Slashdot Mirror
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."
(and do they use tortorous sentences like the one composed above?)
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The U.S. hasn't even selected the 3G frequencies yet. When it finally rolls out, if it rolls out in its current form, you'll be paying metered rates for it, plus subject to all the limitations that cell phone carriers currently insist on.
By the time 3G would or does roll out, free and for-fee wireless networking using 2.4 GHz (802.11b at 11 Mbps and later this year or early next, 802.11g at 22 Mbps) and 5 GHz (802.11a, later this year, at 54 Mbps) will have filled every reasonable niche.
3G might be better in the sense that it could more easily offer ubiquitous coverage. But it's not going to be better for us or for the average traveller or consumer who needs access on the road.
When I talk to cell and wireless companies, I keep asking: tell me why, if 802.11b has 95% coverage for all the typical places people congregate and travel to and from in a year or so, why do I need to reach 98% with 3G at lower speeds and higher costs? Haven't gotten a straight or good answer yet.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
* As far as violating the terms of service, most of the internet connections we are using we are ok, since we are not reselling the service, only sharing it to the our immediate friends and neighbors. Providers may choose to change there terms of services though. We are paying for this service, and choosing to let people use bandwidth we have already bought.
* As far as the network getting used by to many users and becoming useless. Most of the access points have Linux or FreeBSD machines as gateways. If this becomes an issue we will just install traffic shaping software on the gateway. The goal is not to provide you with a superfast connection that will make you give up your home cable modem and DSL line to sit in the park (though that would be nice). The goal is to provide a public free open wireless network for anyone to use. Even if the network gets saturated and we are only providing each person with 10kBytes/sec, that is still double the speed of dialup and adequate for web browsing and email. I watch the bandwidth usage very carefully, and people have been very good about using the free network.
* Wireless is not a replacement for a wired network, and free networks are not a replacement for commercial networks. That being said we are never going to replace commercial wired networks. We can provide an alternative for you to use though.
If your interested in starting a project in your area, do it.
1. Put up a simple web page on geocities or something.
2. Start a mailing list on Yahoo Groups
3. Post links to your website on the Seattle Wireless and Personal Telco web pages. -That is how NYCwireless (originally RooftopsNYC) got started.
-Maybe there is a group in your area, check: Personal Telco Wireless Communties List
If your in New York City, your welcome to use my node at 84th Street and Lexington Ave. Relax at the corner, or have a coffee at the coffee shop.
www.nycwireless.net
Spectrum rights aren't an issue: 2.4 GHz (along with a couple other bands) are free and unlicensed subject to specific regulations (FCC Part 15) about the kinds of devices and their power output and signal type,
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
this is not a problem. ... well.. only a complete moron would do that but from my own wardriving there are many many companies with morons in their IT department.
If you set up your wireless network correctly you will obviously plock all outgoing email traffic and only outgoing or incoming ports specific for certian services. connecting a wireless netowrk without firewalling it is
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
With WiFi, anyone who wants anonymous networking can park their car outside any apartment building, or a corporate office, hook up, and off they go. For grins, I bet they could eventually do it outside Verizon, AT&T, Qwest, or any other telecom megacorps. As WiFi becomes more popular for home networking, there'll be an unlimited supply of unprotected nodes.
And as code red has shown, the average windows drones, or even companies like MS, are not capable of securing their computers. Having the same population securing their WiFi stations is probably an excercise in futility.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Napster was banned at those universities where bandwidth was already at a premium.
I recently graduated from the University of Rochester. We had a pretty healthy bandwidth situation, so they didn't care too much about napster.
They did do one thing that was sort of anal: A guy was shut down after he set up a search engine that allowed anyone on campus to search everybody else's Windows-shared files (usually mp3's and pr0n). His server had to scan everybody's computer once for open shares, and then on the second pass it would record all those openly shared files. The people who got it shut down were the ones with the firewalls... they didn't like the fact that their machines were scanned every day, even though any idiot could have done this by just browsing all the network shares manually. But this automated service was viewed as an invasion of privacy. (I'm sure the intellectual property issues didn't help him either.)
