Once 802.11b/Wi-Fi became affordable (and even before...), experimenters began hacking away at Wi-Fi gear to extend range and otherwise do things that the vendors didn't intend for the equipment to do. One branch of that sort of experimentation trended towards "professional" such as the city-wide Wi-Fi system in Aspen, chronicled in a front-page Wall Street Journal article as using "surplus Russian Army antennas".
But one of today's entries in the excellent (a daily must read!) BoingBoing.net weblog really tickled me - an incredibly inexpensive long range Wi-Fi node made from a USB Wi-Fi adapter... and a "Chinese cooking strainer" as a reflector.
This is ingenious wireless experimentation at its finest, and most pervasive; handily eclipsing the "professionals" and even Amateur Radio Operators who've just begun dabbling with Wi-Fi equipment. The FCC has long known it's "game over" for any effective control of "unauthorized modifications" for Wi-Fi and other license-exempt wireless devices. At a conference I had the chance to ask a high-ranking FCC official "just what are they thinking?" when they don't offer at least a mild rebuke to people that are openly flouting FCC regulations? (An example was Jim Selbi, the instigator behind Aspen's city-wide Wi-Fi coverage who was openly quoted in the aforementioned WSJ article.)
The FCC official's response to my question was "We'll enforce if we have to... but right now no one is complaining!" Apparently the FCC wasn't predisposed to preemptive enforcement in such matters, and now it is, simply, way too late to begin enforcing regulations regarding the use of license-exempt systems. Wi-Fi has hit the "CB Radio Craze" stage of rabid adoption, use, abuse, and experimentation, and it's "anything goes" as the New Zealand "Chinese Strainer" group so ably illustrates.
Steve Stroh
Copyright (c) 2004 by Steve Stroh. This article originally appeared on Corante / Broadband Wireless Internet Access.
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