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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!!"
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.
"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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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
Wireline routing protocols like OSPF are probably not well suited to wireless; there are too many assumptions that break. Radio links vary in quality and are less reliable than wireline; there's also mobility, as a given address might move around within the network. Or even if it stands still, its *logical* location -- which node it's getting best coverage from -- might change. Conventional TCP/IP doesn't handle that well.
One of the projects I've worked on in the distant past that directly addresses wireless networking is RSPF (radio SPF). This is a route-determination ("interior gateway") protocol designed for heterogeneous radio links. Originally just for ham radio AX.25, and very compact compared to OSPF or BGP, it could be adapted for other things like this. RSPF code, albeit experimental, is included in debian and SuSe distros. It adds a routing layer within the "subnet", so it doesn't have to look like a reliable fully-connected LAN.
Still, it's not clear how well a neighborhood network would work in practice. 802.11a, for instance, is limited to indoor use -- it's down in the 5.2 GHz low-power end of the UNII band, which is shared with satellites. The 5.7 GHz end allows outdoor use and more power, but cheap radios are still elusive. And it's sensitive to foliage fade. That's probably where NANs would make the most sense though. 802.11{b}, at 2.4 GHz, is cheap and has some passable range, especially the lower non-b speed. But 2.4 GHz is shared with microwave ovens, cordless phones, and other junque, which makes it tricky to use in urban areas.
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.
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.