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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 ---
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you say Ham? At one time (50-70 years ago) the Ham's, usually a youngish person or even a kid or teenager, would be the one source of information for rural communities (the U.S. has become a great deal more urbanized, and wired, since WWII). Newspapers employed them in small towns. And they were a big source of information during war time. Remember the the radio set is the equivelent of the PC back then.
Gerald Roebke
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.
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.
Imagine doing this cross-border (i.e., CAN-US, US-Mex).
Now THAT would really get some people's britches in a bunch.
When I lived in San Diego, my house had LOS to the hillier parts of Tijuana. One of the people I worked with lived there, and I'm pretty sure I could have rigged up an amp and directional antenna to do just this, although 3 years ago the talk on Slashdot was using cheap microwave equipment.
I would have had to set up NAT on a Linux box to share my cable modem, but if I was there now I'd do this...
Heck, all it'll take is a few black hats roaming around, planting zombie hosts within reception range of various NAN APs, then rigging these zombies to do DDOS or to route various access attempts through random NANs. Who needs to root boxen to get an untraceable network?
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
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
Someone needs to write some point-and-click software for Windows to set up a network like this. Something where you could go to the store, buy some wireless network cards, plug them into some computers, run this software, and have an instant network. If it is easy enough, people will start doing it. The killer app would be MP3 sharing - Everyone in the neighborhood can share their MP3s at 1000x the speed of their puny modems that they had before. It would be great! Once the network was established, new uses for it would start coming out of the woodwork; uses so novel that we haven't even thought of them yet.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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"
Wasn't it called fidonet?
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
I'm not sure you're entirely correct, that 802.11b is only CSMA/CD. You can run 802.11 in CMSA/CA (Collision Avoidance) mode by using Medium Reservation for hidden nodes. The Hidden Nodes problem happens when you have an access point where A can talk to the AP, and B can talk to the AP, but A and B cannot see each other. It's very normal in 802.11b WAN setups to ensure every card has medium reservation turned on, so they can avoid collisions on the access point. Basically, Medium Reservation causes a node to "listen" for a free "line", if it's free it reserves the channel with the AP. There's a chance that the medium reservation request may collide, but by and large it helps avoid collision difficulties.
The downside? You're limited to 20 or 30 nodes per AP channel, so you have a similar problem. Also, in my experience, medium reservation very slightly downgrades performance per machine under heavy loads for the network.
I've been using an 802.11b uplink to my ISP for two years. It's been an on-and-off proposition. We share airspace with a bunch of emergency alert towers since our town is near a chemical weapons depot (Tooele, UT), and the interference from those siren communications is pretty enormous (right in the same band with 2.4GHz). However, within a mile or so you can get really good performance using directional or YAGI antennas for an ad-hoc peer-to-peer net without an access point, or with an amplified AP (but you have to be careful you're staying under the FCC 1-watt limitation if you amp your AP).
A friend of mine and I had a discussion on just this topic not long ago. We called the concept "ghettonet" -- that people shared connections amongst themselves, with gateways out to DSL, modem, or other wireless links. Routing and channel bonding were the thing we figured would stymie the effort, beyond just a few nodes in the NAN.
Thanks for the info about the reduced-preamble mode; I cut my MTU down to 576 to try to get around the issues with some packet loss due to the interference from the aforementioned towers, but the negotiation overhead with my ISP's AP makes the reduced MTU of somewhat dubious value. It's reduced the number of dropped packets at the expense of bandwidth. Eh well. It's a fun game to play!
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
i guess i'm a little nieve. how does this exactly violate FCC regulations? Does the FCC prohibit people from communicating with their neighbour? Let's take away the fact that he's providing internet routing functionality, say my neighbour and i run a cat 5 wire between appartments (through one wall) for networked gaming? or maybe we're working on a project together, and share network resources. what is it about that cat 5 from my bedroom to theirs which violates fcc regulations?
i'm also curious which local building codes would be in violation? is it against code to have an outlette which originates in one living area, and ends in another living area? that would really prohibit me from renting my finished basement that has a small kitchen and bathroom since it's all on the same wiring, maybe even has a few cross phone lines, cable tv lines, etc.
so often we view it as, if you're not paying for it, your're stealing it. how about the position of , well, i'm paying for that (cable internet connection, tv, phone, water, electric, etc) i can use it as i damn well please including but not limited to sharing with everyone on the block. yeah, yeah, internet and phone service area fairly flat rates (per month) for most people, but that's just their charging structure currently. it hasn't always been that way, and may not always continue either.
Funny how this somewhat lacking story gets approved, but yet my post with some actual substance, was rejected last week.
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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
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);