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Wireless Freenets
i8u writes ""It's hard to tell whether these things are a threat or an opportunity for ISPs. I'm talking about community wireless networks using inexpensive 802.11b radios and antennas operating in the 2.4 GHz spectrum band, and possibly other license-free bands." "
IPv6 is most likely to take off in 2003, when UMTS Release 5 starts being deployed - UMTS is the European 3G mobile phone standard, and mandates that any device that does multimedia must use IPv6 (ordinary phones can just use IPv4 behind a NAT, as they do now with GPRS in Europe). This is one of the key drivers for adoption of IPv6, but it will take a while before IPv6 filters into corporations and the home through the influence of IPv6 phones. Internet-enabled appliances might also be a driver for IPv6 but I'm not sure they'll sell in sufficient numbers.
...), and most OSs (Linux, Solaris 8, FreeBSD, Windows XP, ...), already have IPv6 support, though some vendors are taking time to add the full set of routing protocols on top of IPv6.
Most router vendors (Cisco, Nortel, Ericsson,
For WLANs, IPv4 with NAT will be fine for some time.
1) Proxied free access to port 80 outbound only. This way, you get rid of the spammers and slow down the script kiddies. Eventually, someone will end up using it for fraud of some sort, so it'd be good to use a proxy to at least prove that it wasn't you. Your ISP will boot you, but good logs might keep you out of jail.
2) Quasi-free access. A setup like the above that redirects any HTML request to a web page that asks people to sign up. Use the standard list management routine of "give me an email address. I'll send mail with a code. You return that code to me." Link that to a hardware address. Then, give registered hardware addresses access to anywhere. Again, through the proxy to save your butt if they do something bad. That way, you can at least hand the police an email address.
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The folks at http://nocat.net/ are working on the security issue with some GPL'd software (http://nocat.net/download/NoCatAuth-0.20.tar.gz) that authenticates in a reasonably secure fashion, without having to trust the local gateway, and assigns three classes of service: Node Owner, Community Member (other node owner), and Guest. Bandwidth allocations and firewall proxies are set based on the class of service.
83chrise.nuf
Certainly doable but would be a significant effort for hobbyists, compared to the reasonable cost of just buying an Internet link.
Sounds like less work than, say, writing you own OS kernel. Seriously, every city has people out there in the work force doing this stuff. I bet a few of them are interested in linux and the open source movement. They could cooperate pretty easily , it seems.
This sounds like the kind of thing that a good LUG could easily organize.
It's true that the FCC are a bunch of spectrum thieves, who nationalized spectrum in the Roosevelt days to protect the big-money communications companies from competition (even if they made lots of hype about protecting the public's interest in the public's airwaves), and US and European spectrum regulators figured out that the hype about Next Generation Wireless Services could be used to put a big hidden tax on wireless telephony and low-speed data services, which is showing up as huge debts by cellphone companies, just in case any of them weren't getting themselves into debt trouble investing in the fiber bandwidth glut
Fortunately, there's enough unlicensed spectrum to build some reasonable collections of services, but it'll take a lot of coordination. Metricom / Ricochet tried for a while; unfortunately they couldn't make enough money at it, but maybe another generation of providers will succeed, using faster commodity equipment. It's possible to do freenets if you can find a way to coordinate them (tough). But Starbucks is starting to offer commmercial wireless services for $X/month, and so are a few other companies, targeting either the coffeeshop market or the airport market, where there are enough business users with laptops and possibly wireless networks. Not much help if you live in the burbs, but here in San Francisco there's a law requiring a Starbucks on every other block, so if you live in the dot-com live-work loft district, that may be an attractive way to get service. For urban residential areas, where there's enough density for wireless nets to work, it's hard to say whether freenets or businesses will be more successful.
Bill Stewart
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802.11b freenets are great and I by all means encourage more people to open them up and run them (I have a little one running), but they are hardly a realistic threat to ISPs. The simple fact is that WiFi just doesn't have enough range and penetration to make significant coverage economically feasible ad-hoc. It takes a lot of placements to get decent coverage, particularly when leaves, many walls, and most other obstructions attenuate the signal a great deal. Hell, look at all the money Metricom had to pump into getting decent coverage (different tech, but similar range issues).
