Alternative Wireless Networks

Elvis Maximus writes "Technocrat.net has an interesting piece on an effort in London to create a wireless alternative to traditional ISPs called consume.net. Similar projects discussed include guerilla.net, SFLAN and SeattleWireless." Interesting both from the technological and legal sides.

Comments

Metricom's "Ricochet" system (vapor marketing)

[GMontag]

Then there's Metricom's "Ricochet" system. That's more aimed at mobile users. Uses little, shoe-box-sized repeaters mounted on utility poles all over the place.

I live in the DC metro area and actually contacting Metricom here is quite a chore.

The last time I looked at their website (several weeks ago) there were no prices for service listed. When I called, I sat on VM hold for AGES and was never able to speak with a human to find out how much they want per month (their system told me to call back later and hung up).

They are still at 28.8 kbps in this area and have been promising 128 "soon" for about 3 years, still not here.

I was going to use 2 or 3 channels for a vehicle project, but TDB now, they will not get my business nor will they be a sponsor.

Yet another example of a great theory that did not survive contact with reality.

Visit DC2600

Re:Modem pooling

[jovlinger]

That is an excellent idea. You can visualise a system where the network can request a computer to dial in an add aggregate bandwidth. In the era of flat dial-up pricing, this would work wonders.

The only problem is that in order to get decent routing behavior (you want the path through the modems to be transparent) you'll need at least one dedicated server with a good connection to be a routing proxy -- all the modem connected users are masqed behind it, and it forwards packets along the least congested route.

I'm grinning like a fool in love. This is just soo cool. I hereby present you with the Joho prize for coolest idea of the day -- typically presented in the afternoon, but today we make an exception.

You need tall things to do this

[Animats]

This was tried twice in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s. Once by Dewayne Hendricks, who wanted to put a node at every library to cover the surrounding area, and once by Tom Jennings, the designer of FidoNet, as The Little Garden, an early ISP. Some of us at Stanford even looked into this in the late 1980s, but nothing came of that.

At least one end of an RF link needs to be well-sited and engineered. Cell sites and broadcast stations are in high, well-chosen locations with good antennas, so that they work with remote units in lousy locations with poor antennas. This is the basic limitation on peer-to-peer RF systems. However, if you have access to tall things to hang antennas on, it can work. Today, though, it's hard to find a tall thing that isn't overgrown with cellular antennae. People with tall things now want to be compensated for antennas on them. And there's more public opposition to putting antennae up every year.

I'd once toyed with this idea as a net for video games, with all the video game boxes in a neighborhood linking up. I'd also thought of a way to do legal "pirate" radio, with boom boxes acting as relay stations using spread-spectrum in a junk band. But without well-placed base stations, there will be too many dead spots.

Metricom probably has the cutest approach to this problem. Their service uses little boxes attached to street lights, and operates spread-spectrum in the 900MHz band. Most of the nodes are RF-only relays; only a few have wired connections to the Internet. They provide a good, although low-bandwidth, flat-rate mobile Internet service.

Re:If dirt world communities behaved like online o

[danderson]

you still have to use a Mac to use the AirPort base station

If the AirPort is truely IEEE 802.11 compliant (as it claims), you should be able to use _any_ vendor's 802.11 compliant hardware with it. And other vendors support other hardware and operating systems.

For you Linux types: Enterasys' wireless offerings include linux drivers

Problems I see with this...

[Kierthos]

Well, it actually depends on how the plans are to do this... if it's via a laser transmission, that has it's own set of flaws, while a radio peer-to-peer has another set.

Lasers:

(1) Weather. If it's rainy (Seattle), smoggy (L.A.) or snowy (Canada), then you have problems. Also, other 'obstacles' like pigeons and such can be fairly hazardous to a connection... :P

(2) Precision. Laser transmission has to be fairly precise, or you're going to lose packets. Which is not a good way to promote the efficiency of your product. ("We only lose 30% of your information")

(3) Power. Laser transmission can be very ineffective, power-wise, and the further it has to travel, the tighter the beam (what with precision and all) has to be. You have to be careful about power output in open areas.

(4) Interference: What happens if two or more lasers cross? Packet data swaps? Corruption of data? Nothing?

Now, mind you, in a relatively small, enclosed area (I believe an arcology has been mentioned), it might be more feasible.

