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Neighborhood Area Networks?
schmaltz writes: "Recent discussions about long-haul wireless on Slashdot seem geared mostly to benefit institutions, really, until this post on the peer-to-peer-oriented Decentralized list opened my eyes: "What will society do, when there are kits in every computer store and mall, for 802.11a neighborhood routers? What if you could buy a kit with four pole-mounting 15DB directional antennas, and a router in a sealed case that maintains mesh networks? ... There will be a great blooming of local gaming, IM, and voice/video telephony ... a lot of sharing of music and video on these NANs (neighborhood area networks) ... share a 2nd phone line ... we will all realize pretty quickly this is NOT the Internet ..." Maybe NANs could put the telephone company out of business. Seems like the equipment and software are either available or nearly so -can this be done today? I want to build the first NAN AP on my block!!"
I've actually started doing something similar, but with 802.11b. I'll be putting out a flyer in my neighborhood rounding up people to participate. Since just about everyone there are old hippies, the communal thing will probably work.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
... a lot of sharing of music and video
Don't let the RIAA/MPAA find out about this. Then your NAN will be sued and shut down!
Hm. Did someone think their webcam was off? Oops, forgot to secure that Windows box? Wow, nice porn horde you've got there...
...something similar to this, except on a wider scale (we're not necessarily in a neighborhood, but we're miles apart). My friends and I are planning on building a private WLAN, and since we all live pretty much in close proximity one to another, we figured it would be easier to accomplish.
This all works well, but the FCC, RIAA, et al will all step in and crush those networks. Don't ya think? They have vested interests in local bell cos and won't let them die because we have taken matters into our own hands. Phil
my apartment and the one nextdoor are already doing this with cables. we share a cable modem and have 8 boxes linked together. no complaints so far. wireless would be great for us, but catV is quite a bit cheaper when you work for someone who installs it. heh.
I doubt that telephone companies would care. They make money with long-distance calls and lose money on local calls, so they rather make more money if people use other networks for local calls.
like in Building Area Network! :)
that's what i've been doing in my building, linking 4 of my neighbours with RJ45, sharing internet connection, files, and stuff!
I'm thinking of getting 802.11b soon... maybe Wi-Fi will unify BANs?
anyway, for a building-scale network, RJ seems enough, what do you think?
I'd love to find out more about this. My biggest concern is about latency: Ricochet's network was a 'web network' where APs would route packets amongst themselves until they got to a downlink router that had a hardline to the net. This resulted in 500ms latency, making it unusable for gaming and other realtime activities.
I'm also really curious how lookup tables and downlink load balancing would work in a system like this. If we have 50 AP transcievers, 10 of which are hooked to people's home DSL or cable modem hardlines, how will a router know which one to use to access the greater net? What's to stop one from getting flooded while another goes unused?
I'm sure these answers are easy for those folks with extensive TCP/IP networking experience, but it would be great to filter this knowledge down as the technologies and responsibilities for managing routers is falling into the end user's hands.
Kevin Fox
"He was so nice when I couldn't get xyz on the NAN all I had to do was message him and he solved my problem..." : Common comment by Annyonomous Grandma in the NAN era?
Or will this just pull the geeks out of their comfortable corners into social realms they don't want to be in? Will it force the geeks of the world to be more social?
What I'd love to see though... is Annyonomous Grandma taking a hand to the backside of the neightbor hood Script Kiddies... or better yet, DoSing them of the NAN herself!
If I can't see it in Lynx I'm not interested.
Before there are enough people who even KNOW that this is a possiblity, there will be some better technology that gives more range/reliability. It's silly to think that people are going to put up enough access points to create this kind of network, if damn near every house on the street needs one.
The only real barrier to this is that unless you have some tech saavy neighbours, you'd have a pretty hard sell. Instead of thinking of all the possibilities (there are even more than with the internet!), they'll be thinking of 'why should I go out and buy a fifty dollar part so I can talk to my neighbours?'. Even with all the advantages, there are a lot of "I don't need access to a network unless I'm at my computer desk, and the internet is great for that" mentallity. If it could be done though, I could see this being a new utopia (think of the internet 5 years ago) until businesses learn about it and government agenices start to try to limit peoples freedoms using it.
It's been a long time.
From search Networking.com's page
In wireless LAN (WLAN) technology, 802.11 refers to a family of specifications developed by a working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). There are three specifications in the family: 802.11, 802.11a, and 802.11b. All three specify the use of CSMA/CA (carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance) as the path-sharing protocol.
Simply put, it's a group of networking protocols.
How many of these will there be? The answer is difficult to determine: The amount of NAN is Not a Number.
(sorry, bad pun, couldn't resist)
A few friends are considering doing something similar in a guerrilla internet kinda way:
We're looking at creating a bandwidth co-op where we lease a small amount of office space, and a symmetric DSL line (total cost, sub-$500 a month, closer to $200). The members get a single UPS'd power plug and an ethernet drop.
You end up with whatever services you want to provide for a nominal startup cost and $15 a month...in whatever OS you want.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Maybe NANs could put the telephone company out of business.
Not likely. The phone companies make more off of your need to call people outside of your immediate vicinty. How many calls do you make to the friend across town? Your kids to their school buddies in a different neighborhood? Your parents across the country?
The phone companies have nothing to worry about here.
This certainly is a terrific idea! However, working as a network engineer at one of the nation's first widely deployed consumer wireless access companies, I'm all too familiar with the expenses involved in building such a solution.
:(
Ultimately, while playing with the technology and the design of your "NaN" would be fun, we live in a world where bandwidth providers will not accept make-believe money for the pipe(s) to your "NaN" router(s). The issue would quickly become:
1. Who among your neighbors would be willing to shoulder the cost of the bandwidth, AP's, router(s), switch(es), and lend the time and expertise in the installation and configuration of same, and
2. Who is willing to face the inevitable slew of legal and/or licensing challenges in reselling or providing bandwidth for free to the neighbors on your "NaN". Are you willing to pay for a T1 out of your own pocket to feed the bandwidth need? If not, and your neighbors throw monthly contributions into the hat, you face a host of very real-world, non technical legal, tax and business issues.