Mile High Wireless is still a very TINY group, but we need people in Denver and Colorado Springs. We'll shoot for the entire Front Range, one community at a time. :)
http://www.milehighwireless.net
Drop me an e-mail specifically if you have any questions. :) numbski@hksilver.net_spam_suxx
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
more songs than users?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The topic of this thread is what is ethicial, not what is legal.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
We have the massive choice of British Telecom, NTL and Telewest and that's if they supply to your area.
My personal choice for broadband is either BT or BT or BT and I can choose to pay £40/month ($60) for the privilege.
So, I'm looking very seriously at WLANs and setting one up for my local area. Hell, I have the skills, I have the motivation, I just need a connection and some hardware.
Some existing Community WLANs:
http://consume.net/
http://www.wlan.org.uk/
Deleted
I have been pondering what it would take to make a indapendant non corp net for a bit now. All I can see is major implamentation problems.
First we must replace the IP proticals with something more secure and expandable
Second, net hardware may be cheap but unless we where to implament a p2pnet we would need somewhere to connect to localy. The problems of depending on a total p2p based network are plenty odvious to anyone with a cable net connection trying to download a mp3 from someone who has a 14.4 connection.
Third killer apps are needed. Chicken != Egg
Forth a configuration file that says app foo should use TCP/IP and app bar should use XYZ/AB. A bit simplified but you get the idea.
Fifth, a rag tag fugitive fleat of standerds.
Sixth, government intervention and "Protecting the children"
Thats what I just came up with off the top of my head. It would be very nice to see such a thing take off but I doubt that it will happen.
All of these obsticals where overcome the first time we built the net so it can be done again.
Then again it was done again with the Internet2 but thats not for public use.
Also remember that the original net was in 1995-1997 the Information Super Highway. Then it turned into e-business. It was not invissioned as a shoping mall but as a library. You can not take a rouge net with no central authority and keep the corp world out of it.
Ascii artist &
Who do you suppose will be paying for the bandwidth all those cell phone users are gobbling up? Someone is paying for the bandwidth somewhere....
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.
Interesting. Of concern to me would be accountability for those using your network. If some joker decides to download kiddie porn or engage in some other illegal action, the IP law enforcement will see is yours and not that of the law breaker. You'd have a tough time explaining that you weren't the one engaging in the activity.
Now, perhaps if there was some kind of free registry service that tracked users by the MAC.
At the time of the purchase of a wireless card, they would be entered into the registry and a digital certificate issued binding their name, address, public key and MAC address. When the user entered a free zone, they would exchange their credentials and you'd be able to provide the feds with the necessary tracking information.
Of course, this takes the fun out of the project as you'd have a lot of record keeping to do. Just how much...I dunno.
Anybody think such a service could work? If not, why? What would you do to improve upon it?
RD
if you can become a corperation and then file for non-profit status then you get to do many things without control of the local government. For some reason Non-profit businesses do not have to answer to certian regulations. and if the city tried to knock you down, a nice smear campain in the news how the big-bad city is against people having technology and attacks a non-profit group for pure greed makes nice headlines and scares the city to the point that they dont mess with non-profit groups.
I know much of this from expierience.. My father back in his day created a neighborhood "cable-tv" system. basically one large tower with good antennas and cabes ran to the neighbors (20 in all) the city then tried to destroy the neighborhood cable system by soing and threatening to condemn the houses.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm in W3.
Will be talking to my housing association once I've investigated the options more.
Deleted
Get in touch, add your node as "speculative" to their database. You may well find some other people in your area who have been thinking similar thoughts.
Some (relatively) long haul connections are about to come online in London. The extended range people are starting to get/offer may be of use to you.
