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Re: Tuesday, January 8, 2002
There are a couple of conditions that this current 802.11b Internet Beta on PERL Whirl must satisfy in order for wireless Internet access to be offered at every Geek Cruise (and in the future, every MOUStech.NET cruise). The first condition is that the 802.11b services work within the difficult environment of 55,000 gross metric tons of steel, which has all types of signal problems. (I have been doing wireless LAN site surveys on Royal Caribbean ships, ranging from 78,000 to 140,000 gross metric tons, over the past two years. The Titanic was around 55,000 gmt.) This includes having the signal go from the Internet Cafe on one deck down to another deck below, to three seminar rooms (Wajang, Hudson, Half Moon). This takes three signal hops, the industry limit. The wireless system also has to be cost effective, and set up and broken down for just that cruise (ad hoc networking comes to mind). Nothing can remain on the ship, nor interfer with saftey at sea regulations, so no CAT5 cables in public areas to create an ethernet backbone. (Again, we can only frequency hop from three access points before the signal diminishes. That is all we were permitted to test on LINUX Lunacy: just the placement of access points, not hooking up to the Internet, which almost killed the project out of the gate.) Another consideration is the cost of service delivery. Digital Seas is not giving away their services, and like all services at sea, there is a big fee for this many attendees. This fee is somewhat higher than I would expect, maybe because we are the first, but under the conditions of being at sea, it may be understandable. Finally, even if we get 11 mbps out of the third access point, after the signal has jumped from one deck to the next, the transmission rate from the Internet Cafe back to land based services may be taxed by power user geeks. There are a number of variables that need to be tested over a number of Geek Cruises to get a wireless LAN working at the enterprise levels expected by professional geeks. (Otherwise they are doomed to an AOL interface in the Internet Cafe.) The cost of providing the service requires each cruise to book so many attendees to break even, otherwise we can't even set it up for free because we would lose money. Neil Bauman and I have developed a very open business partner agreement on this project that is very adaptable to the changing circumstances (Sept. 11 almost casued the project to go on hold for LINUX Lunacy). Later this year, once the proof of concept is finalized on the Holland America and RC ships, my company, MOUStech.NET, will be offering CISCO Aironet 350 wireless training classes (through my other business partner, Excalibur, a CISCO wireless provider) aboard Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Seas and Explorer of the Seas (Eastern and Western Caribbean 7 day cruises). The wireless site survey labs aboard the largest cruise ships in the world, 144,000 gmt, should be great fun. (If Doc wants to be a keynote speaker at the MOUStech.NET events, I think we can work something out. I'd like for him to be the offical blogger for MOUStech.NET. We could create our own weblog server just for the ongoing cruise projects.) Note: There were three authors on LINUX Lunacy that I wanted to meet, and attend their seminars: Stallman, Raymond, and Searls. Doc is much funnier in person speaking than he is writing on the web. And he doesn't wear a PDP11 Disk Drive on his head like Stallman. I'm looking forward to all of the future cruises. There are responses to this message:
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