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A Motley Crew Beams No-Cost Broadband In New York
Peter Meyers points to this article in the Village Voice, one of the best I've seen on the growing guerilla-networking scene. He excerpts a bit for your pleasure: "Along with some 30 other volunteers in a group called NYCwireless, Townsend's on a crusade to set up wireless Internet access zones: small areas, often called free networks, where people can tap into high-speed connections, without cables or phone lines, at no cost. Call it a marriage of the Web and pirate radio, forged even as big telecom interests bicker over the rights to wireless-spectrum licenses."
I agree that this and other schemes will soon find themselves in licenseable territory - it only takes a bill through your local legislature to take cb etc into restricted licenced use.
... do BT care? No, they don't. Because the impact on them is ... zero.
...
However, that said, if I have paid for 500 k then I am entitled to 500 k * all the time* - especially if this was leased line rather than dsl/cable.
So from the isp's point of view thats all that will be taken, 500k just most of the time rather than for a few hours in the evening.
If they are not really serious about allowing me to take 500k then they shouldn't try to sell it to me as such.
At work we have a small kilostream link with 5 allocated ip addresses. They (BT) could't care less how many pc's route out through the line, masqueraded or otherwise because all i can do is use all of my 64k.
What if I now connect to another sub branch across the street by using wireless
The kind of "up to 512k" access that is being advertised is basically dodgy because this 512k is not deliverable unless most of the people on that switch are not using it. One outcome of local wireless networks might be the withdrawal of this spurious 512k promise - probably better in the long run.
God this is a tortous post
But I am sure you see what I am driving at.
Instead what they will do to discourage this is they will point out, just as I will, that this is a precarious thing. It's a great anonymous platform for introducing worms and viruses into the wild, and a nice way to control a zombie army without worrying at all about being traced to your home IP. All this on top of a protocol that's as secure and solid as swiss cheese. Really, you'd have to be asking for trouble to do this.
Actually, some companies might object: the ones who have to deal with the repercussions of this, be they ISP's having to clean up the mess, or other companies (or governments) hit by guerilla network crackers. This is very unfortunate, but it's an old principle. It only takes one person to pee in the pool.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Those are your major hurdles if you want to Cat-5 it all the way down the line. The Wireless stuff, at least the high quality stuff you'd need for an alternanet isn't as cheap as wiring the apartment.
These groups will start when -you- start them. Become invloved, get a bunch of people together than want this, pool your money, use the free technology available out there to make it happen.
I don't really see how, to an ISP, this is any different a beast from splicing cables. They're both taking a single resource with the expectation of one person using it, and turning it into a shared pool.
That's precisely what it is - "stealing" cable access by offering it to people other than the account holder. It's rather like college students in dorms or off-campus housing quietly setting up home networks off one cable line, instead of doing the honest thing and letting the ISP know what they're up to.
First, I can guarantee that these wireless pirate networks will be disconnected very, very soon; ISPs will not stand to see their own bandwidth and equipment costs skyrocket because some freeloaders are abusing someone else's connection. Second, there will be much whining and screaming from said freeloaders, claiming they were doing nothing wrong, when in fact it's almost certain the ISP contract clearly states that a customer cannot use their service to offer Internet access to others. Third, I bet you'll almost never actually see one of the piraters actually go out, lease a T3 or something from a backbone provider, and cover the costs of setup and maintenance of a legal wireless freenet. Why spend that kind of money, when one can simply abuse a cable connection and Fight The Man?
No, corporations shouldn't be allowed to swallow wireless spectrums whole, but if you can't do it legally, don't do it at all. You're only hurting yourself, your ISP, your users, and any future attempts to set up a legit service. Seriously, grow up.
Actually you pay for a lot less then that bandwidth costs your ISP, they like all other flat rate consumer/small business ISPs make assumptions about the amount of idle bandwidth and buy far less bandwidth out of their colo/POP/HUB then their customers buy into it. Much higher prices are charged to folks who buy the right to resell the connections because the ISP needs to allocate more bandwidth out of their colo/POP/HUB.
You do (probably) have the right to use all the bits you can push up and down the line, but (probably) no resale rights. Who knows what counts as a resale though.
Is it a resale if I don't charge money (say it is my home DSL connection, and a friend comes over with a laptop...or someone I don't know parks in my driveway)? What if I don't charge money for bandwidth, but I'm selling coffee? What if I'm not selling coffee, but merely the right to come onto my property, where 802.11 just happens to be set up?
Anyway if "freenets" become popular, and get charged the same amount "normal" home DSL connections are charged, it will have to push up the prices for "normal" home DSL connections (assuming the current prices don't have much profit margin -- which seems likely given the number of bankruptcies in that area)
What I'm wondering about this is how Townshend expects to support more than a few people on that connection. Let's just say he has cable. If 1 person is playing Counter-Strike, or any bandwidth intensive game for that matter, and has 5 other people surfing the net, this guy won't have any bandwidth to spare.
And mind you, this is all coming from his own peronsal line. I don't know many people who would just go ahead and give away bandwidth to anyone for the hell of it. Regardless, for this kind of thing to happen everywhere would constitute either a huge non-profit organization with lots of funds, or government sponsoring...
--NovaScorpio
Matt
"people have water at home, sometimes metered, they buy bottled water, but everyone is used to the idea of the free public water fountain. why should it be any different with these little cells?
Well I expect it depends on the society you are living in. You have a valid, idealistic and really nice idea- I'd love to see it. Of course, nothing is free, somebody has to pay for it, and we pay for 'free' water fountains through our taxes.
I imagine the idea of 'free' net access like this paid for via municipal taxes would probably be far more acceptable in social democracies (like Scandinavia) -where people generally believe in higher taxes to pay for social infrastructures like schooling, hospitals, etc. I can imagine that this idea wouldn't be as well accepted in free market democracies such as the USA where taxes aren't so well received and the model tends towards the concept of people paying for such services individually rather than as a community, through private commercial contracts.
These "30 volunteers" would soon be branded as "30 inmates" if this ever got popular. Why? they're playing with a cool new technology at the bandwidth expense of of their educational and/or corporate providers.
From the article:
So basically what he's doing is leeching off of NYU's pipes to anyone with a wireless card. Maybe I should look for real estate in his area.
Any college Dorm Network Administrator can tell you how expensive reliable bandwidth is. Last month an unchecked DiVX FTP site here at Rutgers trafficked nearly 15 gigs A DAY, costing the university almost 10 grand in surcharges due to it's "bursty-bandwidth" contract. In short, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Due to its relatively low profile, this wireless project has and will continue to avoid radar screens in city NOCs. Apparently many people dont feel the need to download porn while sitting on park benches :). If they ever do, you can bet people like Mr. Townsend will be disciplined by IT staff, if not fired outright for violating some school network tenet.