Please don't misinterpret these points! I think it's a neat idea. However we must remember, regardless of the technology available, ultimately the twin evils of Money and Regulations drive the market; free or otherwise.
If an "Internet Bandwidth Commune" is your goal, don't lose sight of the inescapable truth that somewhere, sometime, eventually SOMEONE will have to pay for it.
Scot
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
There's really nothing to setting up a (open/insecure) NAN, provided it's just linked to itself.
Sure, you could have problems with overlapping NANs, with frequency fights, but that's mostly handled silently by the hardware.
Inter-NAN is a little thornier, especially if the hardware becomes commodity items installed by Joe Average. I can easily forsee accidental broadcast loops due to misconfigurations.
The hardest one, however, is actually linking up the NAN to the 'net to get somewhere else, as has been mentioned in every other "setting up a wireless network" article. It's against just about every TOS. Sure, you could try buying a T1 lease, and charging for that... but now you have to track who has paid, keep people from hooking up others on the sly, provide support... in other words, become an ISP.
Now, if we all said "the hell with it, we'll ditch the Internet", and built our own from the ground up (possibly with NAPs at universities, those pesky academics are always giving stuff away for free) with long-run links between towns in a kind of wireless fidonet, then you're on to something. The infrastructure costs on that though... yeesh.
Okay, so this sparked something in me! This is the first thing I've felt excited about in years regarding technology and communications. I remember the grand old days of BBS. This sounds like a similar idea. Localized connections, not the whole world to contend with. Perhaps the networks could interconnect and you'd be able to connect Boards halfway across the US! OH THIS COULD BE GOOD!
Maybe NANs could put the telephone company out of business.
Doubtful it will put the telco's out of business, but I've always thought that cheap (over public spectrum) wireless is eventually going to be very, very big, and I think 802.XXX is where its going to start.
Like the beginning of ISPs, radio, TV and cable I bet that small, regional Wireless ISPs are going to spring up all over the place (because it doesn't cost all that much money to set up). Some will be non-profit, some will be small for-profit. I think we've just started entering that phase. Eventually the market will mature and there's going to be consolidation as companies start buying each other out, including the big telcos.
This is still good though, because as the tech becomes more refined its going to give traditional telcos, Cell phone companies (who are trying to push G3) a run for their money, and keep them on thier toes.
AC wrote "and then realize they have no way to power them." Ummmm...solar???
Consume the Net is where its happening in the UK. These are their aims (copied form that link above)
#aims The aims of consume.net are;
define a sustainable network strategy
utilise low cost and existing networks
impliment wireless LAN technology
optimise infrastructual expenditure
reduce network connectivity costs
increase network speed
re-distribute access
promote common ownership
increase resilliance
aggregate avaliable 'internet' bandwidth
develop top level peering status
and of course have more fun
With wireless technology coming of age and broadband internet access becoming more widely available the need for a LAN/NAN becomes obsolete. IMHO
Now back to your regularly scheduled rant already in progress...
Does the neighborhood network really need to happen if high speed internet is available in every home? If there is someone in your area savvy enough to help everyone get connected to their group router, then it seems likely that that same person would be willing to help everyone set up their own FTP/Web/whatever else server using their existing cable/DSL connections.
Obligatory analogy : If when phone service was new, people had neighborhood-closed-circuit phone lines, those wouldn't have been a very good idea for long, as the entire world is now connected via interconnecting phone lines that are just as reliable and fast for voice communications as anyone could really hope for. How long before internet connections reach the same level of maturity for their medium as the phone lines have for theirs?
Leveling up builds character.
I also have been thinking about a Neighborhood Area Network. I can't imagine trying to charge for such a service, and for the most part I actually use a very small percentage of bandwidth that my cable modem has, my guess is less then .01%
If I set up Linux as a router for such a beast, how are Linux's QOS tools nowadays? Could I set up QOS so that when I am using my cable modem, that I get preferential treatment? I don't mind sharing, but the last thing I want to do is degrade my connectivity when I do want to use it.
"think of it as evolution in action"
If this really happens, we'll have FCC trying to sue every kind of internet-connection-sharing-software. And in 'the country of freedom' we really need to worry about this possibility.
It's one more association fighting for the aprovement of SSSCA. Too bad for us, to bad for US. (as I said before it could be really good for the rest of the world)
I really hope that FCC works in a different way. I hope they try to get with the "train" not against it. Of course it would be great to see another association loses time and money trying to stop the unstopable, but it would also bring a lot of legal (and maybe economics also) problems to all of us.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Along the same line, if you look overseas, you will see a lot of neighborhood have done things along this line of "sharing".
For example, I personally know places that share telephone lines, cable lines and even electrical lines to name some. While those neighborhoods have done so out of economical need and government/corporation irresponsiveness, doing the same in a developed country such as the US to create a NAN, or any other sharing utilities, is a dangerous thing to do.
This is why we have laws and license personal for those tasks. If we don't fallow them, you will regret it.
I am not against such projects, but just want to point out that things sound simpler than they really are.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
he he, i set one of these up in order to split the cost of a cable modem. you get a few houses running from one wireless hub and the cost of cable goes way down! :)
:P
and it looks way less suspicious than bright blue wires hung between houses.
I actually have a "Network Neighborhood"!! It is not that hard to do. Me and a friend live two doors down. We asked the neigbors if it was ok if we ran a cable across their yard. They said Yes. So we went to our friendly local computer dealer asked for 270 feet of network cable. He pluged it into his computer I plugged it into my hub. Click a few widgets and BOOM BANG We have a NAN.
Maybe NANs could put the telephone company out of business.
When we dial a phone number we'll get a Not A Number message. NANs could put the telephone company out of business.
