And I hear that you, personally, are really good at
making geeks and telcos play together. Since we're going to be a kind of
telco" -- Kurt startled and Alan kicked him under the table -- "I
thought you could help us get started right."
"Advice," Lyman said, drumming his fingers. He stood up and paced.
"One: don't bother. This is at least two orders of magnitude harder than
you think it is. There aren't enough junk computers in all of Toronto's
landfills to blanket the city in free wireless. The range is nothing but
three hundred feet, right? Less if there are trees and buildings, and
this city is all trees and buildings.
"Two: don't bother. The liability here is stunning. The gear you're
building is nice and all, but you're putting it into people's hands and
you've got no idea what they're going to do with it. They're going to
hack in bigger antennae and signal amplifiers. The radio cops will be on
your ass day and night.
"What's more, they're going to open it up to the rest of the world and
any yahoo who has a need to hide what he's up to is going to use your
network to commit unspeakable acts -- you're going to be every pirate's
best friend and every terrorist's safest haven.
"Three: don't bother. This isn't going to work. You've got a cute little
routing algorithm that runs with three nodes, and you've got a model
that may scale up to 300, but by the time you get to 30 thousand, you're
going to be hitting so much latency and dropping so many packets on the
floor and incurring so much signaling overhead that it'll be a gigantic
failure.
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