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Wireless Networking Books Media Book Reviews Hardware

Deploying License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks 72

Posted by timothy from the you-gotta-license-for-this-thing dept.
Grant Willey writes "Deploying a License-Free Wireless Wide Area Network? Want to learn the intricate details from an authoritative expert who has personally designed and installed hundreds of license-free outdoor broadband wireless networks? This book isn't just for WISPs (wireless Internet service providers), this book is for you!" Read on for Grant's review of Deploying License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks from Cisco Press.
Deploying License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks
author Jack Unger
pages 352
publisher Cisco Press
rating 8
reviewer Grant Willey
ISBN 1587050692
summary This is an information packed publication designed to assist you with the planning, installation, and maintenance of wireless WAN's.

This information packed publication is designed to assist you with the planning, installation, and maintenance of wireless WANs. You'll receive help with many commonly faced deployment challenges including site surveying, antenna evaluation and selection, overcoming real-world obstacles, solving noise and interference problems, maximizing available bandwidth, and working safely with tower structures and wireless gear. And, if you're presently pursuing a wireless technology certification such as Planet3's CWNA, CWNI, CWSP, etc, this book isn't written as a study guide, but it does provide vitally important information to help you earn these respected certifications.

Whether you're an experienced LAN/WAN professional or are new to the field and looking to "get your feet wet," this book will enrich your knowledge and possibly open new doors of opportunity for you. Being an experienced LAN/WAN professional with 19 years of experience and dozens of certifications, I thank the author for not filling the book with dry-humored jokes, useless "real life" experiences, and confusing diagrams/ illustrations. This book is grammatically correct, technically accurate, focused, and very helpful whether you're pursuing wireless certification or not. Beginner and experienced networking professionals will appreciate the "vendor neutral" content of the book. The book is published by Cisco Press, but contains no specific references to CISCO brand hardware/software. I believe this makes the information even more useful to technicians and installers who work with varying vendor equipment. While many concepts and methodologies are the same, this book is true to its name and offers little help in the way of assisting you with indoor WLAN deployments. The wealth of useful information contained in Appendix B, "Wireless Hardware, Software, and Service Provider Organizations" is absolutely priceless and much appreciated.

Here's how the book is organized: Chapters 1 and 2 are an introduction to wireless WANs and explain wireless technology fundamentals. Chapters 3-5 dive into network architecture, conducting site surveys, and selecting appropriate antennae. Chapters 6-9 discuss actual equipment selection, installation, interference resolution, and the provision of broadband wireless Internet access. Chapter review questions are located at the end of each chapter and serve as a "pop quiz" to reinforce key concepts and technologies covered.

Comparing this book to others is relatively easy. I haven't found any other publications dedicated to the planning, installation, and maintenance of wireless WANs! While there are a plethora of theoretical RF and wireless technology books already in print, no single publication dedicates its content to explaining the technologies like this book does. In addition, I appreciate the author's strong emphasis on installation and technician safety -- an area not many authors seem to write about. This book will not bog you down in theoretical RF discussions, but rather allows you to learn through the introduction of real-life examples, explanations, and suggestions based on the author's actual installation experiences.

The book contains no CD-ROM or marketing material. Published in March 2003 (prior to the now finalized 802.11g standard), the book primarily covers 802.11a and 802.11b technologies. Both Mr. Unger and Cisco Press deserve a round of applause!

You can purchase Deploying License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Deploying License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks

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  • Chapter 8 (Score:5, Funny)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:02AM (#6407632)
    Pringle's cans.

    • Re:Chapter 8 (Score:2, Informative)

      by deadsaijinx* ( 637410 )
      To the modderators:

      The Pringles Can thing was a joke reffering to an older article. it was one that involved boosting the signal of a wireless network using pringles cans. The chapters 6-9 are about choosing the hardware for your wireless LAN.... making sense now? good.
    • Business Plan.

      --

  • two things bother me in the review... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:04AM (#6407641)
    Whether you're an experienced LAN/WAN professional or are new to the field and looking to "get your feet wet,"

    I really don't care if he has 19 years experience, I still think that statement makes the book look terrible. In my experience, nearly ALL books that shoot to the entire spectrum of readers fail miserably.

    Comparing this book to others is relatively easy. I haven't found any other publications dedicated to the planning, installation, and maintenance of wireless WANs!

