MetriTalk

A spin-off of the MosquitoNet project, a project of the Stanford Operating Systems and Networking Group

About MetriTalk

About Metricom Radios

To summarise, there are four ways that you can use Metricom radios:

  1. Peer-to-peer, local area
    You can buy a set of Metricom radios and make a little 'wireless network segment' for your Powerbooks. You do this exactly the way you would if you were setting up a little LocalTalk segment. Put one radio on each laptop, and one on a desktop machine that has a wired connection to your AppleTalk network. Run AppleTalk Internet Router on that Mac, and it will forward your wireless packets onto the wired AppleTalk network.

  2. Peer-to-peer, with a few pole-top repeaters installed
    As (1), but if you want to increase the range, you can contact Metricom about having some pole-tops installed in your area.

  3. Peer-to-peer, with Metricom's wide-area forwarding
    As (1), but if you're in an area that already has Ricochet, then you can simply pay $30 a month for the packet forwarding.

  4. Client-to-Server
    If you really want to experience the full joy of modem configuration problems, and you'd rather have to connect a whole rack of Metricom radios to your gateway machine instead of just one, and you'd like to be able to experience your connection unexpectedly 'hanging-up' on you at inconvenient times, then you could use Metricom's modem emulation service and 'dial-in' to a PPP server instead of using Starmode. As described above, making a computer network emulate a modem so that you can run a computer network over it is hardly ideal, but some people might prefer it.

More musings on Metricom Radios.

Getting MetriTalk

You can obtain MetriTalk by anonymous ftp from Bolo.Stanford.EDU

Please let me know if you have any problems.


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