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Open Networking
New10k writes "Here is a feature article on guys in Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere who are bringing the Open Source ethic to the idea of an available to all wireless Internet. Includes a short explanation of telco vs. free methods of providing access." I know folks who do this already, just not with permission (roam around cities with sniffers and find networks that aren't locked down ;)
Ricochet is going to cover 100 million people in the U.S. before the end of next year, and while it isn't as fast as 802.11, it is infinitely more reliable and designed by a company that has Paul Allen and WorldCom's blessing (and money).
http://www.ricochet.com It's a wide-area LAN that uses hundreds of Microcellular Digital radios (usually attached to light poles)arrayed around a city in a checkerboard pattern, with Wired Access Points directing the mesh network traffic onto tthe wired internet. It uses the 915Mhz and 2.4Ghz bands of free, unlicensed spectrum, so it avoids the billions of dollars of spectrum costs that the cellcos are going to have to pay for 3G...and here's the best part - it is available today at 128kbps, going to 256 and then 384kbps within the next two years.
Streaming media on a laptop, batman! I live in Santa Cruz and work in San Jose - but with my Ricochet modem (available in PC card form later this month) I can check my e-mail wirelessly from anywhere in the Bay Area - or Dallas - or Mahattan or anywhere else the network is eventually deployed. A co-worker of mine rode the ACE train from Fremont to work the other day, and stayed connected to the internet the whole time at 30-40kbps. The 128+kbps speeds (I've gotten as much as 250kbps at Stoddard's in Sunnyvale) are typical when you are stationary, but even 30kbps is usable for e-mail and light web use, turning the morning Caltrain or BART ride into productive time. It works with PCs and Macs, and with the USB support in the 2.4 kernel, porbably with Linux too (they've got a serial cable for the modem too, just in case).
The service isn't cheap, with prices at around $70.00 per month, but I think that we'll see that dropping over the next few months. For the convenience (and soon the ubiquity) of Ricochet, it's a small price to pay - plus, no tiny cell phone screens to squint at.
Some of you self-styled geeks should go check this out. It actually works and it is here today.
would this be similar to current free ISPs and if so how would they generate a profit (through advertisement)?
Ya'll, ok...the Lucent Wavelan Silver cards slide nicely into the Wavepoint basestation. We use these puppies as Points of Presence for a metro area business only Internet access solution, full 11MB wireless pipes into a backend with (2) OC3 pipes going up to the big boys...and yea..there are T1 backups and ISDN backups too... The client side demarc points are "very custom" kernel Linux Router Project boxes based in 486's, with Wavelan Silver cards stuck into the isa adapter card, got DMZs, private LAN and all the goodies in there. Anyways we implement network security using first and foremost really hard-to-guess names for the Wavepoint POPs with stupid hard admin passwords. In the Wavepoint there is a nice little setting for only allowing specific MAC (media access control)addresses to connect to the POP. (such as the mac address of the Wavelan Silver card in the client side router) In addition we encrypt the communication bi-directionally at some nifty high bitrate that I cannot remember off the top of my head. On a side note, the Wavelan cards are direct sequence and stick to one channel and that channel is fixed and thus easy to identify using the site survey tool (assuming you know the POP name or IP)...Note..the Breezecom products are frequency hopping and harder to thus get a link on, but they are WAY, and I mean WAY less dependable. That is my version of a warning to would be Breezecom users. Anyways, we actually make solid money with this stuff...if guys want to go solo..thats cool but make sure that you get the right antenna for the right job....and if you are gonna try and setup Points of presence in stead of direct shots...please, for your own sanity...use an array of directionals and not a Uni antenna. Way too much interference on client to Uni uplink usually as the Uni picks up everything in a 360 degree radius... limit your pain with directional arrays is the moral of this story. If you are gonna shoot long distances (15 to 20 miles) use as short a wire from antenna to wavelan card as possible ( db loss can be a pain on long runs) and use a pair of DB24 antennas with line amps. That would be my braindump of the day. enjoy. Oh yeah...add a beowolf cluster in there somewhere just to impress your friends.