Radio peer-to-peer:

(1) Available frequencies: If every 'user' is on their own sub-frequency, in large metropolitan areas, you can run out of sub-frequencies rather quickly. What with radio traffic already there, you have to be able to devote a frequency to a user that can be assured of less then a fixed amount of interference.

(2) Jamming: If you're using a radio peer-to-peer, it's possible to be jammed fairly easily. It's fairly simple to set up a broad-band radio jammer to mess with local radio stations right now (with most, if not all of the parts available at Radio Shack). It may not work over a very wide area, mind you, but it can be done.

(3) Privacy: Radio peer-to-peer, unless properly encrypted, can be 'listened' in on by practically any other user of a radio ptp. And with the right software, encryption can be circumvented, for the most part. After all, you have to be able to insure that the receiver can read it. You can't just send a PGP key with this, because potentially, anyone could 'see' it.

If you're out in the middle of East Armpit, Texas, this becomes less of an issue, but in major metro areas, you'll have all kinds of d00dz playing around with their toys.

IMAO, radio peer-to-peer is not the way to go for now, but for all I know, all of my concerns have been addressed already. Laser transmission offers it's own problems as well, which I really can't see certain ways around. The last thing I want is a 'laser grid' in the sky full of information. Too many possibilites that something could go wrong.

Kierthos

Re:Problems I see with this...

[GMontag]

Perhaps you need to investigate the premises of your various theories a little more.

1. Check this thread http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/09/12/12422 13&cid=19 first. There is a link to a Security Geeks story that has info on hacking an AirPort (now, I am told, useable on Linux and Mac) base station to 128bit encryption.

2. The HAM radio encryption limit is not anything like what you say. It is a legeslated restriction. You are not "allowed" to encrypt on amature frequencies by law, not by physics.

You can easily use any encryption method you like across a TNC (terminal node controller) packet connection. As long as you do not mind breaking the law. If you use public key encryption it will work just fine (well, as fine as TNC gets anyway). The radio can care less if the bursts are gibberish or human readable.

However, you can signal hop and use any method you like for that, so long as the data is not encrypted. Check some of the Off the Hook archives for this info, bernieS gave a nice brief outline of this method on a show from last year or so.

3. Several news stories recently have covered breakthroughs in laser networking. However, moving your house to a line-of sight path to the hub may not be practical.

Visit DC2600

Re:Wireless Problems

[titus-g]

Always thought Manchester had pretty good weather on account of being being in a valley (you've never lived till you've been over snake pass in heavy snow) sort of localised weather system, could see this working a lot better places like edinburgh or stirling (maybe moving there soon) where a lot of the town is on a hill, all we need it to get the National Trust to let us put huge antenna (?) on the castles :)

Funnily enough I actually posted this to /. before I posted it to technocrat.net, ho hum :))

Re:Modem pooling

[titus-g]

Yeah I was thinking of something like that, after having tried things like midpoint with windows before.

But here you have a network where you can have a huge amount of gateways to the internet (modems, ISDN, ADSL, cable), most of which where the person 'dialed up' will be using either a fraction or none of the connection (right now I'm reading a several 100K /. page, modem idle) all that bandwidth could be being used.

I thought initially there would have to be some checks, i.e. if I wanted to download sunsite for fun, well I wouldn't want people using my connection, but umm then there are all those other people doing nothing...

I'd say this is, or at least should be, the way of the future. Taking the power back :)

The main problem I can see so far is that there is nothing centralised, these are all isolated projects, and when it comes to linking them there will be IP conflicts etc.

Also is the software available yet? stuff like BGP going through masqued gateways, or tunneled over the internet.

Really regretting the fact that I spent the day setting up IMAP on my server and missed this thread while it was still alive.

So it goes....

Re:Modem pooling - Downside

[titus-g]

checkout midpoint.com why is there nothing like this O/S yet?

or taking a wild guess and saying there probably is, where is it? me want

Re:Sounds like amateur radio packet relay concept

[titus-g]

yeah, if you read through the archives at consume.net they seem to have realised this, like the range that they want to use is restricted, as far as I can tell though they have chosen to ignore this so far...

Look.ca is already doing this

[Ron Harwood]

Check out look.ca if you live in Canada...