Until one of the kids in the area decides he is going to be 31337 h4X0r and starts going after the pentagon or some such, and *you* get the knock on the door from The Nice Men in Suits(tm).
Or the MPAA watches 20 people download MATRIX II from *your* connection and gets your ISP to lock down your account.
Seriously, how do you prevent stuff like this?
My house is close to our 2600 meeting, and I have thought of providing access for the meeting, until I am reminded that the feds used to collect logs off of the place we last used as a meeting place (and the owners of the cyber cafe finally kicked us out after they got fed up with the visits from The Nice Men in Suits(tm) every time we left).
Last thing I need is a bunch of people screwing around on my connection, getting me in trouble. (I can do that well enough on my own, thank you.)
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
The real problem that may be encountered with NAN's is when a neighborhood group gets together a NAN (and assuming there are no technical/ fiscal problems) and wants a connection to the Internet.
Okay, fine, it either gets routed through an ADSL, cable or wireless broadband connection, which works great... until the provider figures out that behind their ONE, $50/month connection lurks 5-10 households. I think they (AT&T, LEC's or Sprint Broadband, etc.) will react negativly to this; it violates the Terms of Use agreements I have seen for any of these services, plus they will be losing upwards of $500+/month in revenue.
Boom, the connection is turned down, and/or several nasty letters threating legal action are sent out. Maybe they insist on an upgrade to a costlier business class service, for a significantly higher rate (around $250/month minimum).
Never mind that one person is responsible for the connection to the Internet may move, or have a disagreement with another neighbor, and pull the plug. One could go on about the multitude of non-technical problems that could occur with this type of setup for days.
It would be interesting to see how all this will pan out. But, I do not think it will be more than a niche product until the bigger aspects of this (connection to the Internet, or other NAN's, can be worked out).
Gerald Roebke
Not a Number?
Not a (real) Network?
Nanites against Nanotechnology?
NAK ACK NAK?
news.admin.net-abuse?
Nethack all night?
Nontrivial Address Nodes?
NAN is already overused, and might lead to confusion. I could go on for some time. Why don't we instead call these something like 'Residental Area Networks' or 'LANS for Blocks'.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I pay, you get free access, we all lose out in the end when the ISPs who are the unwilling backbones go under.
This is a case where there are real costs & TANSTAAFL.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I posted about this in the 802.11a article a few days ago but here goes again.
Does anyone know of a 11b access point that has mesh-router functionality? The 11a stuff is nice,
but in order to do a WIFI network the cost is too much. However it will force 11b prices down, so if there is a 11b mesh-router available, we could see residential networks become possible.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
not in the real world. People don't talk to each other in many real neighbourhoods. Most people only know a handfull of their neighbours, and then, how many people would want to regularly computer with them? Sure, maybe at a college campus, or at a campsite, but that's it. I think that even if this was built into a housing estate or apartment block as it's being built, the resident's probably wouldn't use it.
Right! If we could get power at the tops of poles, then we could do all sorts of neat stuff, like light our streets...
science is a religion
www.tessco.com/nokia_rooftop
Now back to your regularly scheduled rant already in progress...
As someone who's been involved with three different wireless networks, I just don't see this being a threat to the ILECs like you're thinking it will be.
First, I had Ricochet. For what I wanted, it was great. I wasn't tying up my phone line, I could take my portable anywhere on campus and get a connection, and hell, it was a PPP connection, as opposed to the terminal connections my school was offering, for not much more than what a dialup through an ISP would cost. And it wasn't significantly slower, as it was in the days before kFlex/x2/v.90. It had its problems, however, as there were times when I would get some massive latency. The worst location I could keep the modem was in my apartment...other places were great, but the fact that I was in a concrete building sucked ass.
My next network was a bunch of us from my work living in an appartment complex. We had some ISA wavelan cards that one of the guys had, and it connected up three of our apartments, to an ISDN line outbound. For what we wanted, it worked fine. When there was snow, rain, whatever, the connections would flake out, and you'd have to find a new 'optimal' place for the antenna. Of course, then the person with the ISDN line bought a house, and moved out. The new uplink was put in my place, but GTE had changed their tarrifing for residential ISDN lines [and our complex was 19k feet from the switch, so no DSL, which had just come into the area, and they weren't on the public cable system, so that was out, too]. For what we needed, it worked, but it wasn't a sort of 'set it up and forget it' situation.
Now, I've set the wavelan cards up, and I've got line of sight to my neighbor, who's sharing my DSL [business class, not residential] line. It works better having line of sight, but it still flakes out randomly once in a while, and you have to nudge the antennas a little bit 'till you find a good connection [that whole problem with nodes and antinodes in wavelength].
Wireless may solve problems that you have, and you may be willing to deal with issues, but I don't see people setting up a network, and watching other people start hogging their uplink, or probing their boxes, dealing with the support issues, etc. I do think that wireless has good potential in many, many areas, but I don't see it being anything for the telcos to worry about any time soon.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Of course, they'll sense the shift as it is happening and either die or adjust to accomodate the new market.
science is a religion
Maybe NANs could put the telephone company out of business.
Great! Let's destroy an entire industry, putting hundreds of thousands out of work, this is an incredible idea! Rock!
Speaking of 802.11 antenna's, my friends and i at one point had a plan to get an uncapped ("business class") cable modem, and to share it out w/ wireless
The antenna we decided on was the SMCANT-DI135 (warning PDF). It has a 4.5 mile signal thru a 45 degree arc, 7 mile point to point, is 10 inches long, and weighs less than 20oz. We figured it could be put on the side of a house and hidden from view fairly easily, and with 3 of them, we could have wireless access throughout most of our city (it wasn't that big)
Course we never did it, i moved to college, and we're lacking money, but...
~z
sig?