For all you funky europeans with DECT cordless phones, make sure you change your security code on the base stations! It's the same deal as with the wireless LANs, except, DECT phones are far more common.
Most (all?) base stations ship with a default security code of "00", which makes it easy to reassign a random base station, if you just so happen to be walking down the street with a DECT handset.
Or something.
Anyone played with data over DECT? I see that there are standards for data and DECT, and DECT to ISDN gateways, etc., but haven't really seen any products. Data over DECT could be fun...
...j
Is real data flowing over consume.net yet?
If there was a node about 500 meters closer to me, I would be in range, but, well, until them. D'oh!
...j
160$ fee for a 9600 baud connection. Keep in mind the current speed limitations. Noaw compare that to cable or DSL, at speeds tremedously greater then those available.
:-)
Thats right.. Current network setups only give 9600 baud. Or, you can goto a screaming 56k for nearly a grand..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Not if you want RANGE..
:-)
An 802.11b card cannot provide nearly enough range for what is being talked about here. And you also have another limiting factor at that point. You're now sharing bandwidth with *EVERYONE* using this free service..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
pretty easy really. Most (if not all) 802.11b wireless products allow you tp specify that only certain MAC addresses can use it, so you can just mkae sure the MAC addresses of your wireless NICs are in the access list. You can also specify a network name rather than just allowing a card looking for "any" network to connect.
-jay
I thought Open Source was about having source code available. How does this apply to networking? You're going to require that the bandwidth be distributed with source?
http://www.opensource.org/osd.html
20Mbps seems a bit high. The highest experimental setup going a few yards at best, was 10Ghz and got 2-10Mbps.
A usable network would be about 2-3 Mbps at 10Ghz to 24Ghz.
I suppose you could take a larger spread with more xpensive equipment to get up to 20Mbps, but then you get more interference. The 2.4Ghz is already polluted from the sounds of the article. Its saving grace is that it doesnt carry very far, otherwise it would be extremely dirty.
At any rate, im not an RF expert like you said, but 20Mbps still seems very optimistic with any kind of hardware.
How much of this is usable for a dedicated RF transport? the 2.4Ghz band is quite large, but you cant use a 5 Mhz spread for your networking.
10Ghz microwave bands are nice for throughput, but what is the range for 10Ghz?
People were still running at 9600 bps, and you had to use explicit routing ("send this to A and from there to B and from there to C ...").
Actually there is a HAM group in Columbia, SC that has dynamic routing configured for their packet network.
I don't know the details, but it functions similar to an RF RIP protocol of some sort.
They may have something about this online, i'll look...
The benefit of sharter ranger 900Mhz or 2.4Ghz networks is bandwidth.
A typical 2.4Ghz network can handle over 1.2Mbps. Far beyond anything HAM bands can support.
While packet radio has its place, high bandwidth RF needs high frequency transport.
The equivalent of war-dialing.
There are a number of channel frequencies the devices operate at (within the 2.4Ghz or 900Mhz bands).
Via software configuration you can choose one of hundreds of available 'channels' and pretend your a valid RF device.
If you can communicate at all, you have found an active channel. If not, try the next.
Proprietary devices which do not use any standard or common channel frequencies require the more expensive scanning equipment to pick out the signal.
Is that you cannot guarantee security on the net ANYWAY. Use encryption.
That is fact, no matter what. You are transmitting data through networks you do not control, and have absolutely no power over.
You are right. The FCC had a proposal to grant thousands of low power licenses and the NAB poured millions into quashing this. Right now a bill that will kill this is on an appropriations bill, waiting for Congress to resume.
For more info see on the bill see this article.
For more on the media industry's lobbying to take away your airwaves see this report from the Center for Public Integrity.