...j
(they cancelled Jackass? Eeep!)
Networking stuff is CHEAP. A few people here already have their own home networks.
Link them, leap over the technological hurdles, create an internet where big commerce does not exist.
Sorta like hands around the world, but with cat-5.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Don't forget, there are people who have money and no time or skills, you could provide either of those 2 things while the others provide the financial part.
If you have time, you can contribute.
Theoretically, if you get enough people to do this, the big commercial interests on the "real" Internet would follow, bringing with them the unwashed masses, and you'd have effectively rebuilt the Internet from scratch... without the wires.
W.A.S.T.E.
you mean those same evil corporations who also have a wide-open wireless LAN running? oh.. sure.. take over the local's wireless, and they'll just take over yours...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
that's actually a pretty good suggestion for localized uses... almost akin to trunking radio (Motorola, GE/Erricson, etc...) , but the one question I have for you is, what kind of hardware are we talking about? I know that the Visor has a 802.11b module for the springboard slot, and a mic, no speaker tho.... anyone have a suggestion on hardware?
"This is fucking cool," he says. "This is better than 3G"--the high-speed network cell phone companies are hyping. "That's not even half the speed of what we're getting. And it works."
Its so true, but its also so ghetto. 3G, once implemented, will have multiple metropolis coverage instantaneously. I've heard about the air-port technology for public places... how does this differ from that idea?
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
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
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.
QAExpress: Solid bug tracking for you. Graphs and reports for your PHB.
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.
OK, I'm beginning to think really big here. So please, someone shoot me down on any point below that seems like nonsense to you:
;-), to raise the profile of free public Internet access in the general public is something that could do no harm.
;-)
The best way to preserve and nurture the trend is to link the idea of free public wireless with free public spaces. What am I saying: make areas like Washington Square Park, Central Park, Thompson Square Park, Prospect Park, etc. zones of free Internet. Of course, lots of nonpublic spaces are ideal for free wireless access as well, but for different reasons that are not as symbolic.
So then the issue becomes one of petitioning Henry Stern, the New York City parks commissioner, to pony up a little city $, and to start a volunteer program to support the infrastructure? Is that the wrong way to think about it?
Interestingly, we have the mayor, comptroller, and public advocate up for reelection this year. There might be some election year steam that could be funneled behind this. A candidate could get a big bang for their buck by taking a stand behind free public Internet in public spaces. It would have sound bite value and would play in the press well. It is something that would be interesting to the electorate and draw positive attention. Even if only at the gimmick level (thinking cynically about politics? forgive me
But then, of course, this access must be truly public. A lot of what we are talking about here is sort of "for the geeks, by the geeks." We would have to talk about truly free, public access, which means providing the terminals as well... handing out laptops in a New York City public park to ensure free and equal access is a daunting task indeed. I don't even know where to begin to think about how to make that work, if at all.
I'm thinking aloud here, forgive me if I have missed anything, but there is so much promise and peril and I salute the pioneers!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Does implicitly state that the cable modem shall not be conencted to a computer outside of your premises?
If so, how the hell do you get online? (The modem *needs* to connect to a computer outside of your premises...)
Another point is this, does it state that only computers on your premises can route data over the modem (that would include things like IP tunneling, SMTP relays etc etc), if not, then there isn't an issue.
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
A recent test in Zurich showed that as long as you have a notebook with a 802.11b wireless Ethernet card, you can freely use someone else's high speed Net connections as long as your battery lasts.
:)
In about 2 hours of driving through central Zurich, the testers found no less than a dozen open, unrestricted corporate wireless LANs. Getting the gateway's IP was not a problem thanks to most 802.11b base station's built in DHCP server. If you live near any of these companies, all you need is an external antenna for your card and off you go at someone else's cost - and it's their own fault.
But what's even greater is that around Lake Zurich, you can use broadband 802.11b for free, legally
See the project's official site.