Have a look at consume.net to see a practical start on encouraging wireless neighbourhood peering through boosted 802.11b antennae in the UK. They host a database of active and potential nodes, so you can get an idea of whether you'll have anybody to peer with when you put your pole up.
consume.net is aimed more at connecting people over hundreds or thousands rather than tens of metres, and the recommended kit reflects that at £500/$750. But once you've got your mighty 802.11b antenna and lightning rod up, there's nothing to stop you talking to your neighbours on their wimpy little PCMCIA cards as well.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Let's see:
For peanuts, we can set up a NAN on our own block. We could link these NANs gradually, using directional 80211.x (Pringlenet), or even ruby lasers on rooftops.
Why hook this up to the Internet at all?
The Internet is going to be regulated and policed. Hysteria and business interests are gutting the thing 'til it dies and is reborn as a fancier cable TV network.
Build a new network on poles on rooftops. It's cheap, it's fun, it's not subject to regulation (YET).
Eventually repeaters are going to be tiny things you plug into wall outlets, so relaying the signals into the house past the chickenwire/plaster barrier is not a prolem.
Bandwidth? 802.11a has plenty for our needs at the moment, and higher frequencies will give even more capacity. Latency? Well. that's important for web sites and gaming, but guerilla Pringlenets really should be used as a simpler WWW (Neighborhood Wide Web? NNW?) or even a BBS and newsgroup connection.
Why in the world do this? Because newsgroups and web sites are getting censored preemptively by threatened lawsuits; anonymous posting is becoming impossible; EVERYone seems to want to know what we're doing and who we are.
Don't connect your NAN to the Internet. Connect to other NANs... they'll connect to others... and freedom comes back, at least until the FCC and DOJ enforcers come tearing the poles down.
But the DOJ and the various IP owners have already "torn down the poles" on the Internet as it is, so the Pringlenets give a little more time to think of something else (lasers? power lines? quantum encryption over the regular net?).
Someone here mentioned that someone has to pay for all of this, and I say: why? It costs money for the PC cards and for the wireless routers, but not much. And when you buy a can of Pringles, you get not only a directional focus for 802.11, but also yummy remanufactured potato chips.
Eventually the hardware itself will be regulated, maybe, but we get years of grace from the jackboots, and get to have fun at the same time.
NAN's are assuming that there's a local super-geek that wants to give up his bandwidth, and run a server all of the time. That's not going to happen all that much. Plus, NAN's only work in cities or very tightly clustered neighborhoods. That's irrelevant for most people in at least the US.
Well, the problem with ping times is going to get worse before it gets better. CSMA/CD networks are inherently horrible at that sort of thing, and 802.11b is a wireless implementation of the Ethernet CSMA/CD standard.
The way to lower latency is TDMA, and the problem is that it requires some sort of intelligence to figure out who gets which timeslots. Proxim's Symphony wireless LAN cards use TDMA to provide better support for streaming media and so on.
I stand behind 802.11b as an open standard, compared to Proxim's proprietary approach. But from a usability standpoint, the ATM-like TDMA approach is better. You're not likely to be an LPB if you're connecting through a NAN unless it implements some latency fixes. (In the interim, the Cisco/Aironet cards (and others?) support a reduced-preamble mode which cuts down on the latency of an 802.11b link.)
In order to make feasible NAN's with low latency, someone's going to have to figure out a way to allocate TDMA timeslots in an anarchic network. This gets really hairy when there are more nodes and bandwidth than timeslots, since a given timeslot might be reused several times across the geographic area across which your data travels. The intelligence to perform graceful time slot interchange, and manage the assignments to keep latency to a minimum for sensitive connections, won't be trivial.
sorry i know about the nokia already
(forgot to mention it in the last post)
but the nokia will be WAAAY too expensive,
like 999.00+ for a 11b router.
the Proxim 11a's are the same price for over 4 times the backbone bandwidth.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
We're looking to do this exact same thing. Nice timing on this post.
The Nokia solution is the best we have seen. No need to put up huge antennas every half mile.
http://www.wbs.nokia.com/solution/index.html
But its too expensive (~$1,000/house). BUT if you put a Cisco/Oronaco WAP on each Nokia router you could then service 1000ft area with normal wireless. Using the Nokia soltion as the backbone. Not sure about the software side, but on paper it looks like it will work.
Dirk
I'm sure wireless networks will be the new way to go to bring the 'Internet' back to the users and away from the banner ad dominated corporate wasteland out there today. Besides, how is the RIAA going to try and monitor thousands of seperate networks versus one big corporatized MSN 'net? I think my next big investment will be a wireless card so I can start experimenting 'round the home in preperation for the first NAN that pops up near me. And hey, maybe there's even a market for being a NAN set up company that can help those little cookie-cutter home builder communities build there own individual NAN's?
Which is not Redmond, by the way, we're on the other side of Lake Washington, which has cities on islands in it.
I've heard of some at the UW, think there's some around Phinney Ridge, Fremont, and Ballard, and some on Capitol Hill and Belltown. Speakeasy.org has some connections and there are free terminals to the freenets at some of the local cafes.
I even think two of the nine candidates for mayor are involved in this.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Well, we could run an extension cord up to the top of the telephone pole, but it might be risky...don't want to get electrocuted by the power lines at the top.
Ricochet is already there, but their devices are dormant until someone buys the company. If someone could figure out a way to hack the Ricochet repeaters back into service in the interim, we'd have a huge network of free repeaters already sprinkled around metropolitan areas.
...we will all realize pretty quickly this is NOT the Internet...
This sounds like the revival of the BBS. Oh how I miss those days, when everyone on a board was from the local community. When you never had to deal with advertising and corporations. Only people and most of whom were friends.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
As things have gone right for the open source free software community,the free net community should be just fine.
Things have to be setup in a way which promotes freedom, which does NOT allow a company to monopolize, and keeps the power in the hands of US and not companies.
Meaning we must keep this seperate from the internet, and keep it from becomming comercial.
I think its a good idea.
When things become comercial, then all the benifits of this community based shared internet access go down the drain.
I believe if this thing ran via the freenet protocal, it would be revolutionary for communications purposes,
or maybe not the freenet protocal, but it needs a protcal which cannot be censored or stopped by big business in the same way the GPL cannot be stopped by microsoft.