Unfortunately the public mechanism that we have for arbitrating use of spectrum (the FCC) is under the thumb of the NAB. Witness what is happening with low power radio. The NAB pours millions into an effort to kill a proposal to grant thousands of low power radio licenses, that would bring diversity to the airwaves and permit the kind of civil society to flourish that these do it yourself networking projects have. If these projects become successful industry will in all likelihood manipulate the regulatory mechanism to quash any competition to their wireless services like MMDS.
We need to learn from what has happened to low power radio and not get behind like we are in open access. We need to create mechanisms for civil society to self regulate public resources, with the stakeholders doing the regulation not the government. And we need to make sure we keep access to our spectrum and not let the NAB lock it up.
This is something I have wanted to try to do for quite awhile.
I live in the Phoenix, Arizona area - specifically north of the east/west portion of Loop 101. My actual location makes it difficult to impossible to reach anything south and west (due to some mountains being in the way), but if anyone would like to help me set up a wireless (preferably optical!) net between houses - contact me or post to this thread. With enough nodes, dispersed properly, we could get around any obstacles of the nature...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Ok, I have a question. You say that for 'a few hundred bucks' I can buy a card that will allow me to tap into RF networks. Your link points to what appears to be a standard RF lan card.
How do you determine the SSID of the signal you want to tap (without a $15,000 box)?
Forgive me for playing the devil's advocate here, but people are fond of pointing out how easy it is to sniff wireless networks, but I've yet to see one person say 'I have done it and here is how'. One person said he sniffed his own network - but with a card set up for that net - well duh, no kidding.
So, can you (or anyone) just arbitrarily sniff on an unencrypted RF network without knowing anything about the network (like the SSID, for instance)? If so, how?
Inquiring minds...
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
It's a bit of a cat and mouse game with industry and the FCC in this regard. Industry needs to have connectors mass produced to keep costs down, the FCC wants to insure that people don't hook up antennas to devices that cause them to violate regulations and cause problems. Thus the need for "Industry standard non-standard connectors"
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
The only downside is that it's set up for NAT and now I can no long remote print because stupid LPR bitches that I'm no longer using a priviliged socket .... anyone got any ideas for a quick fix?
Next step of course will be to find a way to get the local Cafe wired .....
No! I was just bitching about this last night! I am not going back to schluffing packets over a friggin 9600 baud link in an unlicensed band! Do you know how much that chafed?!?!
No. Stick to small yagis, mabye a uni-quad and friggin 802.11.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Like all things "free" this service, although well intentioned, is expensive, mediocre, and unrealiable. Best of luck to them. We'll stick with our T1 and DSL.
Someone you trust is one of us.
the mailing list archives are here....
http://lists.spack.org/pipermail/ptp/
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
It might be possible to use a lightweight accounting system based on the Digital Silk Road to spread the load around and provide an incentive for people to add new nodes.
What a load of rubbish. HAM radio has a band at 2.4 GHZ with enough bandwidth for at least 20 Mbps (not to mention 3300-3500 MHz, 5650-5925 MHz etc etc), it even says in the article that these guys got their antennas from amateur radio suppliers. I agree that most amateur packet radio happens at painfully slow baud rates, but there are people doing much higher speed backbones.
The point which I was trying to make is that a wireless LAN consists of two very different technologies. The computer bit (protocols, error checking, addressing etc) and the RF bit (modems (not the same problem as telephone modems), amplifiers, IP3 performance, antennas, propagation etc). The RF bit is every bit as complex as the computer bit. Being an expert in computers does not make you an expert in RF engineering. It is a seperate subject which takes just as long to study at University. HAM radio has spent very many years learning lessons about widely distributed radio LANs, it would be realy stupid to ignore that knowledge when its available free for the asking.
I do research into future aircraft radio equipment and I often meet people who design wonderous inter-aircraft digital comms systems in the fond belief that the RF bit will be easy to add on at the end. They put it all together and prove once again that old adage that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Then they go white when I tell them how much its going to cost to fix it.
