Yes I am well aware and I agree with mostly everything you're saying - but you miss my point - meshes are not ubiquitous at present, and Joe Blow user's cheap 802.11a/b/gg router/ap will not carry multicast data well. One other problem is with use of standard AP equipment and channels to build a mesh. I have a complex down the road which yields over 30 APs on every channel possible. The only way to mesh over that without resorting to being a door-to-door salesman ('please make use of channel x, or join our mesh') is to go to another frequency band, and allocate it only for meshed use. When one does this, the concept of community networking on the mesh is rendered useless. People have a habit of jumping to make wild claims to hype technology -- and as it always goes with those types of claims, when someone expects to see it work as advertised and it fails, the technology is immediately discounted. DTV HD runs at 23Mbits over IP multicast (188-byte frames stuffed in UDP frames with UDP/IP header, staying under MTU of 1400 bytes, creates a nice packet storm). Try carrying that on your mesh, or even just one AP -- if you can find the hardware that will actually do it without dropping packets (so far only a netgear 108Mbit Turbo router has worked for me). The only option is to demux and transcode, as right now nobody has high powered personal transmitters, and you can't assure that no-one will join the AP in 802.aab mode and squelch the datarate (as some APs do). That's unrelated somewhat, but.. Cheers Kon ... still looking for a vendor that promises DSP-assisted/software HD transcoding and actually has a SDK to offer that is not vaporware. -----Original Message----- From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Venki S. Iyer Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 1:08 AM To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [opendtv] Re: its a wifi world - Re: Re: Twang's Um, Kon, you need to take a look at the mesh activities going on around wifi. From a service provider perspective, if I am installing meshed wifi APs in each customer home, what's to stop me from using some protion of the available bandwidth for multicast ("broadcast") purposes? Sure, I'd need the right legalese within my customer contracts, etc, but that's all (apart from actually getting content to re-broadcast). The UDP/TCP issue is a dead herring - there's probably 1/2 dozen ways of getting around TCP's greedy behavior. Meshed environments and associating applications with virtual IP addresses rather than the IP of a physical interface let you roam across APs without TCP connections being dropped. Meshed environments allow you to extend the "service radius" of a wifi in a symmetric manner (OK, symmetric if it is a full mesh, not just a mesh between the infrastructure elements - APs, in this case). Finally, however, Craig probably was "stealing service" by using his neighbor's WiFi. Cheers, -Venki ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.