[OLPC Networking] RSSI value questions

[david at lang.hm]

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Oliver Mattos wrote:

>> the commercial products are able to do it with unmodified laptops, so it
>> should not require a change to the over-the-air signal (unless this
>> generation of active antenna hardware isn't up to the task)
>>
>
> I'd be very innterested to know how they work - I can't see any way it could
> work using speed of light triangulation using any old off the shelf
> hardware, although there are quite a lot of other tricks I can see it could
> do:

I'm not saying that it works with off-the-shelf access points. I am sure 
that it uses custom access points (at the very least custom software on 
them), but it doesn't require changing the software on the devices being 
tracked.

among other uses, the commercial units are sold to companies who want to 
secure their WAN access. they triangulate the source of the signal, and if 
it's outside the company walls it gets blocked.

David Lang