The Blog of Harald

Way back in 1999, the 802.11 people added a new ‘flavour’ of wireless access: bridging via intermediate access points. Ths allows you to place several 802.11 access points in strategic locations without having to connect them all via wires. Manufacturers are apparently (finally?) adding support to their products; LinkSys and Apple have both done so; see this “O’Reilly Network article”:http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/08/28/wireless_bridging.html for more information.

At the same time, MIT is experimenting by building a _routed_ network using 802.11 access points and new routing algorithms that build an efficient topology across a cloud of wireless links; See “The Grid Ad Hoc Networking Project”:http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/grid/ for more information.

Interesting stuff; we may yet be able to get rid of wires and maintain high-speed connections…