I'm in the same situation, and am very tempted to set up a consume.net node near Glasgow. The recommended kit is £500 (~$750) plus an old PC. That in itself is not a barrier to entry, but the problem is that I'm in a suburban area (in a ground hollow, even) and the chance of actually finding a consume.net peer is low.
Perhaps the most valuable service that alternative net projects could provide will be to track the (approximate!) geographical locations of live nodes, to encourage people to join, or to start new clusters in the knowledge that they will soon be joined by other peers.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Yeah Bandwidth was capped at 240 mb/day down 240 mb/day up (total of 480 mb/day in both directions). Its done pretty well, with a counter at the gateway, so theres really no way around it.
If you cross the limit you are shut down for an entire week. *ouch*. Its been good for getting kids to not leave napster or gnutela running in their systrays unattended.
Have people found ways around this? A few - but its only been temporary. Someone in my network last year kept hopping blocked IPs. This was learned of and eventually they mapped his MAC every morning and shut whatever IP he was using down. It was tough. He even went so far as to buy new NETWORK CARDS to change his MAC.
After much discussion, we figure dout one way that would work. Get a group of seven guys together - each running the same custom-written client/server proxy software. Each day everyone uses the same proxy. When that IP is shut off the next morning for bandwidth violations, siwtch to the next of the sveen proxy boxes. By the time the seventh gets shut down, the first is being re-activated by the university.
Its Genius!
It seems that nobody has mentioned the group's website at http://nycwireless.net/.
Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.
There is a mailinglist that is based in sweden called Elektrosmog that has been discussing the technology and communities like this for quite a while now. We are also building a wireless community network in my small hometown Nora and the interest seems to be growing all the time.
At least under some OSes you can use something like ipfw's queue command to put all of the WiFi traffic on a lower priority queue so it will only use the bandwidth you are not using. For that to be most effective you need to set that at the far end of the connection as well, but even if you don't you can kludge it by feeding all incoming traffic through a dummynet pipe with slightly less bandwidth then the real thing and again favoring the non WiFi traffic. That will get TCP (and TCP like things) enough drops to back off.
Using different priority queues is nice because the full bandwidth (or very close to it) will be available for WiFi when you aren't using the link yourself. If your OS doesn't support priority traffic queues you may be able to use fixed size traffic shaping.
This of corse does raise the fixed cost a little, unless you are already doing NATing and the NAT box can do your traffic shaping.
I would rather avoid the government sponsoring since it will either take spending from things that deserve it more, or raise taxes (or both). Plus whenever the government sponsors something it thinks it has the right or even responsibility to regulate it...
The force will come from FCC, as it did in TV broadcasts. For 50 years 60 channels were occupied by 3 networks, go figure! It only takes a few laws, "in the public interest", and heavy fees to blow everyone else off.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It is nice Tommy Lee is no technologicaly inclined. Should have realized though, he is ALL over the internet.
Well, I have a cable modem, which costs me around £20 per month. A lot of the time I'm not really using it. The connection is always on, with more-or-less the same IP address, but perhaps with some mail coming and going, nothing else, while I'm not here.
If I had any PC-using friends within wireless range, I'd be quite happy for them to "borrow" some of my connection. To paraphrase, "512kb ought to be enough for anybody".
Of course, we did this in Aberdeen, Scotland, three years ago using Cat 5 and a 128k leased line. Out the window of the flat where the line came in, back in my window, a floor below. There were other people going to be added in as well. Never quite got the cable across the street though. Wireless would have been great for that.
This actually really works, on a lot of things - including murder! I saw something on A&E, a program called (I think) "Cold Case Files"...
Basically, there was this case of a small town in which this very bad individual (I think he was a serial killer or murder/rapist, something) kept eluding the law, and settled (I believe) in his hometown, where the shit began anew. The police and the law were having a hard time getting anything on the guy, and when they did, he always seemed to get out on bail or something, and resume his ways.