Because believe me, ISPs will fight this. be prepared to face AOL.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
How about have a wirless lan... have a look at a local one here in ireland ....
http://cork.irishwan.org
Cruise TT
This is the ???th article in ./ in the last couple of months about building a wireless infrastructure on top of 802.xx.
You need to realize that these unlicensed services operate on frequencies that are specifically not guaranteed protection from interference, and which are shared with other users.
The power levels unlicensed systems can legally use are very low, and they are vulnerable to interference from cordless phones, other wireless data users, and other services sharing these unlicensed bands.
All things considered, these systems have worked remarkably well so far, but they are fragile and there's no guarantee they'll continue working.
We should have it setup in an annonymous way.
Freenet protocal is one option for an annnonymous internet.
People can take the freenet code and work with that, perhaps modify it alittle bit, but it will work.
In order for this to work, Censorship must be completely impossibe.
Everyone must be annonymous to stop Censorship.
The public internet, perhaps shouldnt be annonymous but private internets are private for a reason. So people could share information in private.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Remember when telephone technology was finally cheap and easy, and each neighborhood set up its own telephone network for talking to each other?
One which cannot be stopped.
One which doesnt allow them to know you are part of the network.
One which stops them from accessing the network without becoming a part of it.
And one which is completely annonymous so they dont knwo who to attack, then just use saftey in numbers.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Especially if I can pick it up in the neighborhood Indian restaurant.
This presupposes the existence of cooperation in neighborhoods. "Neighborhood" is a nebulous term.
Duh, it should be annonymous
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
amen to that brother ;)
23
The whole freakin point of this is that it operates in the 2.4ghz range. What WILL happen is that the frequencies will fill up very fast if there are tons of little networks in each neighborhood
-
aphex
I Steal Music!
7. the global Internet will come to the NANs for various confirmations of location, authentication and reputation. A reputation on the Internet will be unthinkable if you don't have a reputation someplace in the NAN environment, Like, who the heck are YOU, if nobody knows you on the NANs?
Which is the way it was, sortof, before AOL discovered the Web, or Microsoft with MSN.
Speaking of which, how much you want to make a bet the Microsoft either tries to take it over, monopolize it, or outlaw it as competitive to them?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
... Welcome to the Pr0n neighborhood.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
Wasn't it called fidonet?
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
Yes you would. As soon as the company started losing out on profits, they would enfore regualtions of how many devices you can hook up.
And the best pary is -- this will contribute to the resistance groups of liberatrians, free thinkers, and unpatriotic americans (like those who believe in freedom) who will start fighting big brother when the USA Act becomes permanant, the SSSCA becomes law, key escrow becomes manditory, and the bill of rights becomes a fable.
Just remember what Orwell said:
"The truth was erased, the erasure forgotten, and the lie became the truth."
And what I said:
"Only a criminal would seek to use such historical documents as the Bill of Rights for a shield."
F*ck this, I'm gonna yake my cryptanalyst-in-training self to the land of the free, Germany.
However we must remember, regardless of the technology available, ultimately the twin evils of Money and Regulations drive the market; free or otherwise.
If it weren't for "evil" money, do you honestly think this technology would now be available to us?
"And like that
So, for those looking to do one or more of the above, this probably isn't the route to go. Also, remember Shannon's law -- the smaller the bandwidth, the less the data-carrying capacity of the data channel. So for those frequencies capable of spanning long distances (through skip, moonbounce, or whatever), the data capacity won't come close to what can be had with an 802.11b network.
Still, as strictly a communications medium, data over amateur radio frequencies is more than sufficient. What needs to be done is to discover methods to increase capacity on the available bandwiths by (1) increasing S/N ratios and (2) devising modulation schemes which transmit more than 0 or 1 per frequency cycle. Some of these schemes are very popular, but there's still a lot of work to be done, and a lot of improvements to be made.
Many comments here suggest wireless digital communications over many miles at low cost simply doesn't exist. It does exist, but with restriction. If you can live within the restrictions (and a little imagination might even provide solutions to work around those restrictions), then the low-cost solution is already here. There's no need to simply talk about it as if it doesn't exist.
Unfortunately in my experience, microwaves cause sever disturbance to 802.11b APs and bring them to a grinding halt. It would certainly be humorous though, as you're fraggin away and joe blow across the street starts making a burrito... What would happen?
The Return of FidoNet!
Time to start randomly assigning node numbers...
Perhaps we can have VPN tunnels over the internet, or over dialups to connect to isolated BlockLANS that we can't reach via 802.11b. Hell, we could put old Ricochet modems to work once we get our own 802.11b mesh topology up.
I need to get a slashdot nick...
Start linking the individual NAN's together and you have something like an "underground" internet starting.
Who would administer something like that?
Would there be any rules, or would anything be fair game?
It could be a very cool thing as long as it would remain separated from the internet at large, there could be some security issues.
The solution to this is logically trivial, though
the business end may be troublesome:
Net access (even cable modems or DSL) should be sold per unit bandwidth, not per user. The whole point of _inter_net is the sort of interconnection we're talking about here. When selling a connection, restricting the end user not to have other connections is, in the end, counter productive. However, if many users try to use one connection, their bandwidth needs will increase. A better pricing model is all that's needed. If, at some point, consumers want to do something for which a different pricing model is better for everyone, something will bend.
You have 61 new messages.
Beeeeep!-
"Hello this is Ms. Johnson from down the street. The computer is broken and you have to fix it now. I didn't do ANYTHING to it it just stopped working. Don't ask me anything about it cause I don't understand computers. Just come over my house and fix it. Thanks."
Beeeeep!
"Yo you luser my skilz rule and I will h4xor your shit everyday!"
Beeeeep!
"Hi, can you - hey you kids shut the fuck up!!!, put that rock down!" click.
Beeeeep!
"Can I buy a computer from you?"
Might sound somewhat conspiratorial now, but I don't doubt that in the next few years it could become a realistic scenario.