They're doing full, bi-direcional wireless in test markets now - but they already have uni-directional with a modem for the uplink, which still works well with laptops.

Wireless Problems

[eric2hill]

We have a company in town that provides 2.4GHz wireless internet access. The biggest problem is if you order a T1's worth of data, and it starts raining, you may only get 128K or 256K. Weather adversely effects the signal quality. Laser transmission suffers from the same problems. The only way to get a strong connection in any weather conditions is to get a hard line.

Modem pooling

[interiot]

This sounds like what I wanted to do in my dorm 6 years ago when we only had dial-in connections, but we had a fast local network. I wanted to combine the bandwidth of the modems to produce a bandwidth pool that local users could use. This assumes that the local network is faster than the dial-up connection, and that the dial-up link is the weakest link between you and the internet.

One of the benefits not mentioned in the article is that there's greater reliability since each computer has many ways of communicating with the 'net.
--

Re:Modem pooling

[interiot]

Here's an analogy: many islands each with a small bridge to mainland. If the islands interconnect, then if one island wants to move lots of cargo to mainland and the other islands aren't shipping anything, then some of the trucks can first go to other islands and then go to mainland. This situation is even better when the islands are closer to each other than they are to mainland, making it economical to build faster & wider bridges between the islands, so overall latency isn't increased very much.
--

If dirt world communities behaved like online ones

[GMontag]

If dirt world communities behaved like online communities, or even if the HAM "spirit" would spread a bit, we could have wireless networks all across the countryside.

This securitygeeks story covers how to setup a very basic AirPort wireless network that can communicate at great distances as well as 128 bit encryption.

As far as I know you still have to use a Mac to use the AirPort base station, but it does not look like it would be impossible to hack for UNIX use (perhaps it already has been and I just missed the news).

Anyway, the point is that the hardware and the software is already here, all we need to do is band together and use it.

Visit DC2600

Re:check out MANET

[jbf]

We (ad hoc networking community, not necessarily IETF MANET WG community) do pretty well for small nets (Broch et al, Mobicom 98) and geographically routable large nets (Ko and Vaidya, Mobicom 98; Li et al, Karp and Kung, Mobicom 00)

Also, a silly plug, we (the monarch group) haven't updated our latest internet draft because we've been busy writing working code =) Another interesting protocol is DSR: http://www.monarch.cs.cmu.edu/ietf.html

Who cares about ISPs?

[BenL]

What everyone seems to be missing is that this is an opportunity to bypass ISPs altogether. A network by the people and for the people. Internet3!

Re:Modem pooling - Downside

[slashdot-me]

Suppose you had several nodes (say you and your neighbors) each with a different ISP (and interconnected with ethernet). How could you do packet level load balancing between the multiple connections? Perhaps you could set up a VPN among your neighbors and a fast colo'ed machine. Then run OSPF on you private network and NAT at the colo. Of course this makes it difficult for each resident to have their own servers. But they could always run their servers on the colo machine instead which is probably better anyway.

Wow, it'd be like having your own private internet. I'll setup an ARIN analog to dole out private ips. Then I'll create a new country code '.ryan' for my internal machines. Since my domain server will proxy DNS lookups everything will work out fine. Then I'll make my own napster server and a private usenet. An IP parallel universe. Cool! Right out of a sci-fi novel.

Are there any large scale VPN alternate universes out there?

Ryan

Interesting model...but can it work?

[Cylix]

Interesting model...

Essentially they want to create a high speed and low cost wireless intranet within their area. It would be nice to have something similar to a local free high speed network in your home town. Fast file sharing and quick access to those within your networks limits.

However, I saw no mention of any type of bandwidth provisions... it would seem as if they would be relying on network providers to peer with them... If this is the situation, I would seriously doubt anyone would give away bandwidth for free.

This sounds like a nice idea, but I have a difficult time grasping of how you would get this to work properly. IMHO relying on others to contribute is usually a bad idea.

With a select and dedicated group of individuals who would give a damn if the network runs and maintain their part...this could work... so it would seem this is left to the hobbyist and small organizations to implement for themselves.

I don't think you get the point...

[ManDude]

I don't think you get it.