If you look at the major freenet networks (such as SFLan and BAWUG here in San Francisco or others), their actual coverage is really quite tiny. Sure, you can find a good number more by war driving around the city, but that hardly gets to the point that were making a dent in the ISP revenue stream. While I'm optimistic on their expanding and the radios improving, what percentage of SF residents realistically would have usuable signal strength in their homes in 1, 2, even 3 years out?
If you do decide to run a freenet, get an external antenna with some decent gain, though WAP antenna connectors have to be proprietary, most are just reversed DNC or the like. You get a pretty shocking increase in range and penetration even with a 3db omni and a lot less sensitivity to the wireless card's orientation (which is all to often flat and sub-optimal for pickup). A lot of the freenet spec out relatively expensive hardware (< $1K for SFLan), but a little antenna hacking can get most any WAP to reach out for semi-decent range.
Regards, RJS
As the proprietor of a wireless ISP, I can say we have a difficult time keeping our own towers from interfering from each other. Even though 802.11 has 11 channels, only 3 of them can co-exist peacefully. Luckily we have an RF engineer on staff, who with the right antennas and network design can eliminate these problems, or work around them. With lots of these "mom and pop" freenets, they will definitely interfere with each other. Also with a large number in an area, and all broadcasting the "world" SSID, you may roam to another access point with a different subnet and loose connectivity.
Could this be like the old days of Fidonet where we were able to transmit email without having to pay access fees?
If we establish local 802.11b networks that connect to each other in every neighborhood, then we won't need ISPs. Of course, someone will have to pay for the bandwidth to the internet backbone eventually, right?
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1- Last mile connection has always been a problem for telcos because they aren't profitable. it is the service that is profitable (so the cost of the last maile has to be subsidised)
2- Therefore this can only mean good news for big telcos and ISPs
3- Oh, but what if a lot of amateurs just setup a bunch of these and it's free and people don't have to pay for it, are the telco's and ISP's screwed then?
4- Nope. the problem with spread spectrum and other no-license-required frequencies is that, well, no license is required, meaning there's no control over it and eventually they get saturated. so all a telco or ISP has to do is install plenty of these cheap antenas when enough people are using it for it to matter, make sure that those antenas are a tad more powerful than the amateur ones and presto. you took over. ever seen what spread spectrum looks like in El Salvador (and no, San Salvador is not some ugly middle of the jungle place like most americans think)? Caracas? Rio de Janeiro?
5- Once this is done, the demand for this either crashes (due to poor connection quality because of interference), or the big companies steal all the customers....at a price.
hmm just re-read the post and kinda sounds like a troll. that wasn't the intent. sorry.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
802.11 works great. It generates traffic, right? So ISPs should be delighted that it's out there, because it will lead to more users on more high-capacity lines in more locations. I sell DSL for a living and would be thrilled to have freenets buying my service (AS LONG AS THEY PAY THE BILLS). Where's the downside? I don't see it.
sulli
RTFJ.
Now if someone starts spamming or DOSing from your account, and you get booted off your service, that will also be your problem. You are responsible for whatever goes down that wire.
(Full disclosure: I work for an ISP offering DSL service; our TOS behave this way, and I'm sure your ISP's do as well.)
sulli
RTFJ.
Yeah I wish I didn't have to pay a monthly fee. I live in the small village of Dundee, MI and I'm paying 69.95 for my 802.11b "broadband" connection. Plus the 200.00 deposit on the antenna and wireless network card, plus the 99.95 install fee. Yeah, free would be nice, but I don't see it.
Okay, so I've got some spare bandwidth on my DSL line. If I throw down $300 for a wireless base station, what are my legal liabilities if I provide free access to anyone who wants to use it?
If you have a clear line of sight and a amplifier/directional antennae you can get your little wireless cards to go for miles. That serves as a good way to link different nets, but there are some other good ways to connect you and your friends at higher speed.
- Get an unused pair of copper from the phone copany that connects you and your friend, get two old ADSL modems off of ebay, and hook it all up for a cheap, reasonably fast link. You can also do the same with just bulk copper wire you run yourself (or so I hear, never tried it). String a few of these together and you could get your own psuedo-backbone for your town and add wireless access points off of it in different locations.
