I'm kind of going to go on and on here, because this post is more for me to get my thoughts down then to comunicate with you Andy, but feel free to reply...

I guess it really depends on what I want to do, and what RADIUS is capable of doing... If it's not obvious I want to set up cells in public places and charge people for usage (just like everyone else). So, let me first say before I continue on and people think I'm crazy, yes I do believe that people will pay for wireless access at their local coffee shop regardless of the existence of community hotspots. Ok, with that said, I don't nessicarily see that the backend has to be as inexpensive as possible, just as long as whatever solution I use has the functionality I need and has the ability to scale. The fact is I'm going to have to buy a very limited amount of backend equipment (and hopefully) a whole lot of access equipment. As far as nocat goes, I can't really tell WHAT they do. The nocat white paper is as useless as my spelling and so is the apparent lack of documentation on their site. All I can get from it, is that there is an authentication service (nocatauth) which is seperate from but works in conjunction with linux wireless routers which use their self-developed proprietary application (wrp) to authenticate wireless clients primarily for access to the network and secondarily for differential service which they probably implement through bandwith throtleing. Thats nice, call me superstitios (and excuse the sarcasm) but I wouldn't in a thousand years put anything but appliances at a customers premises. And since nocatauth doesn't appear to use RADIUS and the throttling functionality is already built into the orinoco outdoor gateways I intend on using, nocatauth looks redundant, uninteropperable with what I'm using and not really what I need. I have an orinoco box in the mail, when it arrives I intend to set it up with cistron RADIUS server, which is free, just to see what I can and can't do. Also another option is going with guys like http://www.hereuare.com/index-how.html , they resale billing services to WISPs, although, I'm sure they probably take quite a bit off the top. These guys http://www.wifimetro.com/about.html use them. I havn't priced aptilo yet, but It looks expensive... I'll let you know on that. Authentication, Autherization, Accounting... RADIUS records start and stop times specifically to calculate usage for billing, so the hooks are their, I'll just have to see what it takes. Another thing that is bugging me is that it appears, you have to install a client if you want to use radius with the orinoco boxes, I was hoping to find a box that would do everything over ssl in a browser window so no client side app would be nessicary?