Council is looking at blanketing downtown with WiFi. I’d go with a mesh network—it’s cheaper, and my tests downtown show that it’ll work just fine.
Sideblog
- Downtown tarot card reader Ed Rowe passed away on NYE; a memorial service will be held Wed. 01/07 from 5-8PM at Twisted Branch. #
- The DP illustrates a 30% drop in UVa's endowment with a graph that gets 58% smaller. Not a lot of statisticians go into the news biz, I guess. #
- There's an E85 station in Albemarle now. #
- Urban Outfitters to open up in the old Hardware Store. Ugh. The very worst of Old Town Alexandria, right here in C'ville. #
- Wistar and Darren's spider on frog on turtle photo keeps getting more famous. #
- Trish took some photos of an albino deer, or perhaps a piebald deer. In either case, it's an awfully rare thing and, incidentally, perfectly legal to hunt in VA. #
- David Maurer provides the address of some of the best Christmas lights around town, and I mapped them. In a nutshell, it's all about Meade, Holmes, and Agnese. Update: The DP mapped them, too. #
- Google Maps now provides CTS routes, complete with fare prices and scheduling. This is so cool! #
- The Downtown Mall overhaul might come in under budget, thanks to the lousy economy. #
- DMB is playing the JPJ in April. #
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This is a community news blog about Charlottesville, VA, USA, started in March of 2001. It's run by Waldo Jaquith. It has nothing to do with C-Ville Weekly, the newspaper. Feel free to submit a story.
How do they stop people from doing things like downloading bittorrents and the like.
why should they? I don’t see any of the coffee shops here blocking particular kinds of traffic.
There are a couple of ways to do it, if you’re gonna. The first, and probably best, is throttling the bandwidth available to any single client to some reasonable fraction of the total bandwidth. So if the whole of downtown is on a 1.5Mbps connection, perhaps any single client can use no more than a sustained rate of maybe 10% of that, or 152kbps (19Kbps). Bandwidth throttling can be quite a bit more complex than that, but you get the idea. The second way is through port filtering. Simply block any outgoing traffic on ports for purposes other than mail (POP/IMAP/SMTP), web (HTTP/HTTPS) or IM (XMPP/AIM). But I’m not sure that’s necessary if bandwidth is being throttled—as Chad points out, there’s probably no need.
Internet telephony and Halo are both great, but neither high-bandwidth technologies are a great use of a new public commons that’s on probation. :)
Who’s paying the internet provider and how much?
I wonder how long it will be before all new laptops sold will have some sort of wireless adaptor that uses a cell phone signal as a wireless internet source.
It’s already being done. The catch is that mobile phone signals offer some mighty weak signals compared to WiFi.