Technik News

Das Blog zu IT, Mobilfunk & Internet

WiFi

New Fon routers with LAN and USB ports, but not by Fon

von

I got a tip today that Fon is looking at launching a new router with a LAN port, apart from the WAN port found in the current Fonera (they seem to privately admit not having a LAN passthrough was a rather big mistake).

With the current Fonera, you cannot access devices on the wired side of the network (such as a SAN drive or printer) from the wireless side, be it using the public or private SSID, you are effectively NATted from your own network. A LAN port would solve this the same way as it is done in higher quality devices such as the Linksys WRT54 series.

Fon Liberator?

What really surprised me was to see that these routers have already been shown by Accton, the OEM that manufactures the Fonera on their website for a few weeks. Check out these links, datasheets in PDF available, for a white-label Fonera, a Fonera with LAN passthrough, and what looks to be the Fon Liberator, having a USB port and BitTorrent client built-in! Martin Varsavsky recently put the release date of the Liberator back a few months, originally scheduled for Christmas 2006, citing technical difficulties.

Now, either Accton wants to score a goal taking advantage of the publicity offered by Fon, or Fon didn’t pay an exclusivity fee for the design of these routers, or both. One million routers by 2010 is nothing by asian manufacturer standards, but they do allow buyers to secure exclusive designs. Copies could still be found, but not as prominently and by the same manufacturer making their own.

I wasn’t sure that Accton was the designer behind the Fonera, and gave Fon the benefit of the doubt of actually having developed something themselves in the electronics field, but now it seems clear that Accton is the designer of the hardware platfom, so there wasn’t that much development by Fon after all (the firmware was created by the hackers behind DD-WRT and OpenWRT).

The Fonera, hacked to run OpenWRT

von

It was only a matter of time until the developers of open-source firmware OpenWRT and DD-WRT managed to port the OS to the Fonera, which is based on an Atheros chipset. As described in this thread of the DD-WRT forums, there is a firmware package available for download, which can be flashed onto the Fonera, thus replacing FON’s original firmware and functionality. I think it will be a matter of time until we see reflashed Foneras on eBay, just like we saw Linksys once upon a time.

The hack is not for the faint-hearted, and so you risk bricking your router if the flashing fails – there is still a way to de-brick using the serial port, but in any case, don’t try this at home unless you know what you are doing. We are on the cutting edge of the development, which eventually trickles down into easier-to-follow HOWTOs and step-by-step guides.

How not to install a WiFi antenna

von

Leaving aside regulatory issues that may turn this particular setup into an illegal operation, I will better not describe the quality of the installation to be polite. Check out this picture:

wifi antenna

Spotted the problem yet? Radio antennas are affected by any element that is present around them, even non-metallic elements, such as the ground. In this particular case, kanijo, a Fonero, has attempted to provide more “range” to his FON hotspot, which is in itself commendable, however, the means may not result in the desired end.

You can see that the vertical omni antenna, a carefully tuned radiating element, has been strapped to a metallic pole, which also runs a coaxial cable into a TV antenna right on top. The router is inside a sealed plastic box, with power and Ethernet going into it from below. There is no way that this antenna is radiating correctly, as the pole that supports it is probably grounded (if it has been installed according to regulations), and even if it is not, it is inducing an imbalance into the tuned element, causing a large amount of RF to be attenuated. The user reports good results with it, which are most likely due to good luck.

The second problem with this type of setup is that vertical antennas don’t emit downwards, and thus will provide very limited coverage to users below the antenna. There is some downwards bleed of course, but it will only reach lower users that are some distance away from the antenna.

Recommendations for these sort of setups: install the antenna right at the top of its own pole, and ground the pole. If you have no choice but to use an existing pole, get a T arm fitting and mount the antenna at least 1 meter (3 feet) away from the pole. A perfect example of such as setup, in this case with two supports as the antenna is rather large and care for wind load is needed, is this (credit to Roger Halstead):

Check out Roger’s page, it is a very good read if you are interested in radio installations.

The problem with WiFi at hotels

von

The New York Times ran a story two days ago, also picked up by Glenn Fleishman over at WiFi Net News, about how hard it is sometimes to get connected at hotels over their WiFi networks. Some travelers even report a failure rate of 50%, in comparison with 5% in wired connections. Support is usually directed to a hotline run by the hotspot operator, which results in a rather frustrating experience.

I have also seen it all, hotels with only WiFi in the lobby and wired connections in the rooms (Hotel Fox, in Copenhagen), others with very spotty coverage that reached only certain rooms, getting connected to another hotel’s WiFi across the street, then realizing it was free and only asked for a room number and surname, while your own hotel charged you a fortune, and so on.

My best experience was during DEFCON 14 in Las Vegas, where we stayed in the MGM Grand hotel. These guys went over the top, and installed an AP in every single room!. It was bolted underneath the table, inside a metal case, and the deprecated Ethernet cable was connected to it. A quick scan revealed that I could only see about 4 or 5 networks from my room, and only two with a half-decent signal, which makes me believe they turned down the power of the APs so as to avoid interference problems.

Wouldn’t it be great if with falling hardware costs, other hotels would do the same thing? To avoid interference between rooms, apart from channel variations, one could either turn each room into miniature Faraday cages, or turn down the power of the AP to a minimum.

Divine to offer pay-per-minute WiFi

von

Techworld.com reports that UK WiFi aggregator Divine Wireless will be offering a new service, which covers some 15.000 hotspots run by BT Openzone, amongst others, charged in minutes rather than hours or days. Thus, a user would pay 8 pence per minute, or 4.80 GBP per hour. This is still very expensive, but the fact that you only pay for the minutes you use will make it very attractive to occasional users, to quickly check email, for example. Will people go for it? Maybe, but only if you really can get connected while waiting for the bus to come, as they claim in their typical scenario.