25