So.. first. I'm not talking about building 'free internet' for people.. just neighborhood networks.
So you get a bunch of networks.. people doing whatever. Then you get some networks hooking up with other networks over whatever is convenient. Then you need some kind of unique routable addressing scheme... like IP.....
The way the internet USED to work was, if you were building a network, you would use IP, and you would get your address space assigned, regardless of whether you were hooked up to another site or not. The reason for the unique addresses was so that you could join to another network if you wanted someday. The Internet is the result of this practice. Now it's all perverted.
So what we really need to do is start again. And we can do it, with ipv6.
Yep. But Ham Radio did provide the country with a good pool of technical types to recruit from.
These freenets are great ideas, and I for one would like to see them continue...
But think for a second on what would happen should these freenets upset the "powers that be"...
They use radio frequencies, in a "free" spectrum - sure, a lot of other equipment uses this free spectrum as well, and companies have vested interests in keeping it open. But none of this stops the government from stepping in and regulating the system, taking back the frequencies, finding and prosecuting "pirates" who continue to use "banned" equipment, etc. None of this stops those same companies from going a different route if they see their subsidiary markets threatened (they may not want freenets).
So the glass house come crashing down - simply because the equipment in use can and will be regulated by the FCC.
As I stated before - I hope this isn't the case, and I hope this keeps flourishing - I would love to try to get in on it myself someday (when I have more cash and time). But I sincerely think that freenet members should start looking into comm technologies which can't be regulated (like lasercomm, or LEDcomm ala Ronja), rather than setting themselves up for a later fall (and yes, I know of people who are doing this, and have been sucessful on a number of fronts. I also know the arguments about there not being an "omni" capability with these type system - people, with wired systems there isn't an omni capability, but that didn't stop anything, did it?)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This could introduce more online gaming to the younger crowd. Just imagine, you could be having something like a 45-90 ms ping on your NAN. I would welcome a NAN.
who ever said telephone pole?
I don't really want to go through the fun of setting it all up, along with the cost - if someone is just going to mooch off of it and/or do something stupid in there to either break that, or another system and get traced back to me.
I'm all for the concept I suppose, but I think I see a wide range of new ways to abuse it...
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Where I live is cut off from the world. My neighborhood is served by a RT with a DLC; the RT is 18000' from us, and the RT is 18000' from the CO. This means (1) we're out of range for DSL (2) we can't get modem connections better than 28,800, and (3) no one cares about us. We also are without modem cable, so no cable modems.
[we can get IDSL; 128kbps for $80/mo; I have this now]
I've been looking at this for a while. My thoughts are share the costs of a fractional T1 and somehow wire the neighborhood.
As it ends up, I can get a full T1 (with SLA) for $800/mo; split over 20 houses, that would be $50 each. That's on pare (or better, bandwidth-wise) with most DSL and Cable offerings in the area.
In fact, the T1 provider in fact has no problem with sharing the circuit (a portion of their TOS allows such); they only care that there is a single responsible party.
My problem is figuring out the actually costs of building and deploying a NAN. 802.11a is almost perfect; most of the area is open and has good line of sight.
The key is "most". My house isn't in line of sight with the rest of the neighborhood; I have a barrier of about 400' of forest to cross.
I'm looking for pointers to people with experience in building something like this. Or, companies that sell such gear that can tell me what is likely to work.
Any help?
Having worked at a company designing and building the devices you use to deploy such networks...
This isn't about Internet. You missed the point.
It's about setting up neighborhood networks, so neighbors can communicate without paying anyone.
At some point, this can grow so different neighborhoods can talk to each other, over whatever means are available.
At some point, this can turn into an internet. In fact, tha'ts how the interent worked in the first place....
non-connected sites still used IP addresses, assigned to them to be unique to their organization, so they could someday hook up to others.
You mean I can't route the NAN through my @Home cable connection? I already have an old Linux box as my Internet gateway/DHCP Server/Squid proxy server. I thought I'd start an ISP and send my neighbors a monthky bill!! That's a pricing model I might like! ;-)
NAN is used only as a wireless backbone. The internal network should be wired. All security should be designed with the idea that all information transmitted can be intercepted, and block tranmissions at your NAN router.
However, you could then place hardened hosts in the NAN to act as communal resources (anonymous FTP servers, web servers, etc.) and allow VOIP transmissions.
Security is fine as long as you do not trust the NAN.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
NANs have become a cheap alternative to a modem. A lot of people build networks to share an ADSL connection, some networks can be as large as 300 nodes, and spread across a whole city. Really cool.
Sure, you can do it. Hell, I have a domain name mapped to go to a server in my house, which is connected by @Home.
As long as you go undetected, i.e. setting up a pr0n/warez site, you're fine.
How the hell would @Home know the difference between your in-home LAN with several computers connected, and a NAN that you set up?
They're too busy reorganizing their bankrupt asses.
The halls that i live in at uni (Bangor N. Wales) were all laid with cat 5 for years however the university refused to actually install the routers and switches till this year. Me and some other geeks in the building started planning the following solution to the problem :))
Every 2 floors we bought 1 adsl connection (£40 pm) and connected all the machines to one back bone a squid proxy + linux box connected to eac adsl line + ip masquradeing then connectect each machine to local squid serevr and each squidd server to each other as peers
make the squid server Masquarade but rather than just simple masqurading use a round robin DNS so each connection request went to a different adsl line. Hope fully this would keep down starvation/flooding of links. Using tos for more advanced routing and a couple of patches u can favour local (ie close low number of hops) connections if they are free and use further away connections when localtraffic is high so ping times will vary but bandwidth will remain constant.
This also means u can use a large number of different ISP's so if one goes down every ones access gets slower but doesnt die compleatly
so now you have a system where every x many houses share an adsl line amungst them and the larger nan is only there for local use or when there are a lot of local requests also your squid proxies share amungst themselves (most traffic is web only) and reduce total bandwidth use you can also use this to have ipV6 in the nan and ipv4 on the internet connection (this will help with namespace and ip allocation
This is nothing new. Windows 95 has had Network Neighborhood for years. You stupid linux geeks are so behind the times.