- If you are really old school, you can do the 300/1200bd HAM packet-radio thing. Pretty good distances, but not much good for anything except checking a couple text emails.
Anyone got any other good ideas?
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- 802.11b. And maybe lots of it in some places. You can only have so many overlapping networks before performance degrades.
- 2.4Ghz cordless phones. By FCC regs, these can transmit as much power as an 802.11b card, so it only takes a few of them in your neighbourhood to start running over your wireless LAN.
- Cordless anything. Keyboards, mice, gamepads...and funny, what are these usually right next to... your 802.11b card!
- Microwaves. Which can pump out a shit-load of power and noise into the 2.4GHz band
- Other industrial ISM-band equipment
While you can boost performance by using a high-gain directional antenna and putting it up high (like the top of your house) the legal limits on trnasmitted power are still really low - like 1 W RMS (according to the article - I thought it was 1mW RMS, but my memory is bad). I toyed briefly with the idea of setting up an 802.11b antenna on the top of my new house as I work fairly close to where I line and it would just be, you know, cool. But it's expensive and the only way to really get decent range is to use a number of cells (and I don't have the capital to build out a city-wide network) or crank the power, which is fine by me, but technically illegal.Anyway, I don't really have enough spare time to hand-roll and antenna like these freenet guys, so I was thinking about buying one from HyperLink Technologies, but then I'm too cheap to do that.
Anyway, sounds like fun. Anyone building one in Toronto?
Companies don't lay down backbones as a public service, they do it to sell bandwith and make money.
I agree, but you obviously didn't read my post. The Internet was not created for the benefit of these companies. I recognize their right to exist and to make money, but I do not recognize their rights to control content, or to control who can view that content.
The Internet was created as a research tool. It was intended to connect people together. These companies did not create the internet. They provided us with a great service in connecting us to the internet in the past, but laying out a backbone is not an excuse to run a monopoly. Hence, these companies are, in many (not all) cases, abusing their power over users, and it is suggested that they may be outgrowing their usefulness.
I suggested that the community create their own networks. Ones that are run by the community, with free access for all. Inevitably you have to connect to another network, but that's the name of the game when it comes to the Internet, since there is no single global network which connects to everybody. Rather, everybody connects to somebody else, and eventually a path is formed.
Obviously the community can't create a cross-country backbone overnight, but get enough people together and it should be possible to first connect within the cities, and then eventually to expand outwards once the network gains power.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
There are a bunch of problems that will have to be solved before this can really work in the real world. They are:
- The "hidden transmitter" problem. If the system uses anything like a collision-detection system, two units which can't hear each other can repeatedly disrupt each other's attempts to reach a third one which can hear both of them. You've got to have some kind of arbitration or polling system to deal with this, and only polling works well at high densities.
- Access to limited resources. Having 5 MBPS access to somebody's AP is nice, but if you've got 10 people trying to work through the associated 768 kbps DSL to the internet, you've got a serious congestion problem.
- Allocation of resources. If someone's DSL provider charges by the unit of traffic, who's going to pay the extra fees to keep the AP open to the public?
- The solution to some of those issues is to route traffic over the air from AP to AP instead of going through the wired network, but that only works if you're not too many hops from "home".
Some of these issues have been faced by hams with their pioneering work with packet radio, but it's all got to be adapted and re-implemented to suit the medium.--
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The problem is going to be corporate-sponsored litigation against freenets.
The argument has been made that these freenets should operate with the same purpose as the telephone infrastructure, and as such, such a freenet must abide by the quality of service regulations that are imposed on a local telco. Of course, such freenets aren't yet designed to take over the local telephone company, but they do take away from their profits.
The FCC, which is in bed with the local telcos, has a solution. Limit the capabilities of consumer-grade wireless networking equipment, and where not possible, ensure that the spectrum isn't adequate for true public use.
Just you wait, this is going to get a lot of Washington lobbys all fired up. It's already begun.
Don't forget that 5ghz wireless is being released later this summer, and it's suposidly going to be cheap. It's capable of 70 something mbs, even if they do limit it to only 50 something. This will make 2.4ghz wireless even more economical by driving the prices down, not to mention if you wanted to you could spike up to 5ghz and do larger relay networks with higher capacity.