interesting development

[George Nicol]

The following link points to I, Cringely's "Pulpit" article posted 
yesterday. The article prominently mentions some outfit in Canada called 
Starnix. And I guess Evan is too modest to direct our attention that 
way. I hope he's not too modest to do a presentation for the group in 
the near future.

	The Limits of SpongeBob SquarePants
	|
	One Canadian's Wireless Neighborhood Network
	Could Someday Serve Us All
	|
	By Robert X. Cringely

	http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040930.html

from the first two paragraphs:

"Like many of us, Andrew Greig put a WiFi access point in his house so 
he could share his broadband Internet connection.  But like hardly any 
of us, Andrew uses his WiFi network for Internet, television, and 
telephone.  He cancelled his telephone line and cable TV service.  Then 
his neighbors dropped-by, saw what Andrew had done, and they cancelled 
their telephone and cable TV services, too, many of them without having 
a wired broadband connection of their own.  They get their service from 
Andrew, who added an inline amplifier and put a better antenna in his 
attic.  Now most of Andrew's neighborhood is watching digital TV with 
full PVR capability, making unmetered VoIP telephone calls, and 
downloading data at prodigious rates thanks to shared bandwidth.  Is 
this the future of home communications and entertainment?  It could be, 
five years from now, if Andrew Greig has anything to say about it."

"The advantage Andrew Greig has over most of the rest of us is that he 
works for Starnix, an international Open Source software and services 
consultancy in Toronto, Canada.  Starnix, which deals with huge 
corporate clients, has the brain power to get running what I described 
above.  And it goes much further than that simple introduction."
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