[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

[bryant]

"For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot."

135 square miles is 3,763,584,000 square feet. Let's pretend each access point is giving us about 50 feet of range That's 7,853 square feet per access point, or 7,500 for easy calculations and to allow some slippage. So... around 502,000 access points. That's 20 bucks an access point even if you don't allow for wiring costs. But the article says "hundreds, or maybe thousands of small transmitters."

Am I woefully underestimating the range of each access point?

Comments

[kodi]

Outdoor range is huge compared to indoor range - and don't forget that you can increase range by lowering bandwidth. Cisco makes access points with a nominal outdoor range of 2000ft @ 1Mbps, for about $700 each. I'm coming up with $200k in access point hardware for a 2000ft range. You're obviously not going to see 2000ft range in most of Philadelphia - I've never been, but my impression is that it's not a flat, grassy plain. The "open office indoor range" goes up to 410ft. That's with a wussy antenna, too - I'm not sure how much the higher-gain antennas increase the range. If they're trying to give people access inside high-rises, that's going to be more of a headache; I'd imagine for something like that they're going to have to put cheaper access points on individual floors.

I'm wholly inexpert when it comes to this sort of thing, but $10 million seems do-able, especially if they can get a manufacturer to cut them a deal in exchange for branding.