About 5 years ago me and a friend built a device that scans through the channels attached to garage door openers. It wasn't to big of a deal, just a brute force method, sending out radio signals on a range of channels as quick as possible. We hoped in the car and drove around the neighborhood with it, I haven't laughed that hard since, watching everybody's garage doors open. But seriously, if Net Admins think the "broadcast" nature of Ethernet Hubs causes security problems, wait until wireless takes hold. Hackers don't even have to plug into the network they just have to pull up a van next to the building. And what about DoS attacks? It's not difficult to build devices that can send out strong levels of noise on select channels, bringing a wireless network to it's knees. All issues that Network Admins will face in the future, just in case you thought your job was getting easy :)
Jay
Well, isn't this a bit insecure in a way? The air isn't really secure - and what could you find out about your neighbour that uses telnet to connect to his new web hosting company?. This brings atleast that they have to use full encrypted ethernet/IPSEC doesn't it? Also, on IRC, who would like others to see your conversation?. On a sidenote, people who want a IRC server with full SSL support (client-server, server-server), check the url in my sig.
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
Making only certain MACs privileged would still leave the network vulnerable to impersonation of those MACs, which would be visible to the sniffer. This is the same vulnerability that allows cell phones to be cloned. You'd need to encrypt everything to prevent this, in which case it wouldn't be necessary to allow only certain MACs (but it certainly wouldn't hurt anything).
It's "free" as in "Fair Use." And even that's not free; just remember what Sun did to you when you tried to release "Java(TM) Invaders." And also remember that Sun Microsystems threatened to sue when you use the "stylized Java(TM) logo" for the Java story topic.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I think this kind of misses the point. Ala Heinlein: TANSTAAFL, and everyone knows it. Of course hardware costs money, and of course running it costs money. This is a big-ole "DUH". Implementation is not free. That's not what "free as in beer" means. The beer recipe is downloadable gratis, but running the microbrewery is not.
But "free as in beer" means that the Intellectual Property *is* free. That vapor about which everyone is so worked up, patenting, and suing over is free. The details are out there, for free, is non-proprietary, and open to comment and further development.
The idea behind all this open network development is not so that you, or anyone for that matter, can get a cheaper lunch, it's so that those odd people out there who like burning themselves occasionally with solder might tweak with something that they're not going to get sued for reverse engeneering, folding, spindling, or mangling. Maybe, just maybe, an open development model might eventually come up with ways to make it as cheap or cheaper than commercial service... but that's not the point. That's a potential side effect of people who want to tweak.
So if you don't want to muck around with wiring, schematics, frequencies, climbing up on your roof, network settings, etc... feel free to just buy service from your local carrier. That's why they exist. It's an easy choice.
But the moment you want to start helping out that local carrier, or figure out how their tech works so that you can tweak it for your own benefit... forget about it. Their stuff is neither "free as in speech", nor "free as in beer".
The article said "Rain and walls also clog the pipes." This is different than saying 802.11b won't go through walls at all.
I'm typing on my laptop using a Lucent 802.11b card now, and I can tell you that walls do "clog" 2.4GHz signals. My data rate drops from 11Mb/s to 2Mb/s if I walk out my back door and sit on my porch.
These "community network" folks are pushing weak signals at distances they weren't designed for. Walls would do significant damage to their signal strength.
Without encryption, it would be like having a hub on my DSL modem that anybody driving by could plug in to...
Man, it would take a very hand and nerves of steel to accomplish a feat such as that.... =]
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
there's the same WaveLan PCMCIA card that's in my Linux laptop .... 802.11 is something that Apple adopted, not something they invented .... like lots of other coold stuff (like CD Drives, bitmapped displays etc etc) Apple is a great early adopter but just because you first saw it from them don't assume that they thought up the idea .... (oh yeah I love my Apple Airport - makes a great/cheap 802.11 RF router for my Linux network)
etherpeg.org have source code for an applicaiton that sniffs JPEGs and GIFs from 802.11 nets and draws them on the screen - great fun in public areas running AirPort.
Also, this is not an Apple-developed system. I believe that it was pioneered by Lucent. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Apple's implementation is Lucent's.
