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

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.