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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."
* 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
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.
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!
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
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.
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...
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.
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
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 ; )
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.
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.
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
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