    Great, so we are going to read a book that tries to cover everyone from Joe to Expert *and* this guy (with 19 years experience) hasn't seen another book like this?

    Just my worthless .02

  • I don't understand. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This book is grammatically correct, technically accurate, focused, and very helpful ...

    I read Slashdot. I'm not sure I'm familiar with what this sentence (fragment) means.

    • Um, that's not a fragment. It just ends with a compound adjective in the predicate nominative. Check the grammar section of any freshman composition textbook for verification. Or, disbelieve and flame. By the way, "I watered the garden, it was very dry" is a comma splice. "Unfortunately, water usage" is a fragment.

  • Self-contradictory (Score:4, Informative)

    by Enigma2175 ( 179646 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:15AM (#6407690) Homepage Journal
    I thank the author for not filling the book with dry-humored jokes, useless "real life" experiences...

    ...but rather allows you to learn through the introduction of real-life examples, explanations, and suggestions based on the author's actual installation experiences.

    So you thank the author for not filling the book with "real life" experiences, then you applaud him for including real life examples. Let me make sure I'm reading correctly... real life experiences-bad. Real life examples-good. What is the difference between the two?
    • I think that he means that the author leaves out the anecdotes and crap which he thinks is funny, but others just groan and hope to meet the author in a dark alley for some hot baseball bat-to-forehead action.

      Kind of like all my posts.
    • I think a "real-life example" [as the review uses it] would indicate a generic example that would be found in life. The generic and therefore broad nature would allow for a more general descriptoion that and hence an understanding of the concepts, so as they may apply the general knowledge to a wider variety of situations. Where as a real-life experience would tell us how to do one thing very well, but only in those specific circumstances.
      • "real life" experience

        By looking both ways when I crossed the street, I avoided getting run over.


        real-life example

        A friend of mine did not look both ways when crossing the street and was crushed to a pulp not unlike a large uncooked pizza by a cement truck going the wrong way against traffic.

        I think the difference is that the "real life" experiences are in the first person, and the examples don't need to be. By necessity most folks experiences are somewhat limited compared to the range

    • I do see the potential contradiction there, but I also see another possibility that seems pretty reasonable:
      Perhaps the "useless 'real life' experiences" her refers to are, in fact, real-life experiences that just happen to be useless for the subject of whatever book they are found in.

      The real-life experiences that the reviewer liked in this book may only differ from aforementioned useless real-life experiences he mentioned by usefulness.

  • Amazon Review (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:21AM (#6407727)
    Buyer Beware! This book is GREAT...!, [amazon.com]

    "Reviewer: Grant Willey from Laurel, Delaware
    Whether you're an experienced LAN/WAN professional or are new to the field and looking to "get your feet wet", this book will enrich your knowledgebase and possibly open new doors of opportunity for you. Being an experienced LAN/WAN professional with 19 years of experience and dozens of certifications, I thank the author for not filling the book with dry-humored jokes, useless "real life" experiences, and confusing diagrams/ illustrations. This book is grammatically correct (except for 2 spelling errors), technically accurate, focused, and very helpful whether you're pursuing wireless certification or not. Beginner and experienced networking professionals will appreciate the "vendor neutral" content of the book. The book is published by Cisco Press, but contains no specific references to CISCO brand hardware/software. I believe this makes the information even more useful to technicians and installers who work with varying vendor equipment. While many concepts and methodologies are the same, this book is true to its name and offers little help in the way of assisting you with indoor WLAN deployments. The wealth of useful information contained in Appendix B, "Wireless Hardware, Software, and Service Provider Organizations" is absolutely priceless and much appreciated. The book contains no CD-ROM or marketing material (kudos!). Published prior to the finalized 802.11g standard, the book primarily covers 802.11a and 802.11b technologies. Both Mr. Unger and Cisco Press deserve a round of applause!
    Disclaimer: This is an honest review - I do not benefit from it in any manner."

    Sound Familiar!!??!!
    Why is he posting this all over the internet... HE WORKS FOR THE F'ing PUBLISHER!!!
    • You should have stayed logged in. Now how are we going to know where to send the deerstalker cap, magnifying glass, and deep-bowled pipe?

      Aside from that, nice piece of detective work!
      Hizzah!

