General Meeting
Full house again! 80 people were at the meeting tonight. Some were watching the proceedings out in the front room via the live video feed over the wireless LAN. Up to 30 people were using the wi-LAN at once! We repositioned the Wi-LAN gear and used the Linksys WSB24 booster to give full coverage throughout the restaurant. Link quality: Excellent!
Frank Keeney & Mike Outmesguine started the meeting. Mike introduced us to the new stickers - chewing through about half of the stock in one night! There was a lot of interest in stickers and T-shirts. We’ll definitely make something available over the Internet and at the meetings.
Frank talked about the live streaming video setup and the Mitsumi Wavit11 product. He used the Wavit11 during the meeting to send the video up to the internet over the wi-LAN. Remember, it’s tiny (about the size of a deck of cards,) and everything about it is tiny - except its features.
Fran McGrath then stepped up to show us how ColorBroadband set up the Long Beach HotZone. Great presentation and a lot of Q&A on how it works, how they did it, how they got permission, and where it’s going from here - Long Beach Airport, of course!
Bao C. Ha brought out the OpenBrick computer. This thing is very nice, and low-cost! This sparked a lot of questions and Bao passed one around for everyone to ogle. Watch the video and check out the digipix for a closer look.
Wow! Lance from WilTel announced something spectacular for the wireless community in North America. I have to clear what I can say here, but watch the video to get it first-hand. In the meantime, click here to see WilTel’s map. [update will be posted here and on the discussion list when available.]
Jack Unger made an announcement that his book, Building License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks, will be in stores March 11th!
We stopped the meeting, broke into groups, and some of us lingered in the parking lot until midnight.
Presentation One:
- Fran McGrath of Colorbroadband
- www.colorbroadband.com - built the recent wireless HotZone in Long Beach, CA
- Colorband Inc. is an international provider of wireless “broadcast fiber” communication and other digital services. Colorband has engineered the highest capacity microwave backbone network in Southern California. This unique network architecture enables Colorband to provide scalable franchise business solutions, serving subscribers from multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
- Some topics that will be covered:
Color Broadband Inc.
Overview on Wireless
Wireless in Long Beach www.longbeachportals.com Wireless Hot Zone project.
Presentation Two:
- Bao C. Ha of Hacom
- www.hacom.net - sells small low-cost computers
- OpenBrick is a new kind of low-cost fan-less small computer targeted the Open-Source/Free Software community, mainly Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. It is popular in Europe and attracted a large follow of engineers, hackers, students, researchers, small Open-Source companies, and ISPs to implement ideas of appliances in areas of WiFi, broadband networks, communications, multimedia, and IP telephony.
- Checkout the OpenBrick here.
Other Topics:
- Hardware Review and Live Demonstration of the Mitsumi Wavit11 802.11b Access Point / Client device all-in-one! [PDF File]
- NoCat summary and a little on the L.A. Blogosphere
Special Thanks to the following:
- LPBN for providing video archive and live streaming
- Pasadena IHOP and their big meeting room
Pictures:
- Neato Ham radio digipix available here (look for 2/27/2003)
- More digipix coming soon
Where the elite meet to eat during the live video feed.