OT: 802.11b or Bluetooth access points in T.O.?

Austin aacton-B71PBEe7S7Y at public.gmane.org
Tue Nov 2 14:36:31 UTC 2004


On Tue, 2004-11-02 at 09:20 -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> What excactly is the range of bluetooth?  6 feet?

My "class 1" dongle *says* "up to 330 feet (100 meters)".
I assume most cell phones, PDAs, and such are class 2 or 3, which have
significantly less range.

It also *says* "up to 723 kbps".  I've never clocked it, but
transferring files from machine to machine is REALLY slow.

> What would a
> bluetooth hotspot look like?  That is not what bluetooth is designed
> for.

In typical Bluetooth style, I have seen much hoopla in the press about
the potential for hotspots, but I've yet to see one in practice.

It's hard to beat 802.11 for simplicity, practicality, and speed.

And back to the original question, while there are very few official
free wifi hotspots, if you just need to check your mail in a pinch or
something, you can find completely open networks almost anywhere
downtown.  I walked down Roncesvalles the other day, and there were open
nets almost the entire length of the street.  I mean fully open:
broadcast on, no encryption, no authentication, dhcp available, gateway
available.  If you're beaming that out into the street, you'd have a
hard time convincing a court that you forbade anybody else to use it.
And with Rogers and Bell both offering nearly unlimited bandwidth (in
most people's terms) I don't feel bad checking me email or reading
Slashdot from a park bench.  (Searching for nets without broadcast or
cracking wep: that's a whole different, and not-so-innocent issue.)

Austin

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