[Previous entry: "Misunderstanding all you see..."] [Next entry: "Spokane gets shafted (redux)"]

06/19/2004: "Spokane gets taken for a ride (again)"

As seen on Slashdot

Spokane International Airport is getting wireless connectivity (another link) just before the city will expand WiFi coverage to 100 blocks in Spokane downtown. It will be the largest urban Wi-Fi zone in the United States, said Bob Conley, a founder of Vivato, the company that made the antennas for both installations. Vivato's press release mentions the service will be useful not only to casual downloaders. The downtown 'Hot Zone' will improve city services by facilitating intelligent policing, quicker fire and rescue response, and will support e-government initiatives and a more productive mobile workforce.


I like the comment farther down in the /. story:


They mentioned this on the news earlier this week, said that downtown was already wired. So my wife and I went war driving downtown.

Out of 4 random intersections downtown (well within the listed coverage area), 3 had no signal and the 4th was so weak it kept coming and going.

I suppose you get what you pay for...


Um well yeah. Exactly.

Kids there is NO WAY to make this work in unlicensed spectrum. Most of what is wrong with Vivato is that Bob Conley hasn't given up on the wet dream of wireless residential broadband. Its a little-known fact that the whole reason for Mabuhay/Vivato's existance is that Bob and Skip couldn't get anything but dial-up in Liberty Lake, WA. So these two Agilent engineers decided that they could build a phased-array 802.16 device (Vivato's telephone number still contains a reference to 802.16) and unwire the masses. The VCs wouldn't fund a 802.16 company, but WiFi was hot, so Mabuhay became an 802.11 company.

But there is a big problem: 802.11 is a listen-before-send protocol. If an 802.11 device detects an 802.11 signal (or even a high-enough level of any signal on or near the channel its operating on), it will decide that the channel is in-use (the 802.11 standard calls this CCA (clear channel assesment), and not send.

Vivato's "antenna" provides more gain across a "100 degree" FOV. Now, if you will, estimate the number of APs within range (even at 1Mbps or lower, since all the radio must do is decode the preamble on the front of the packet to set CCA for the duration of the packet) of a single Vivato switch, all sending beacons every 100usec, as well as the traffic to and from any associated device.

Now add all the other 2.4GHz signals in the air, and the opportunites to transmit (even an ACK of a received frame) become quite scarce.

Its a huge problem.

And with other recently-discovered flaws in 802.11, making emergency services, or revenue-bearing services (such as notification of parking meter violations) is just dumb, and may even put lives at-risk. The recently "discovered" "flaw" in 802.11 that allows any station to set the collision window to a very large value, coupled with the Vivato range, means that an attacker could be anywhere. :-)

Bob's other problem is that he won't give up on the first product being "multi-channel", even though "multi-channel" is a 120dB problem. For the non-engineers in the audience, that translates as, "not in our lifetimes". Bob attempted to get me fired by going to Vivato's board about the product that I championed (the new 11g switch) that is only single-channel. The truth is that the first-gen product only works well in a single-channel configuration.

So Spokane is being abused by its own child. There is no way in hell that this metro-area network will work, even in the backwater of Spokane, WA. In the meantime, Bob is helping Vivato unload a product that they otherwise wasn't really selling. All with the federal government providing the funds. While its not as bad as Spokane's parking garage debacle, wherein the Cowles Family managed to fleece the city out of several million for a parking garage that can't break-even unless its 100% full, year-round, the waring Irish Conley faction appears to be out on its own cash-grab mission.

Amazingly, one of the proposed uses for all this equipment is to have all the parking meters in Spokane send notification to a central dispatch when they expire, so the meter maid can come write a parking ticket more often. The goal is that the meter maid will be at the expired meter within 60 seconds. Spokane's Parking Nazi's are legend, and the city has decided to attempt to pay-off the Parkade debt by running the surface parking enforcement as hard as possible.

See how it all ties together? Spokane buys a lot of dead-end gear from the local high-tech "great white hope" (Spokane being 90% caucasian, after all), and gets the federal government to pay for it under the guise of improv(ing) city services by facilitating intelligent policing, quicker fire and rescue response, and will support e-government iinitiatives and a more productive mobile workforce.

So there is another problem. WiFi runs in the ISM band, so to get free parking (or at least avoid the meter maids until they care to look at the flag on the meter, rather than being dispatched to the most recently-expired meter by radio), all you need is a small continous transmit device running 2.4. The Vivato switch (at least in the direction where *your* car is parked) will be unable to hear the meter's notice, and the parking attendent won't visit your car.

And yes, its 100% legal to do this. With a little bit of software running on the device, you can determine which channel the meter is using, and block that channel.

Meanwhile, Vivato is exiting Spokane as fast as it can. The executives are now ALL either located in the bay area, or are being moved there. I'm leaving too, of course.

If you're going to build one of these metro-area networks with WiFi, there is only one way: Mesh.

Jim
p.s. Liberty Lake now has cable modem service.