He essentially had the entire town scared for their lives - no one would go out after dark, and everyone kept a gun near them.
One day, the town "boys" got together to discuss what to do, how they could get rid of the guy - drive him out of town or something. Just as the meeting was getting underway, one guy popped in and told them that the man was at the local bar (apparently the favorite watering hole). All the men in the meeting grabbed their guns, and drove over to the bar...
They all walked into the bar, the suspected murderer was still there. He noticed what was going on, decided to pay his tab, and leave. He walked out, and what happened next is "conjecture"...
Apparently, several shots were heard, the police arrived, and the suspected murdered was found shot in the front seat of his car. Stone cold dead.
The FBI was called in, and everyone at the bar was questioned. Every last one of them said they were hiding when they heard the shots. The FBI continued the questioning, eventually questioning nearly every person in the town. Everyone gave the same story - nobody knew or seen nuthin'!
The FBI knew that the "town" had murdered that man, regardless of his guilt or innocence in the crimes he supposedly committed - however, with everybody backing each other up, there was nothing they could do, nobody they could arrest. They never found the murder weapon, either.
As far as the problems the town was having prior (murders/rapes)? They stopped...
Needless to say, that is one town that you don't cross...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
i'm worried about this phenomenon being snuffed out... there are so many angles to how it could be killed: spectrum rights, terms-of-use, 802.11 security...
i live in manhattan... does anybody want to get together with me and try to propose to city hall that these entities should be legally protected? do it fast and stealthily enough, with the right level of positive community mojo, and it could sneak under the radar of the huge corporations with vested interests and reversing it would only be a pr embarassment for them...
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?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
adult playground... hot summer evenings... go utterly unnoticed... sounds like somebody got kicked out of the house for looking at pr0n.
Ooh, not how I'd configure it. That effectively imposes a user cap.
Were I playing with this, it'd be set up with maximum burst rate of (bandwidth / users * 2) for n seconds and maximum of bandwidth / users over the course of any given minute, if and when scheduling comes in to play - or something along those lines, anyway. Most of the time, most of the connections are likely to be entirely idle, after all, so there's no point in artificially restricting when the bandwidth isn't banging headlong into its upper limit.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Presumably, a working concept for this would be:
... and only those who set them up are permitted to access the system through their wireless devices.
Everyone who has a wired broadband connection sets up a 'base station'
This should create a 1:1 environment, so it is truly "shared" and apart from density issues (which may be resolved by base station density anyway) there'd be no huge bottlenecking anywhere.
It would certainly be incredible if this could get off the ground in a widespread capacity, and may be the only way wireless broadband will ever be achieved!
(Then again, communism worked in theory)
There are motley crews beaming no-cost broadband in several dozen cities around the world. Unless they've managed to slather the entire Lower East Side with access points and get a fair number of end-user type participants, what the hell is so special about New York's version of this idea?
I'm doing this in Chicago (things are moving slowly). My personal favorites in the community wireless world are Seattle Wireless and Green Bay Professional Packet Radio (GBPPR has some great tech and a very experimental bent, but they won't give you the time of day unless you can convert mw to dBm in your head... fine with me).
The way DSL is going, I can't wait for stuff like this to pick up some momentum.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Well tell me when .... I live in Greenock and will happily help ;-)
- It is 1200/9600 bps, not Bps.
- Amateur radio may only be used for personal hobby-related purposes. That's quite a regulatory restriction.
Still, as said, it gets me telnetting in, and it gets my (non business) email out, free of charge and free of providers.Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
Yeah that's what I need... more grief every morning.
Imagine the emails waiting for me as various persons are wondering why hundreds of hack attempts/Code Red XXI/whatever are coming from our network.
 
F1_Fan.
nooo it's illegal in the fact that it is against city zoning laws. installing a telecommunications network without a permit, or monthly fees to the city, their kickbacks, not being inspected and approved by an inspector (as if any city has a telcom inspector that knows a datacable from a jelly dougnut)
do NOT talk to your city, they will shut you down and fine your butt to hell and back.
