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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 problem was with everyone not wanting to pay. It would have been T-1 access to every home for about 70 dollars per month. Every home built out there would have a 24 port hub and CAT 5 wiring as part of the house.
I have also wondered why this has not caught on, considering hotels and dorm rooms at schools have this technology implemented just fine.
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I always thought one way to roll out the mobile internet is to create a freenet like network between all the mobile nodes. Every device acts as a node for the network and can route data to nearby nodes.
For argument sake, lets say that each device can transmit up to 100ft. You however want to connect to a node that is 200ft. away. Luckly there is a node in between you that can route the information between you. Lets say you want to connect to someone miles away, well the same rules apply, just keep hoping until you find the host. Certain internet access points would be established too to keep wireless trafic to a minimum (for less hops) as well as routing traffic to nodes outside of your range.
This would take some pretty fancy routing but I think it would be possible. If these nodes were added to every device that can use them (cell phones, pdas, radios, etc) then the network will quickly form. It may not be as ideal as other wireless network topolgies, but it is better than nothing at all, like we have right now!
Wow, this is a great idea. But the application I'd really like to see is a T3 (or better) being pretty much standard coming into eavery big apartment building, or city block. Using wireless could save so much on infrastructure costs that it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect high-speed internet to be cheap and accessible almost universally. Between this and sub-$700 PCs, we could have most of the population online very soon... and maybe an ubiquity of online communication would make everyone's life better.
Or maybe I'm just a geek.
telekon
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
This is exactly what we want to see -- hobbyists helping hobbyists. It might not make money, but it's a valuable contribution to the community, both real-world and virtual.
True, not everyone has the expertise available to set up several servers/firewalls/NAT boxes, and this could well be the major challenge facing Open Source. Someone should put together a wireless_net.rpm 'For Idiots' or similar, then finally things will start to change.
Local networks are probably going to be the wave of the future as costs decrease and several-PC homes start to become more common. Experiments like this, pushing forward the mass application of such technology, should be happening everywhere.
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I have a feeling it's because many people don't care about internet access enough to pay $70/month for it, and many more (myself included) would rather pay $40/month for a personal DSL connection, considering that if you get a good provider, a DSL connection can be every bit as fast as T1.
As for all the other perks, I doubt joe schmoe has a use for unlimited webspace or sees a need for backed up filespace on the network.
Hotels and dorm rooms are an entirely different issue in many peoples' minds, especially since the costs are very different. . . My school has an OC3 connection, but when you divide the cost among 1,200 students, the cost is much less per person. As for hotels, if they even jump the price by $5/night, that ends up being a potential of $150/month per room, but to the person leasing the room it's still an okay price because if you want internet access bad enough to have it in your hotel room, you're probably willing to pay $5 for a night of it.
The greatest thing about the BBS days (other than TradeWars and OOII) was that you were connecting to people nearby. Though you never met face-to-face, it was still nice to know that they were in the same area. I would love to find a local web site in my area that was focused exclusively on my neighborhood. Alas, I can find none. We don't need a wireless freenet, we just need better focused sites. People say we're anti-social, but computers have ALWAYS been about connecting people to people!
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
If my cable company found out about this somehow, they would pull by connection so fast, half our house would go with the wall plate. Then of course I'd be stuck because there's not a terrific variety of reliable vendors to choose from in our neck of the woods. So it would have to be low-key, somehow.
Besides, more than a few people would likely saturate the upstream on almost any cable modem and many DSL's. Any words of wisdom for those of us with 10 Mbit pipes running into our house?
How about, for example, a peer-peer setup with multiple cable modem gateways splitting the load?
Would that work with multiple base stations?
I want to setup a wireless network similar to this, but I wouldn't get my bandwidth for free so I'd have to charge a small fee to cover the cost of the T-1 or T-3 line. The main problem I saw was distance, sure I could put up a powerful antenna on my home, but what about everyones wireless cards? I figured I could transmit to them, but I figured their little antennas wouldn't be able to transmit to me unless I also put up a powerful antenna on each home.
Does anyone have some ideas about how I could do this? The chaining of access points sounds like a good idea, but there is the routing issue if one goes down, not to mention to cost factor of having one in every home, maybe one every couple of homes to keep a fairly tight network. Could someone point me to a good resource that describes how I could setup a network like this and make it work well? What about FCC regulations on doing this type of thing? Ideally, in the future, I'd like to provide a wireless type service to my whole town, are there any regulations for using a standard wireless network for profit like that?
I have so many questions about this type of network setup so if you want to e-mail me the answers and maybe we could talk off-slashdot, that'd be great too. My e-mail is pretty easy to figure out since there is no JeffSketch.com domain.
Thanks in advance.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
how attractive would a free wireless access be in a small downtown to techies? i live in a small city on the oregon coast, and economically, it is pretty much rock bottom. timber is on its way out, and many people have to look elsewere for work (big cities like portland and seattle). now i realize there needs to be other forms of economic enticement, but would freewireless access in a (empty) downtown area help attract people from crowded cities? you can bring your laptop and pda to the local cafe, and work while enjoying the ocean breeze.
i realize it's a crazy idea, but i would like to take my pda out where ever i am, and be able to stay connected.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
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.
From the article:
[quote]
The final aspect is the one of trust towards me. Since all traffic goes through my servers, and all e-mail is stored in my computers, etc. the Freenet members need to trust me. If they just slightly mistrust me, they would start using conventional dial-up connections to send more intimate or secret messages. This shows again the limited application scope of Freenets.
[/quote]
Why don't they worry about this kind of stuff with their own ISP?? "I connect to AOL because I want someone I don't know reading my e-mail."
Granted, it's a bit more embarassing when the guy down the street reads your love letter to Celine Dion, but why not balk when it's Earthlink, the FBI, or anybody freakin' else. Hey, I presonally would rather know who is reading my mail, so I can walk down the street and give him a PHP tutorial. (Pretty Humongous Pain)
But the reality that this should bring home to everyone, is this: Do you trust your upstream providers?? (Say at least as much as the Post Office?)
~Hammy (The unbeliever)
"When a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is attacked, which people are innocent again??"
If I were to open my wireless access point to neighbors, I'm liable for their behavior. My DSL provider isn't going to want to hear "It wasn't me, it was my neighbor.". So if my neighbor gets busted for kiddy porn, or for hacking some vulnerable server out there, I don't want to be the one paying the fines/jail time, etc.
So for now, the only people that will be allowed access to my internet pipe are people I know and trust.
I don't think people this cooperative live around here in Atlanta...
:-)
Hell; I'd be happy if my ****ing neighbors wouldn't use those "really cool" spread spectrum 2.4 ghz phones. I can always tell when they get a phone call, because all of my wireless nodes drop off the net.
I figured out who it was, though, when I picked up the handy neighborhood association phonebook and started calling numbers until my network died... now all I need is some neat way to jam their phone so they'll think "it sucks".
... and all I wanted for xmas was a magic 8 ball, but i got this lousy
Ahem, would you care to back this up? I know someone who was afraid to leave the house for a long time. After talking with people on the internet, he began to feel less disconnected from the world and began to venture out into the world again. I had long thought of the internet as something that kept people behind closed doors, but now I'm not so sure. I'd like to see some evidence before I'll believe the kind of sweeping factoids that the person who posted this article just made.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Is it a dream or a reality that a Global Independent Wireless Network is possible? What I mean is:
But I'm not knowledgable about this kind of thing. Is it possible? How long would it take? What is your opinion of it? But if it happens, it sounds like one of the engineering feats of the century.