Most people see the need for something like this to happen, the open source idea in the realm of communications. There are things like this happening in all realms of life. People have learned to gather freely (www.welcomehome.org). People have learned to build communities that defy expectations of money and regulations (Christiania). People have come together to build open source software, which defies money and regulations. The internet can be regulated, therefore it is nessesary to go elseware to create what many of use experienced with freenet, bbs, the 'good ol days' of the internet. It was possible for freenets to exist, so it seems to me that this is equally as possible. The technology might change, maybe it won't be 802.xx, but people will come together to communicate freely.
If an "Internet Bandwidth Commune" is your goal, don't lose sight of the inescapable truth that somewhere, sometime, eventually SOMEONE will have to pay for it. :(
I think the money will just magically appear if you use the term Linux enough, though.
_Surprised at Seven Digits_, indeed.
--saint
The Answer: get a liscense.
/.er) and it gives you rights to lots and lots of VHF and UHF frequencies. In my area, there is almost no one on any 2 meter frequencies except the local repeater. Set the network up there. I know this may limit the amount of people who are able to connect, but anyone who wants to be part of it should be able to get a liscense. Another advantage of this is that the antenna technology, etc. has been in place for many decades, so most of the kinks have been worked out. Just look at packet radio, right now its just a way to chat that's dying because of the internet. But it could be so much more.
I can tell you that the Technician Class HAM liscense test is fairly easy (a weekend's study for the average
Funny how this somewhat lacking story gets approved, but yet my post with some actual substance, was rejected last week.
d ex.html#6148163
d ex.html#6334347
1 _index.html#6334590
Anyway, here's was my original post:
I was sitting around last night and came up a pipe dream of sharing my ADSL with the rest of my low-income neighbors. I'd like some practical feedback from those of you with experience with Linksys gear (or advise another economical brand, but they seem to be pretty decent as far as low-end 5 port switches and also routers).
My main concern is being able to control any sort of topology loops (STP is used in standard bridging/switching, what about wireless?). How can I control which Linksys acting as a Bridge connects to which other bridges?
Any other design concerns in my little pilot test? What about scaling this to homes beyond... how many Bridges can be connected in series before problems occur?
Details are posted at the following (currently):
http://jason.artoo.net/#home
(now under):
http://jason.artoo.net/#hacker
If a day or two goes by and I blog more, it'll always be up at:
http://jason.artoo.net/blogger/home/2001_10_01_in
Newest posts here:
http://jason.artoo.net/blogger/home/2001_10_01_in
http://jason.roysdon.net/blogger/hacker/2001_10_0
Take a look here http://www.pdxwireless.org A friend of mine operates a node (access point) for this network. It is really pretty neat stuff.
With two 802.11b networks and a 2.4GHz phone, I've found that my phone stomps on my 802.11b signal occasionally. The phone has to be set manually to a different channel. Then the 900MHz phone clobbers the baby monitor. So... How dense can we get?
Instead of arguing and whining and picking during an association meeting, we could just duke it out on the network, in Quake Arena or something.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
1. Everyone who wants it gets a rate limited
(say 56 or 128k) connection.
2. Want more bandwidth? Cough up some dough.
3. Want desktop support more dough.
4. Contant local business, allow them advertising
(ugh yeah.) but LOCAL small biz only, for subsidizing service.
5. Perhaps local hosting as well
In addition, work out a plan to trade install, support work for cash (where needed)
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Some people in Sweden rallied together and bought themselves a 100mpbs network for their whole village. They dug up the trenches for the fiber lines themselves. Pretty neat stuff. I don't know if this is exactly what you were talking about when referring to NANs, but this is what came to my mind.
Check it out: http://www.acc.umu.se/~tfytbk/mattgrand/. There's some cool pictures of the equipment, screenshots of 6mb/sec downloads, etc.
void women (int money, time_t time);
I expect many other people have also done something similar, but here it is just fyi concerning how well it works;
I've setup a "NAN" using all Apple products and a simple Range Extender antenna on my AirPort base station. I share this with only one neighbor, who has an iBook (a total of 5 or 6 Macs use this network, all but one of which are physically located on my property). They can use my cable-modem connection, plus I have setup a single shared folder for them to store backups of important documents on one of my units. This has been working great for a little over a year with essentially 0% downtime. Even my cable provider hasn't gone down for more than a few minutes here and there. Overall a very handy solution which has been both stable and useful. We have about 120 feet between our houses, which would normally push the limits of the Airport system, especially considering the number of walls involved, but the range extending antenna allows them to access the network from any part of their house except the basement just fine.
Mesa Networks (here) provides 802.11b residential service, 1mbps up/down for $58/month. I have friends paying $200/month for 128k dual isdn (I Still Don't Net) so I think it's a great deal.
I've had the service for a couple of weeks now, low latency, no problems. Until I found out about them, I had no hope of getting service from Qwaste or the Deathstar.
I really hope it works out...I can definitely see small ISP's like this investing in NAN's as a way to increase consumer penetration in the area's they serve. Think of it this way, managing a NAN isn't that much harder for a small isp than managing the 802.11b infratstructure they're putting in place currently.
see linksys wap11, it can do point to multipoint access point meshing without wired interconnects.
they go for about 140 bux
All this talk of antennae and cabling and routers has me a bit perplexed -
What ever happened to the block party and the neighborhood cook-out? Do people ever talk face-to-face anymore, leaning across the fence and sharing stories, or is all of our inter-personal communication limited to IMs, MP3s and frags? Don't get me wrong - all of these beautiful technologies are wonderful for helping us to stay connected, but they can also cause us to get more dis-connected.
