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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.
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!
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)
Besides, with the advanced routing techniques available to Linux/UNIX/BSD style boxes, you don't have to be the sole upstream provider. You can peer amongst other Wireless users that have a full/part-time connection to the Internet. Imagine redundancy over multiple users whose ISP's in turn have redundant connections over multiple networks using diverse methods of connectivity (Cable, xDSL, Modem, Leased Lines, Wireless, T1/T3, etc). Add in QOS rules to classify, route, and limit traffic. If one of you gets picked out for incorrect bandwidth useage, you're not out of the game. You may have added latency and reduction in local bandwidth resources, and your community members would have lost a fraction of their total bandwidth. Guess what, you still win; you're still connected.
assert(expired(knowledge));
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