Look.ca is trying to be a big fat ISP. It is only interested in your money not your freedom. consume.net and guerilla.net are trying to make you your own ISP giving you your freedom. Just because Look is wireless doesn't mean that it is the same.

DudeMan

Re:Wireless Problems -BZZZZT

[nosilA]

This depends largely on the frequency that you are transmitting at. Higher frequencies (i.e. microwave) diffract more and therefore you experience a major loss of signal during rain, or even high humidity. Lower frequencies (i.e. FM) do not diffract nearly as much and are more or less unaffected by weather. 2.4GHz is somewhere in the middle there, and the amount that weather effects it is mostly proportional to how directional the antenna is. omnidirectional antennae don't lose much signal in rain, but directional do (dispersion is bigger problem).

-Alison

Re:Modem pooling - Downside

[tzanger]

True, you may have larger aggregate bandwidth; however, any individual connection can only download/upload at the modem rate. Special exceptions can be made when you own the servers on the other ends of modems, but in a normal circumstance, it's not possible. In which case the whole system is kinda pointless, and everyone would be better off with their own modems.

Untrue

I personally had 4 modems dialled into the same NAS on my provider (with different accounts) and the link speed was a little under the theoretical maximum for a single modem *4. This was because the NAS allowed pooling. This was back in the 2.0.x days of the Linux kernel and the program which enslaved the individual ppp links was a little kludgy, but it worked wonders. So long as the other end is a Total Control center or a Cisco AS5200/5300, you should be fine, so long as the guy running it kept modem banding enabled. :-)

Re:Arcologies

[sjames]

In a city where there are hundreds of possible receptors, how can I prevent someone from stealing my notes as I send them back to my computer?

That is not a technical problem. Just use public key encryption to exchange session keys. The real problem has been export limits and companies who figure that the stupid lusers they sell to won't know the difference anyway.

The first problem is less of an issue now in the U.S., the second just requires clueful users finding clueful vendors or Free software.

No Mac required

[geoGIF]

I've been using my Airport with Linux for several months now. It works great. It is useful to have a Mac to initially configure the Airport base station, but not necessary. I borrowed a Mac laptop from work to set mine up the first time. Several weeks ago I was messing with my configuration and got everything munged up; not feeling like driving to the office to borrow the laptop again, I found a Java Airport configurator. Works perfectly from both Win32 and Linux: no Mac required.

ISPs and Wireless LAN Technology

[gscott]

I work for a company that sell wireless LANs. I the past 9 months, over 75 percent of our sales calls have been from ISPs implementing wireless LAN technology to deliver internet services to customers. Unfortunately, most of them know little about the technology and are not interested in engineering a wireless network that delivers a constant bandwidth with high reliability. Most seem to want to only be able to deliver something faster than dialup and then don't car if they have to flood the spectrum with enough RF to bake a potato at 500 yards! The three unliscend bands are around 915 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and 5.8 GHz. THe 915 band has become so flooded with RF due to overlap by the paging towers that it is considered no longer reliable (at least by us, we tend to be more conservative). The advent of the 802.11b compatible 11 Mb cards abd caused a HUGE explosion in the amount of 2.4 GHz equipment out there. My humble opinion is that a few years down the road, the end user look up his ISP's number on his Bluetooth enabled PalmPilot, will call his ISP on his 2.4 GHz phone, and complain that his 2.4 GHz internet connection does't work worth a damn. The use of frequency hopping allows a network to be designed so that it can handle the interference better but there are distance limitation and (until very recently) bandwidth limitations. . The 5.8 GHz band is fairly open and there are several standards in the works that will open it up to high bandwidth, low cost products but right now there aren't too many out there. The distance limitations hurt too. Sorry for rambling. I just don't think that creating a city-wide 2.4 GHz network (I am assuming here, don't know if that is what they really are doing at consume.net) is really possible due to the sheer amount of 2.4 GHz equipement that is going to be around in a few years. The FCC never really intended for the wireless LAN equipment to be so prevalent in the world of ISPs, IMHO. It's great indoors and for bridging LAN's but the more people put it out there, the more interference we are all going to have to deal with eventually. If you are really interested in the wireless ISP arena, check out the archives at isp-planet.com. They have a wireless mailing list and there is a lot of info there. You could also check out wispa.org. Just my thoughts as a frustrated salesperson/tech support guy.