Wireless Hacks

The NoCat Night Light

Put your AP where everyone can see it—on the ceiling.

Back in March 2003, some friends and I were hanging out at a really good coffee shop in Sebastopol, CA. This particular coffee joint is housed in an old wooden train station building, with very high ceilings, old-style hanging industrial lamps, and even a couple of old trains still on the tracks, serving as small shops.

Unfortunately, there’s no wireless available at this shop. (There was, once upon a time, back when O’Reilly was located across the street from it. But that was ages ago, and even then the signal wasn’t all that it could have been.) As we sat around drinking our high octane beverages, we got to talking about the best way to provide coverage in such a huge space. The room we were in was a common room, open at all hours (the front entrance is huge, and doesn’t even have a door.) While you could put an access point in one of the enclosed shops in the building, coverage in the open area would likely be spotty at best. You would want the AP to be located high up off the ground, where everyone could see it.

Almost simultaneously, we all looked up and noticed the lamps hanging from the wooden rafters. What if you could house an AP in a package the size of a large light bulb, and install it in an existing light socket? This seemed like a good idea, but how would you get network access to it without running CAT5 to the socket? Easy: Powerline Ethernet.

With the recent release of the Siemens’ SpeedStream ...