Dorian In the World

My business partner and I went to LA and San Diego this week to look at a few different companies to acquire and put in to the MetroBridge family.

YVR was a mess. The normally easy to transit, verging on calm airport was transformed in to the longest line I have personally ever witnessed at an airport. No one was complaining much...it was mostly stunned looks and bewilderment in the thousand deep crowd.

The terrorists? They succeeded. Whether they were really ever going to blow up planes in mid-air is almost irrelevant. The terrorists (or extremists, or whatever you personally want to call them) managed to push up the terror alert status to the maximum (since it has come off) in both the USA and Britain.

Plainly put, travel was a pain in the ass. In the US there were National Guard deployed at both LAX and SAN...standing guard over the tens of thousands of travellers who couldn't even bring a bottle of water airside. Leaving San Diego I went through the metal detector without setting it off...but I went through with my highly explosive Puma flip flops on so had to return and put them on the xray belt. The carpet had a nice sticky feel to it...like old flypaper or something ('would a small child stick to it' I thought to myself).

"President" Bush no doubt benefits in his ratings during such times...which always leaves me wondering how they find that perfect balance between keeping citizens scared enough...but not wreck their economy.

Posted by Dorian Banks at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I can't take it any longer. What is up with these (crazy) cities all over the planet spearheading municipal WiFi projects?!? I have said for almost a year that if I was a tax payer in Philadelphia or countless other wreckless cities I would sue the local government for misuse of my tax dollars. I predict a class action lawsuit or the like against a US city within a year. I do understand that taxpayer money is not funding the rollouts...but who is funding the city employee's time working on these projects?

What is going through a politicians mind when they 'come up with the idea' that their city should have ubiquitous WiFi coverage for the masses? Maybe ubiquitious housing, education or medical aid is a more likely target?!? I'm telling you it makes me crazy. Why don't they start dealing in electricity, cable TV or countless other commercial services?!? Does WiFi makes their citizens smarter or something? I haven't seen such a study.

I predict that there will be free WiFi coverage in most major cities throughout North America as ISP's beef up their networks (hell, I will be one of the people doing it...so I can atleast speak factually about one company). WiFi nodes are so inexpensive these days and with the great open source meshing protocols it is remarkably easy to extend off gateways everywhere. Today we have been experimenting with meraki mini's and their meshing work. Over the past 12 months I have also worked with 4G Systems devices, MIT Roofnet systems as well as Meru Networks. Each of these systems will extend any gateway in to the WiFi arena for little cost ($49 in the case of Meraki !!).

Posted by Dorian Banks at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)