On 19-nov-03, at 1:38, Eliot Lear wrote:
I think part of the blame should go to the access points that kept
disappearing. Someone told me this was because the AP transmitters
were set to just 1 mw. If this is true, it was obviously a very big
mistake.
Oh really?! Please explain why.
Ok, maybe not so obvious then...
Under the best of circumstances dialing down the transmit power neither
helps nor hurts as both the signal we're interested in and the noise
generated by signals we're not interested in become weaker so the
signal to noise ratio remains the same. So even under ideal conditions
there is no reason to do this. However, in practice the conditions
aren't ideal, as receiver sensitivity remains the same, and AFAIK
802.11b has no mechanisms to make clients lower their signal output.
And even if it had, this presumably wouldn't apply to rogue p2p
networks.
So the net effect of lowering access point transmit levels is that
interference from clients goes way up, as a 30 mw client at 15 meters
(50 ft) is received stronger than a 1 mw AP at 3 meters (assuming the
antennas are equivalent). This means that a client sitting in one of
these artificially shrunk access point service areas can easily
interfere with the transmissions of another access point further away
using the same channel. And when a client doesn't see its access point
anymore because of some temporary problem (someone walking through the
line of sight or something) it is almost guaranteed that if there are
any rogue p2p networks, these will have a stronger signal as seen from
the client than the remaining access points.
Your words strike me as those of a volunteer for South Korea. Do I
have that about right?
I'd be happy to volunteer but I don't think I'll attend IETF59 as I've
attended three of the last four meetings which is already more than I
planned.
I'll happily take 40 kbps MPEG-4 audio only; the video is so badly
out of sync that it is unwatchable most of the time anyway.
Will you happily pay for the privilege?
So how much would this have to cost? As things are now, getting
multicast service is more expensive for me than attending the meetings
in person...