willidiots

Do you opportunistically use Wi-Fi? Or just LTE all the time?

I'd posit it's an increase in per-sub utilization vs total sub count. Users aren't motivated to limit their LTE usage with these plans, and in some cases eschew Wi-Fi entirely.

Seems like a design flaw. Do any taxiways have markings etc. to make them more distinguishable?

Channel selection won't affect roaming, so you shouldn't need to. What specific problem are you having?

In general see my response to grk, you can roam with any network that meets these criteria:

1. All APs use the same SSID

2. All APs bridge users onto the same subnet

But the experience will vary from client to client in terms of how aggressively they roam. Many AP vendors offer knobs to "help" clients roam by kicking clients off at a certain signal threshold, supposedly triggering a roam: in practice, this just upsets many clients.

Re #1: "SSID" is actually shorthand for "ESSID" - Extended service set identifier. Each AP has its own "BSSID" - Basic service set identifier, which is the AP's Wi-Fi MAC address. The whole concept of an "ESSID" is to signal to clients that a certain group of APs belong to the same system.

Re #2: If you need to scale beyond a single subnet, you generally solve for this by terminating users on a centralized packet core / wireless controller, which shards users out onto multiple subnets.

Yes and nothing special, as long as the clients and AP are moving consistent to each other.

If the client is moving >10MPH relative to a fixed AP (i.e. you're driving past the AP in your car), Wi-Fi doesn't handle that well. Your movement creates Doppler shift in your RF signal, which Wi-Fi can't adjust for (vs. e.g. LTE which does).

Yes it absolutely does, but it is dependent on the station (the client) doing so. One of my gripes about Wi-Fi is that it delegates too much to the station - your experience is thus dictated by whoever wrote your phone/computer's Wi-Fi chipset driver, and how they interpret the standard.

Any Wi-Fi network supports roaming on the network side, you just need all of your access points to use the same SSID, and to dump users onto the same subnet consistently (otherwise you'll need to re-IP after roaming).

An unfortunate side effect of being in the industry is that I constantly have a surplus of enterprise-grade hardware at home. It's been a while since I looked at consumer hardware. Apple's Airports were solid, but have been discontinued. I've used both of the OnHubs and both were performant / stable. I've heard generally good things about Google's new Wi-Fi pucks, and Netgear's nighthawk series.

5G is the better of the two bands - it gives you many more channels and there's generally less interference. That sounds like something particular to your environment.

If you have a Mac, I recommend installing Wi-Fi signal (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-signal/id525912054?mt=1...) - it gives you much greater insight into what's happening on the air. I'd start by installing something like that, and monitoring for correlation with your drops - what else happens when your connection drops? Does the SNR drop? Does the AP change channels? etc.

I build public Wi-Fi networks, you've probably used one of them. AMA if you have Wi-Fi questions.

To say it "sucks" is a bit harsh. It's delivering multiple hundreds of Mbps to you via an unlicensed contention-based medium. The air interface is like sending packets over a noisy Ethernet hub; it's impressive it works as well as it does. That said, this article's a good primer on some of the protocol's fundamental challenges.

In the coming years we'll hear more about 802.11ax, which is thankfully focused on efficiency vs. raw numbers, but likely won't be ratified until 2019/2020.

It puts the ISPs/carriers in a little bit of an awkward position. If an ISP can afford to provide me X GB / month of zero-rated data, and this technology exists, how can they argue against it while claiming to be pro-consumer?

As a person with a polar opposite background - grew up on 7 acres in the middle of nowhere - I completely agree. I enjoy living close to employment and services without being completely immersed in humanity 24/7.

This whole piece is an exercise in bias. I'm disappointed with Quartz.

Welcome to unlicensed frequencies. You can also buy any number of legitimate narrowband continuous transmitters (e.g. an analog video transmitter) and effectively destroy one of the available channels.

If you're the type of person who ever takes scenic routes, do yourself a favor and buy a PLB. You can get an ACR ResQLink for $250, they last up to 10 years, and they work nearly everywhere.

Their 500 page is pretty great too: http://www.bloomberg.com/500

This is admittedly anecdata, but a close member of my family just committed suicide this week, after starting SSRIs a few weeks earlier.

The family saw a therapist for counseling (not the therapist responsible for the SSRIs) yesterday and her opinion was that prescribing an SSRI without an accompanying mood stablizier was extremely risky. There's certainly a contingent of mental health workers who feel this is a real risk.

Simultaneously, a different member of the family has been on SSRIs under her primary care provider's oversight alone - something we finally convinced her was a bad idea. I wonder how common this practice has become, and if it's contributed to the overall increase in U.S. suicide rates.