Fuck 'im up, Tim! His views are invalid! -Pirate Corp$
By the way, I'd like to hear more about cruising the streets with a sniffer looking for open networks. How's that done, and what does one do to 'lock down' the network? I've been thinking of putting in a wireless network, but I hadn't thought about this hazard.
Here I go with a bit of karma-whoring (joke)
Go here to read about a loose coalition of london people trying to set up a similar scheme.
And go here to read all the comments from when this subject was last posted on /. just over a week ago.
Ben^3 (wondering whether CmdrTaco et al have goldfish DNA)The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
It seems to me that rather than trying to take wireless LAN technology which is realy designed for short range in-building networking and fixing it to big external antennas (which is basically what these guys are going), it might be a better plan to take technology from the HAM community and adapt it to these unlicenced bands.
The article is vague, but I very much doubt that these wireless LAN radios have the strong signal handling required to operate well when connected to a large external antenna.
Summary: An interesting idea, but one that needs as much imput from radio expert as it does from computer experts. RF engineering is not as simple as it sounds once you start dealing with a lot of signal over a large area.
G1DGL
"Free as in beer" software is not really "free as in beer". Someone has to pay for hardware, electricity, web hosting, whatever... So there is a cost, but it's so small that the creator is absorbing it, or perhaps ad banners or sponsors.
This is hardly free either: "$800 to buy all the components needed to get hooked up". (that's US) + maintenance + time.
Here in Canada I pay 40 bucks (Canadian) a month for ADSL or Cable (I've used both). My adsl connection will actually run 2 machines straight of the ADSL-modem (with a hub) (anyone with sympatico can do this).
So at that rate, this scheme might pay for itself after 2 years, but in 2 years I'll probably have a faster and cheaper connection anyways.
-... ---
Since this is obviously a big threat to large telecom providers like ATT, MCI, etc., I wonder if they will lobby the FCC to step in on their behalf. This kind of movement has happened before, most notably with micropower (around 1 watt) FM radio stations.
A couple of years ago, I became interested in setting up my own radio station so I investigated the FCC requirements for getting a broadcasting license. It turns out that the application fee for getting your broadcast license is several thousand dollars and the associated paperwork takes a team of lawyers to complete properly. Not only that, but the FCC won't even CONSIDER giving you a license if you're broadcasting at less than 100 watts. The equipment for that level of power gets pretty expensive for the average citizen. IMHO, these requirements don't benefit the public at all, it just artificially restricts broadcasting on the public airwaves to the big companies that can afford the price of admission. I suspect some heavy lobbying was involved...
I wonder if the large telecoms and their teams of lobbyists will try to get the FCC to step in on this...
This
These types of RF networks have been in use by companies for quite a few years (i.e. manufacturing data collection)
Like the TacoMan said, many of these networks aren't secured very well.
Half a dozen manufacturing plants that I integrated RF data collection devices for did not use any type of authentication of encryption and relied solely on frequency channels to identify remote RF terminals.
For a few hundred bucks, Intermec and others can provide you with ISA cards to tap into RF networks and even PCMCIA cards that you can plug right into your laptop.
These devices setup an IP connection that ties a psuedo terminal on a unix server to the ANSI/VT100/etc emulation terminal running on the data collection devices themselves.
Some of the newer models provide a light weight web browser configured for various ports on a unix server to handle the data collection interface.
Almost all (95%+) of the data collection applications that are attached to the other end of these RF terminals are running on critical enterprise servers so that they can be close to the databases they feed.
It always baffled me that the IS tech's would be so lax on security simply because it was 'RF'.
As a side note, eavesdropping on an RF network is orders of magnitude easier than typical networks (ethernet / ATM) and effectively impossible to identify. For a few hundred bucks anyone can make a RF 'tcpdump' with a laptop and RF PCMCIA card that will trap every single IP packet flying over the RF networks.
So, the moral of this story is:
RF entails much more security risk than typical networking. Beware when you implement an RF network, and keep security at the top of your to-do list.