    • Re:Amazon Review (Score:2, Informative)

      by deadsaijinx* ( 637410 )
      Before someone marks the AC comment as insightful, let me say that the Grant Willey review is under CUSTOMER reviews. And why shouldn't he post the same review here as he did on amazon? Helps people to make decisions on the book and gets it noticed on /.

    • More and more "book reviews" are becoming less and less review-like and more and more marketing. Wasn't there a book "review" some time ago that introduced the word marketectual? It was aimed at marketing software products or something and every piece of review on here was loaded with acronyms, buzzwords and various hi-tech sounding catchphrases.

    • Reviews I write go to multiple sites (/., amazon, etc). Who cares, as long as it's the case of the same person writing the same review in each place? If you plagarize another person's review, that's another story.

  • Maybe I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cnkeller ( 181482 ) <cnkeller@@@gmail...com> on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:30AM (#6407788) Homepage
    The more interesting part of the problem is the backhaul. Great, you set up a couple of access points and provide access to your entire apartment building or neighborhood. What's the backhaul connection? DSL? T3? Unless you're talking about provisioning something on ther order of OC3 or a DS3 you have the potential of bottle-necking pretty quickly. The bandwidth has got to come from somewhere. That's why I believe the 802.16 spec is the last-mile answer, not WLAN. We've [beamreachnetworks.com] addressed that problem, has anyone else?
    • Jeez, if I thought the review was a thinly disguised commercial...the parent post is quite obviously one.

      P.S. I never hear anyone but marketing guys call it "backhaul".

    • Okay, so now there is no difference between 'backhaul' and 'last mile'? you marketing guys have all the answers, huh.
    • Yes, we at MediaCell, Inc, have. Years before beamreach. See US Patent 6,377,782. Try not to be so arrogant.

    • What's the backhaul connection? DSL? T3? Unless you're talking about provisioning something on ther order of OC3 or a DS3 you have the potential of bottle-necking pretty quickly.

      A DS3 and a T3 are the same thing genius.

      In most corp. networks the local access layer is Fast-E, connected to a T1 Interenet pipe, so what's the difference?

      Regardless of access speeds, the connection to the Internet will most likely always be a bottleneck. Wi-Max only increases the speed of the local access, not the "backhau

    • That's why I believe the 802.16 spec is the last-mile answer, not WLAN. We've addressed that problem, has anyone else?

      Can I afford to buy your gear to setup 10 homes along a 1 mile stretch of rural road? That's why I'm looking at WLAN, but I'm not opposed to alternates.

  • 900 MHz (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:30AM (#6407792) Journal
    What about WANs that use 900 MHz? Those higher 802.11x frequencies are very common, but when faces with a lot of trees, hills, etc you want something that has less signal loss through obstacles. The equipment is definitely available [waverider.com].

    I am surprised that the book does not cover this technology because the spectrum is license free (at least in Canada and the USA) and it has a lot of potential for Wider Area Lans in hilly, forested, wooded areas like my own.

    • Re:900 MHz (Score:4, Informative)

      by general_boy ( 635045 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @12:08PM (#6408054)
      The author and I worked together in 1997, just as he was starting to transition from 900 MHz to 2.4 GHz equipment. At the time he was seeing some pretty serious interference problems with 900 MHz in the south SF bay - presumably due to the boom in 900 MHz cordless phones. Rest assured he has a lot of experience with that band, so I don't know why he wouldn't write about it, unless he doesn't consider it viable for modern installations.

      One interesting thing about 900 MHz is that although the free air path loss and absorption by vegetation is indeed lower vs. higher frequencies, it's also more difficult to deploy antennas with gains like you find in the 2.4 and 5.7 GHz bands. I'm talking mostly about point-to-point deployments. In designs I've done, the system loss (calculation of amount of energy arriving at the remote receiver), assuming antennas of reasonable size, was almost the same for 900 or 2.4. One significant advantage of 2.4 is an 83 MHz band to play with vs. a 26 MHz band on 900. I wouldn't say that kind of equivalence applies to 5.7 though, due to the environmentally-related fade factors starting to really kick in.

      I have a lot of respect for Jack and his commitment to wireless, and hope his book sells a gazillion copies. He's a fellow ham radio operator and knows the RF side far better than most wireless LAN/WAN people I've met.

      • It's a myth that the free space path loss increases with frequency. The free space path loss is independent of frequency. Think about it: If the path loss of electromagnetic radiation increased with frequency, we'd never see any light from the sun--at 500,000,000 MHz [qsl.net], it'd be severely attenuated!