All that said, I completely understand the usefulness of a NAN to share an Internet connection - I've had a VERY hard time trying to get DSL for the last month - and if there's anyone in Normal, IL who wants to help out a guy who's stuck with dial-up, I'm all ears. ;-)
MP3's of music on your hard drive are illegal when you do not own a CD/tape/LP/45/78/8-track/reel-to-reel of that music. But, I bet you have some of that anyway do you not?
I thought so.
Who do you think police the airwaves during wartime? The same types people that were using Ham's. Like you said, "..a good pool of technical types to recruit from."
Gerald Roebke
We have heard a lot about NAN's in their varios forms recently, and as I am in a position to live close by several friends a form of 802.11b network joining us would certainly be beneficial.
However, whenever you try to recearch the feasibility of a project, all information seems to ognore the cost issue. Surely its would be a lot easier to set up a VPN over broadband. OK, you dont get inherent wireless capabilities, (that doesnt make much different when you live in Manchester England, its usualy raining!) but all of the functionality is there, with the benefit of a bit of security from prying eyes.
By law, these devices can only emit 100 mW at peak. In addition, they must not cause harmful interference.
Right now, with 11a, you may have less to worry about; however, there are a LOT of users of 11b's radiospace. Cordless phones primarily, but you have to also worry about the neighboring services, like wireless broadband and DBS/DSS reception (which grabs a fairly sensitive signal).
Not to mention radio amateurs, who have a bit more priority over the spectrum than you do. (If you're a ham, and can figure out a way for the stations to emit callsigns in a clear, common, and unencrypted way, then game-on.)
Link: Part 15 Rules
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Seattle, where I'm from, has a free local wireless network setup. A number of people from the Seattle are have put up wireless antennas and access points to help the infrastructure. From what I can see, there are at least a couple hundred people already involoved with more joining. The web site for the project is here:
http://www.seattlewireless.net/
The map of all the current nodes is here:
http://ofb.net/seattlewireless/
I hope you fellow Seattlites get all your 802.11b networking equipment together and help the cause.
- pr00f
They're worth watching to see what the pitfalls are likely to be.
Build and make!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
neighbour: can you download the new (insert) linux distro and put it in your shared dir?
me : sure, could you mow my lawn this afternoon?
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
The biggest obstacle to amateur radio being used for this purpose is licensing. Everyone who operates a transmitter on this theoretical network would need to be licensed. It might be possible for your kids or wife to use the system if you are present (third party traffic), but that's no good when you're not around.
I'll reiterate that no encrypted connections would be tolerated, but if you send your music in MIDI form, some people would consider that acceptable. As far as "commercial stuff goes," recent rulings have suggested that everything except the actual sale may be conducted online; some clubs run "Swap n' Shops," etc.
Yes, I am a licensed amateur radio operator. No, do not take this as gospel; I have study books from various years that contradict each other. Amateur radio frequencies likely won't be up for grabs anytime soon; they are used for emergency management and are partially regulated by the International Telecomuncations Union.
For more information on Internet and ham radio, visit ampr.org. Everything 44.*.*.* online has been an amateur radio station since the 1970's. Note that most of these (to be legal) do not allow you access to their systems. That could qualify as unauthorized operation of a radio tranmitter on their part.
And if you want to know how over 350 amateur radio operators worked over 5000 man-hours helping in the aftermath of September 11th, go here.
I'm wondering what'll happen when these independent networks grow until the space between them disappears and they start to merge. It seems like people will have duplicate addresses. (i.e. "Whaddya mean you're 192.168.4.66? That's me!") When everyone knows each other, they can agree on who gets what block of what addresses, or all share a DHCP server, but the whole idea goes down the tubes when things get big and spread out.
Will all the different "suburbs" have to be connected to each other through NAT/masquerading gateways or something like that? I think central authorities will be needed in order to make it easier to grow and scale. (That seems paradoxical! Centralization needed for scalability?!) Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Or does IPV6 somehow magically solve this? (I am quite IPV6-ignorant.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Then I traded it to "I'll work for a case of beer" just so I wouldn't feel like a jerk charging them going rates.
Then it got worse because they felt like they had actually paid for something and when they broke it again they would get mad at me because "obviously" it was me fixing what broke last time that cause the new thing breaking to happen.
I've just gone to $50/hr 1 hr. minimum now. They don't call as much and I feel alot better about it.
By George, he's GOT it.
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
I'd LOVE to have a NAN, but I can hardly get my neighbour to cut his lawn and keep the neighbourhood looking good. Not to mention that he could care less if he had access to my Hip Hop MP3 collection, he'll go on to -insert fav. P2P client here- and download his favourite country music songs himself.
No one (well where I live anyways) has ANY interest in technology (esp. things that will cost more money), so long as the Cable stays up, or their DSL still works they're happy.
*Sigh* I wish there were more geeks here.
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
Freely opening your broadband connection to your neighborhood via wireless technology, besides being illegal (read the contract from your provider), sounds like a great way to get yourself thrown in jail for all the stupid ass ways your neighbors will abuse your good intentions; child pronography, account cracking, denial of service, spam mail, etc. Do you really want to have this sort of traffic assocatiated with you? Set up an open wireless router and it will surely eventually happen. Watch your asses folks,
you will be held liable for damage that originates from your home.
RadioShack already sells an 802.11b router. I don't know what it's power is - i haven't gone wireless with my LAN yet - but it's there. Maybe some superguru can modify a cell antenna to be a nice 802.11b antenna... glass mount, 5db gain, for under $300..hmm.. lol
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Well if they are next door:
go to their door and sove the problem at the source....
in london consume.net and with citywave in berlin there are similar efforts going on. citywave is a closed network whereas consume.net is trying to develop a grassroot movement. the problem is, that people at the edges will have lots of traffic, since there are the gateway to the wired net. there is more problems like pki, roamning, etc,etc wavelan is not this kind of projects...
Dear god, is anyone doing anything like this in Chicago?
Seattle has such cool stuff going on as far as wireless freenets and sharing connections... Seattle and Chicago have a lot in common neighborhood and they're very similar urban environments...