“Well, Alan, Kurt, it’s nice to meet you,” Lyman said. “I hear you’re working on some exciting stuff.”
“We are,” Alan said. “We’re building a city-wide mesh wireless network using unlicensed spectrum that will provide high-speed, Internet connectivity absolutely gratis.”
“That’s ambitious,” Lyman said, without the skepticism that Alan had assumed would greet his statement. “How’s it coming?”
“Well, we’ve got a bunch of Kensington Market covered,” Alan said. “Kurt’s been improving the hardware design and we’ve come up with something cheap and reproducible.” He opened his tub and handed out the access points, housed in gray high-impact plastic junction boxes.
Lyman accepted one solemnly and passed it on to his graybeard, then passed the next to an East Indian woman in horn-rim glasses whose bitten-down fingernails immediately popped the latch and began lightly stroking the hardware inside, tracing the connections. The third landed in front of Lyman himself.
“So, what do they do?”
Alan nodded at Kurt. Kurt put his hands on the table and took a breath. “They’ve got three network interfaces; we can do any combination of wired and wireless cards. The OS is loaded on a flash-card; it auto-detects any wireless cards and auto-configures them to seek out other access points. When it finds a peer, they negotiate a client-server relationship based on current load, and the client then associates with the server. There’s a key exchange that we use to make sure that rogue APs don’t sneak into the mesh, and a self-healing routine we use to switch routes if the connection drops or we start to see too much packet loss.”
The graybeard looked up. “It izz a radio vor talking to Gott!” he said. Lyman’s posse laughed, and after a second, so did Kurt.
Alan must have looked puzzled, for Kurt elbowed him in the ribs and said, “It’s from Indiana Jones,” he said.
“Ha,” Alan said. That movie had come out long before he’d come to the city—he hadn’t seen a movie until he was almost 20. As was often the case, the reference to a film made him feel like a Martian.