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!!"

Comments

Standalone NAN is easy

[RollingThunder]

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.

Re:Ping times? Multiple routers?

[Wolfstar]

I'd imagine that either OSPF, or possibly BGP, would work just fine for this sort of thing. The problem is, you need a REAL router to do these things, not one of those $200 USD Router-In-A-Box jobbies that you can pick up from D-Link or Linksys. And even then, you're not going to be able to do that over DSL or Cable, because I don't know of ANY ISP that will provide a BGP table over those connection types.

More likely would be some sort of setup where their would be a central node that those gateways would report to, and the routers at those gateways would report throughput for their links back to the central node. That node would then distribute that bandwidth as equally as possible on a per-request basis.

This basically would be just like setting up any kind of NAT-based network with more than two connects to the internet, but without the benefit of BGP to help things along. It's possible, but sticky.

There's also the subject of the real routers. Netopias won't cut it here either; you'd almost have to have a Cisco. Alternately, you could set up Linux boxen to serve as your router; Zebra is supposedly pretty far along, and would work for internal traffic distribution. There's also LEAF and LRP, two closely related projects for doing a single-floppy router/firewall/NAT device. Find them at:

The LEAF Site

Or:

The LRP Site

It'd take a lot of effort, but if you happen to live in a high-geek-ratio neighborhood and you can share the implementation efforts across other shoulders, it should be easy enough.

Unlicensed wireless networks are fragile

[n8ur]

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.