        The effect often seen is due to the antennas used, not the frequency of operation. WLANs often use resonant dipole antennas. Such antennas have constant gain with frequency; a 900 MHz resonant dipole has the

        • As soon as you're not in free space, though, high frequencies tend to get aborbed faster.

          For example, one brand of high-quality coaxial cable loses 3.7 db per 100 feet at 900 MHz. At 2500 MHz, it's up to 6.5 db per 100 feet.

          Similar things happen when there are buildings, trees, people, and other obstructions. It's analogous to what happens when you're a few hundred feet from a stereo and you mostly hear the bass.

          It's the difference between propagating through free space, like the vacuum between the earth

  • Copied Article? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:37AM (#6407832) Journal
    Look at the first review on Amazon for this book:

    http://www.booksmags.com/books/shop/pd1587050692/ [booksmags.com]

    It appears to be identical to this slashdot article.

  • i can't believe it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is a new low for Slashdot. The Amazon repost issue aside, this "review" reads like the copy from the book jacket. It barely even touches on what's actually in the book, instead rambling on about how great it is. Do the editors actually read this stuff?
  • Does the book cover security at all? I haven't yet met a wireless network my version of AirSnort didn't like.

    Until there is a reliable method of securing a wireless network, I would recommend that nobody set up any more detailed of a network than a couple of access points. You're just inviting people to pirate your bandwidth.

  • For the best wisp related training, i highly recommend ydi's course.

    http://www.ydi.com/support/training.php
    • From the YDI training page (i.e. sales pitch plus) After lunch, one-on-one time can be scheduled with Michael Young, a YDI Account Manager or Sales Engineer to assist you in designing your specific wireless systems.

      While I'm not sure where one gets a degree in sales engineering, I do have some information about where to get the only currently accredited Bachelors Degree in Wireless Engineering [imaps.org]


      caveat emptor="BEWARE THE SALES ENGINEER"

  • Do not miss this chance of a lifetime! (Score:5, Funny)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @12:28PM (#6408204) Homepage Journal
    GET RICH QUICK!

    this book will enrich your knowledge and possibly open new doors of opportunity for you
    Don't waste you time working for someone else! For only $99 I will send you a kit that will bring you tens of thousands of dollars every week.

    Being an experienced LAN/WAN professional with 19 years of experience and dozens of certifications
    I did the hard work so you don't have to. Guaranteed wealth!

    Comparing this book to others is relatively easy. I haven't found any other publications dedicated to the planning, installation, and maintenance of wireless WANs!
    Do not trust imitators. This is the only real original Get Rich Quick plan.

    This book will not bog you down in theoretical RF discussions, but rather allows you to learn through the introduction of real-life examples,
    No previous experience necessary. Just follow the examples and you can soon could be living a big house, driving a big car, and hiring 3 big hookers every night to play on your bed while you sit impotently on the couch watching.

    The book contains no CD-ROM or marketing material. Published in March 2003 (prior to the now finalized 802.11g standard), the book primarily covers 802.11a and 802.11b technologies. Both Mr. Unger and Cisco Press deserve a round of applause!
    You know you can trust us because we know complicated industry acronyms.

  • This is a must for any wireless bookshelf. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Agent Green ( 231202 ) * on Thursday July 10, 2003 @01:54PM (#6408886)
    I got this book a few months ago, and it was one of the best books I've purchased. For a book from Cisco Press, there is almost no mention of specific Cisco products, which was surprising...but freshing in a way.

    Granted, it's weaker in the areas of security and such, but it is pretty heavy on RF theory and all those things you need to make any license-free WWAN work.

    Security and stuff is important as anyone here will likely agree to, but that is really better covered in dedicated books on the topic. In short, this is not a general book about wireless networking. It is techincal and there's a lot of useful information for people who are above the noob level of wireless looking to install outdoor wireless link.

    The best part of the book, IMHO, was the antenna theory portions, math, and formulas that were included. The author is a ham radio operator (as am I) and he defintely know what he's talking about.

    A very good job, and worth every cent paid.
  • Yeah, I've been doing this stuff for not quite 19 years but enough to tell BS from the real thing. Will somone post a link to a bittorrent of this thing, so I can download it, read it, and review?
  • If we had the article moderation feature that so many people are after, this would be modded as a troll in seconds flat : )

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