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DIY: Building A Wireless Freenet
techmuse writes: "Moshe Bar has an excellent article at Byte describing how he designed a wireless freenet for his community, and convinced his neighbors to participate. Most importantly, the freenet has resulted in new forms of interaction and strengthened social ties within his own local community (the inverse of what happens on the wider Internet)." And since consumer-grade wireless access points are now cheaper than a large hard drive, this sort of guide is especially welcome.
The biggest problem is not routing, but bandwidth. All of these wireless devices arent running gigabit backbone connections, but 56k speeds or less. Modern routing would require only a few modifications to work with this, but such a network would use enormous amounts of bandwidth, and with current speeds, it would pretty much DoS itself offline if it got big enough.
I am !amused.
They are such a great idea that I'm sure that this will be lobbied against by big corps like AOL/Time Warner and eventually be likened to terrorism SOMEHOW if they ever catch on.
Sorry if I'm pessemistic, but at the rate things are going, I have no reason to believe these won't be made illegal in the near future.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Open source is an exciting and important part of our technology society and will probably shape the future of computing for many decades. However management of "Open Source" companies have not yet found a way to make a viable business out of the concept. Unfortunately the statements you made concerning the profitability of Redhat are incorrect. IBM has been profitable for the last 10 quarters and accumulated profits of 8.43B in the last 12 months -- whereas Redhat has lost money for the last 10 quarters and lost 139M in the last 12 months. Is it the software's fault? Probably not. Is it management's fault? Possibly. When the management and directors of "Open Source" companies begin to understand the market they are in and their opportunities for profitability then the headlines may begin to read "Open Source -- back in business."
It all comes down to scalability. Lets suppose you covered a small town with a mesh of roof-top radio AP's. Since you're probably interested in getting out to the internet you'll need some kind soul to forward your traffic.
Therein lies problem number one. Who foots the bill for the bytes?
Lets assume you can find enough people willing to contribute bandwidth for the good of the community or charge a small amount every month to maintain a dedicated line.
Now you'll note that the closer you are to the internet uplink the faster your connection is going to be (fewer hops). Anyone on the fringes of such a network is going to have to hop-hop-hop their way to the uplink. This is bad for the fringes. People right next to the uplink might _think_ they have it made, but then you remember.. everyone further away from the uplink than you is going to be hopping through you.
So, lets assume you figure out a static routing method that takes advantage of all available radio channels, avoids massive short hops and avoids overloading the AP's nearest to the uplink.
Plunk, someone between you and the uplink flips the wrong breaker and powers down their AP. Goodbye static routing. Clearly not an appropriate choice in this environment. Lets try to create a dynamic routing system for hundreds of nodes none of which have global visibility and none of which can be a point of failure. We'll need to ensure that AP's can be added and removed anywhere on the mesh at any time.
After all that, how much 'free' bandwidth will your 200-300$ AP investment give you? Enough to compete with dial-up modems. Maybe.
It's not all dark and grim. 802.11a is right around the corner and it's five times faster than 802.11b. It's probably reasonable to assume that 802.11* types of radio systems will only get faster over the next half-dozen years.
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I should mention that I work for a company that develops high-speed radio networks. Rooftop mesh might be the future, but it sure ain't the present.
See Personal Telco. Its got tons of stuff on FCC regs, example hardware, existing communities, and a really good mailing list.
To answer your question, your neighbors would need to buy or build a Directional Antenna to point at your omni antenna. The FCC says you can't exceed certain output levels, but other than that, it is "unregulated".
"If I am such a genius, how come that I am drunk and lost in the desert with a bullet in my ass?" --Otto (Malcom ITM)
I can understand where $70 might bother joe average consumer. I'd personally love it considering I pay for business class DSL for my apartment. I know that when I buy my house, I'm definitely getting it wired for CAT5. Too bad there can't be "tech" communities where everyone wants that kind of service.
Well firstly you can't use a "powerful antenna" operating on ISM bands. The highest PEP you're allowed is 1 watt will get you decent range in dry air. You also have to figure out if your phone company or whoever is providing your T1 is going to care if you're reselling your bandwidth. Freenets get away with being called freenets because they are essentially free. Someone has a high speed connection and sticks an AirPort base station on their roof so other people can access their network. You're looking to set up infrastructure which I doubt many people are going to want to foot the bill for. I'd say just stick with a small setup and let your local neighbors use your net.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Brisbane Mesh
The biggest hassle is that governments collect enormous amounts of revenue from communications companies, so they do not look kindly on things like this. It would be very easy for anyone that wants to stop you to find you.
check http://www.wirelessanarchy.com or start your own page and get it added, pretty soon others will start contacting you and before you know it, you've created one in your hometown.