This is why many connected neighborhoods are privately owned subdivisions (canadian-lakes in michigan for example.. the "community" is owned and ran by one man and county officials cant do squat.) and this is how high-tech communities are formed or will be formed... in rural areas away from the morons we call city officials as priavate communities with a private infrastructure with signs stating that governments are un-welcome.
you need to always treat your local government(as all gov bodies) as your enemy. and deal with them as a spy would trying to infiltrate the organization... make them think you are their friend.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Urban wireless cells are nice, but you obviously need to have a landline at some point. Immediately you run into the problem of dependency on DSL or leased-line services that may or may not permit line-sharing in the TOS. What's the next step? Get off the landline. Us urbanites need to get in touch with our suburban and hillbilly roots, and convince them to run repeaters in order to connect multiple metropolitan areas. Really.
Here's the deal: I'm in Seattle. I looked at the Seattle Wireless map, and I could plug into the local network and just be another bump on the freeloading log. Or I could use the fact that I'm on one of the highest points in the city, and run a long-haul repeater w/~15mi range to a relative's place north of Federal Way, from there ~15mi to my brother-in-law in Tacoma, then I only need to find one willing person to bridge the haul to my in-laws in Olympia. What, four more hops to Portland? I've got more freinds and relatives down there too. Likewise, it's only a half a dozen hops north to Vancouver BC. It may not be much of a service to start, but it won't take much either.
Frankly, this is how McCaw Cellular (now AT&T Wireless, my former employer) built much of the North American Cellular Network (NACN). McCaw bought up ~200+ local operating companies, put in *tiny* connections between them to optimize the expensive traffic, wrote software to dump local traffic where it was cheapest, and the rest was marketing (hence the "NACN" name). It is very much within the realm of possibility to do this successfully.
I think the participation & sustainability problems can be turned around the other way -- instead of people on the wireless freenet only wanting to get off and connect out, it should be possible to build enough resources & self-sufficiency on the wireless network that people want to get into the freenet. Convince a few major businesses that there is revinue to be had by participating (just as commercial endeavors on the web were initially driven by sales of geek toys to geeks) and combine that with a rich geek participatory network mesh, and you have the foundation for a sustainable infrastructure.
Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
Here, reproduced on your screen, at no cost to me whatsoever, are my words. Magic? No, just something different.
Someone paid for his bandwith and wanted him to have it. What he does with it is a matter of his contract and state law. The University itself is responsible for policing their network and deserve their surcharges for signing so stupid a "bursty-bandwith" contract. We shall see if anyone bothers to move to the park to so they can traffic DIVX. The network admin may want to monitor his connection, but it's hard to imagine him getting upset at the proffesor for wanting to surf on a park bench.
In the mean time, to paraphrase an arrogant smart ass, I'll serve ham sandwiches if I feel like it! Enjoy your free virtual lunch.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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
As we live in a densely populated area, running UTP through to neighbours isn't a real problem. The people who want to connect pay a small fee as a compensation to the ones hooked up on the net, and everyone profits. The "clients" get fast, easy and reliable internet for a low cost, the "servers" get to use the other servers connection as a bonus. And the servers run mostly on open OS's (Linux, Open), makes routing the data between servers easy...
Of course, it's not really legal, but it works nicely, and can grow steadily. Long life the rise of the CAN's! ;)
This sig is intentionally left blank
It already happened. My @Home agreement says "Customer shall not... connect the cable modem to any computer outside of the Customer's premises."
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
not in the 80's he didin't it was 1.2Kbps not Bps (bits not Bytes) 2400bps modems for packet did not come around until 1991 and then they required special mods to the radios so users were sparse and usually not near each other. (also incompatable with digipeaters.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"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.
