Sprint-Nextel finally looks like they have a plan to be successful. This week they announced they are going to partner with other companies including Clearwire and Google to deploy their WIMAX network. There were also rumors about Sprint trying to sell the Nextel brand which they spent billions to buy just a couple years ago. These are good signs because it shows that Sprint has a plan for its different networks. Sprint’s is currently running two, and soon to be three, separate networks. If Sprint could offload Nextel then it wouldn’t need support the Nextel network which is very costly to operate.

Sprint has been recently focusing a great deal of attention on its new WIMAX network, but this isn’t where their issues lie. Sprint needs to fix the problem associated with it current cellular network. Dan Hesse, Sprint-Nextel’s new CEO, seems to be making major strides in improving the brand’s image by improving customer service. Sprint needs something to differentiate it from its big rivals. Cool phones aren’t the answer and neither is a $100 everything plan. Sprint needs to embrace what the young generation wants: internet everywhere. If Sprint offered unlimited data access on all their plan’s they could win over a huge number of customers. The young generation wants to check Facebook on their phones but current data costs for most carriers are prohibitive. Teens have a huge influence, and if they tell their parents they want to switch to Sprint because it offers free access to the internet, many parents would be willing to do this. Sprint should require all of it’s phones to support EVDO and come with a good browser such as Opera Mini. Even if you get a “free” phone you can still surf the net, something that no other carrier would be capable of. A large change is needed if Sprint is going to win new customers in a saturated wireless market.

This weekend I displayed my wind powered wireless network repeater at the RIT Innovation Festival. The turnout was great but the weather consisted of light showers and the wind was very calm. I explained the project to many people and showed how it was operational by surfing the net on an OLPC by RIT’s quarter mile. Here are the posters I displayed at my booth explaining the project.

There are a lot of great sites on the net that explain how to build your own wind turbine. My favorite is by Michael Davis and you can view his site here. Another great place is gotwind.org and the site also has a discussion form with many other DIY wind turbine builders.

How the Project Works:

My wireless network repeater consists of four parts: wind turbine, batteries, charge controller, and wireless network gear. The wind turbine consists of an electric DC motor which is connected to three blades. When the wind blows, it causes the blades to spin. This produces a DC voltage which depends on how fast the generator is spinning. My turbine produces 12v at around 300RPM. Above this speed causes current to flow into the batteries which charge them. The issue on days with light wind is that the blades won’t spin fast enough to reach 12v, so the batteries won’t charge. I am investigating a voltage boosting circuits which would trickle charge the batteries on days with light wind. To prevent the batteries from overcharging on windy days I use ghurd’s charge controller. When the batteries voltage reaches a certain level, the controller dumps the power to a set of load resistors.

For the wireless network gear, I use two Linksys WRT54G routers with the DDWRT firmware. The first router acts as the backhaul link and is setup in client bridge mode. It has a 18dBi 2.4Ghz parabolic antenna so if can communicate over far distances. The second router is connected to the first one via an Ethernet cable, and is set up in access point mode. DHCP is disabled on both units, so any devices connecting to the repeater will pull an IP address from the DHCP server from the host network. In my case I connect to the wind turbine network which had an SSID of “Wind Turbine,” and I receive an IP address from RIT’s network. My laptop looked/worked like any other computer on the network even though I was located in a field far away from RIT’s network infrastructure.

Last month I installed my wind turbine wireless repeater project at RIT.  I planned on adding information regarding the project to this site, but my friend Dave Brenner beat me to it.  Dave wrote an article on his site regarding the installing of the turbine and Make Magazine linked to it on their blog.