Lots of comments in here about economic factors. It's important to recognize that depression can occur independent of one's situation. There's a stigma around depression which keeps many people quiet when they need help the most. I worry that our decreasing face-to-face interaction and emphasis on individual-success-at-all-costs is worsening this; it's so easy to socially isolate yourself these days.

I'm assuming by the same mechanism that offers to save previously-entered passwords. It's always sniffing anything you type into a password field.

Or perhaps the soda tax and reduced consumption both stem from the same body of scientific evidence and anti-soda narrative? As a whole, consumers are shifting to healthier eating trends, soda's one of the obvious things to cut.

I agree with the last paragraph, the studies to date haven't shown much. It'd be interesting to compare state-by-state changes over the past 10 years.

For those who haven't seen it, Geek Silicon Valley gives a great tour of historically significant locations throughout the area: http://www.amazon.com/Geek-Silicon-Valley-Sunnyvale-Francisc...

Might be time to visit some of these places before they're gone forever.

I'll concede that's not the best choice of words. My point was that they probably aren't going to willingly install a drop to your random UBNT radio on a pole. You need that friendly neighbor.

"find the closest fiber plant Comcast has for the HFC node that services the general area and make them give me a L3 drop to this bridge"

You are massively underestimating the work involved here. Aside from the physical constraints of needing a POP installed for handoff to your random wireless bridge, what makes you think the author can "make them" do anything? And what makes you think that Comcast could effectively engineer a solution to support this one-off installation, when they can't even schedule a normal OSP drop?

Edit: rhetorical questions aside, I actually investigated this option for my parents' old home in the boonies. Comcast actively prohibits you from doing this, per their AUP (http://www.comcast.com/Corporate/Customers/Policies/HighSpee...): "Network and usage restrictions: ... sell the Service or otherwise make available to anyone outside the Premises the ability to use the Service (for example, through WiFi or other methods of networking), in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, with the sole exception of your use of Comcast-provided WiFi service"

They offered! They found a "good cheesesteak place" about 30 miles from here (I believe it) and offered to have someone drive it out to me, but cautioned it would be very expensive & asked if I wanted them to get a quote. I declined, not THAT hungry for a cheesesteak tonight, but I'm super happy with the knowledge & result.

This is crazy, I was just brainstorming about this last week. You're basically layering concierges on top of remote hands. Awesome!

I'm curious to see what you'll do to handle exceptional cases. I live in the boonies and am asking for a philly cheesesteak right now.

Let's all have a moment of contemplation & relaxation on behalf of those poor souls on-call...

It'll work against WPA2 as well, the link you provided is confusingly worded. There's currently no technical way of preventing deauth attacks as 802.11 management frames are always unencrypted / unsigned.

802.11w aims to address this by authenticating management frames but is slow in coming to market and plagued with interop issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11w-2009

I actually agree w/ OP, the message seemed totally unclear to me, and I never saw that initial sentence.

I revisited the page and realized my eye was immediately drawn to the huge propaganda eagle, after which I jumped to the middle of the article and started skimming. Once again I missed the initial sentence. Had to intentionally look for it.

FYI there are a variety of MoCA products out there that support 175Mbps Ethernet over coax up to 300':

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008EQ4BQG?pc_redir=1414247414...

Looks like they're running on 900MHz. To be effective, 900MHz antennas usually must be rather large. May limit the useful applications.

Edit: I stand corrected. http://www.slashgear.com/whistlegps-dog-tracker-first-to-use...

Full list of cities, from the FAQ:

Arizona - Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe California - San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto Georgia - Atlanta, Avondale Estates, Brookhaven, College Park, Decatur, East Point, Hapeville, Sandy Springs, Smyrna North Carolina - Charlotte, Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Garner, Morrisville, Raleigh Oregon - Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, Lake Oswego, Tigard Tennessee - Nashville-Davidson Texas - San Antonio Utah - Salt Lake City

I ate at the Mtn View uWink a few times before it died; it seemed to suffer from a few procedural issues:

* People didn't understand how to use the tablets, so you needed staff to explain things to them.

* Certain things (like drink refills) that are high-frequency are easier handled by human intervention, than by calling up the "order refill" option and waiting for someone to appear

* Food was expensive (presumably to account for the cost of POS systems plus a full staff) and not great (not really an issue for Applebee's / Chili's as they've made an empire out of mediocre food)

* As mentioned above, a fair share of software glitches - so you need IT support in addition to kitchen / service staff.

It didn't really seem to solve a problem - you replaced the customer-staff interaction with a customer-staff-computer-staff interaction.

I'd like the ability to page my server, but that's about it.