Wouldn't it be nice if these wireless networks became ubiquitous enough that you could use IP telephony software on a handheld as a replacement for cell phones... No roaming and 1440 anytime minutes / day ; )
This style of 'rebel' tech reminds me of some of the philosophics of Hakim Bey and the Temporary Autonomous Zones line of thinking.
'Cellular' resistance...
No one person on the network is allowed to take up too much bandwidth. I could just picture some teen downloading 20 songs simultainiously off of Napster, while 10 other people are trying to share the bandwidth and getting dial up speeds. They should set up a QOS system, where each person gets a minimum amount of bandwidth, but is still allowed to burst to whatever they might need.
Well, I'd say they shot themselves in the foot with their choice of subjects. They specify that "Customer shall not...connect blah blah blah" and all that, but in a wireless environment, of course, the customer does not "connect" the cable modem to anything, other people walk up and connect (wirelessly) to the cable modem. and THEY never agreed to the TOS, so that's that.
glibness aside, however, I feel certain that once this starts to gain any steam (as it would have to, to be useful), the ISPs involved will react pretty strongly. and, really, I can see their point--as one poster pointed out, it's very similar to splicing cable lines, and giving all your neighbors cable "for free." it doesn't make you an all around nice guy, rather a theif.
and, I can't wait until NYU finds out that THEY are in fact serving as an ISP for this network. I somehow doubt they will be amused.
sean
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.
Mine says the same thing... luckily neither my computer or my cable modem will physically be connected to anything outside of my premises!
Are YOU listed?
The real question is whether the same bandwidth levels can be achieved bouncing waves around the sky as can be by pulsing light over a thread of glass.
Then again, maybe it doesn't matter so much. There is always the Good Enough Principle when discussing mass markets.
when will ther be a group like this in the dallas/fort worth metroplex? the DFW area is the ideal area for an open wireless network:
high population density
low precipitation
flat land
with the number of broadband clients in the area, one could dedicate a 20 kb stream to the open network and supply most of the metroplex with free, wireless networking. it'd also make for killer WAN parties : ) i know i've wanted a low-ping game of quake every once in a while with my friends w/in a 1 mi radius...
moox. for a new generation.
If he's still hassling you, tell him that he could only possibly get 33.6 out of the connection. Only way he could get 56k to you would be for you to bring in a digital line (aka channelized T1) so that the modem would only have to do 1 analog to digital conversion (56k can't do a home analog -> telco digital -> end home analog).
:)
You could always ask him for the infrastructure fee's to get it setup: T1 installation charge, modems that can handle a digital trunk... probably somewhere around $5k, not including reoccuring costs, that wouldn't be a problem now would it, since you'd now have "free 56k access"
What if you buy an extra IP or two from your cable company, saying "it's for my girlfriend's computer" or something, without mentioning that your girlfriend lives on the next block?
Further, I see big benefits for heavy duty proxy servers in applications like this. With intelligent management and semi-responsible use, it's doubtful whether this would present much of an increase from the provider's point of view.
I've been considering setting up something like this with my dialup connection. The bandwidth is silly, but people could still check their mail or chat over it, and dialup ISPs could care less what you do with the connection. A local proxy would make an even bigger difference in this case.
Yeah, that's what they said. "Internet".
And boy, do I use it. When my cable access in Toronto goes down, and I am in Asia or at the office, I telnet to a nearby TCP/IP gateway, then telnet to my hambox node via packet!
And all my email goes out: the gateway is also a mail gateway. Anyway, see www.mvw.net/radio
Oh, and I connected to the ISS (Space station) for the first time recently.
The ampr. org (44.) has plenty of IP's left. So all hurry up and get your ham radio license!
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
I can't remember correctly, but I think this incident did take place in a "southern" town - however, it wasn't a racially motivated incident - the suspected individual was white, as were most of the townspeople (I would say all, but I don't know that for sure, and besides, it is unlikely)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon