Stanford Team Tries For Better Wi-Fi In Crowded Buildings 43
alphadogg writes "Having lots of Wi-Fi networks packed into a condominium or apartment building can hurt everyone's wireless performance, but Stanford University researchers say they've found a way to turn crowding into an advantage. In a dorm on the Stanford campus, they're building a single, dense Wi-Fi infrastructure that each resident can use and manage like their own private network. That means the shared system, called BeHop, can be centrally managed for maximum performance and efficiency while users still assign their own SSIDs, passwords and other settings. The Stanford project is making this happen with inexpensive, consumer-grade access points and SDN (software-defined networking)."
Re:Software Defined Networking = Telephony (Score:2, Insightful)
Your upstream provider can already do all of those things to you. They don't control where your packet goes upstream from you, but if your local ISP chooses to shut you out, the upstream folks will never see your packet in the first place. (The only difficult one is choosing the priority of the packet. Your local ISP can't raise the priority of your packet, but you bet they can lower it as much as they want by simply not sending it.)
The fact that ISPs don't do that is based on tradition and the threats of competition and regulation, not on any technical limitations.