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

NAN

[ScumBiker]

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.

Co-OP Internet

[Matey-O]

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.

Doubtful... but

[FatRatBastard]

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.

Re:A Sense of Community

[groebke]

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.

I just don't see it.

[oneiros27]

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.

Re:FCC

[Winged Cat]

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?

Re:How Wonderfully Idealistic! ;)

[Spy Hunter]

How about this: Everyone buys their own seperate connection to the Internet, and the NaN is simply used for high-bandwidth low-latency neighborhood communication, not connected to the Internet? That way people can share their files or play games or do whatever through a nice fast local network, and the Internet is still there for longer-distance communication, and you don't have to worry about paying for an Internet connection. With that cost out of the way, there's essentially no cost to the network and everyone can connect for free.

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.

Your Microsoft NANny

[Alien54]

6. a common platform for Web of Trust will emerge. It will be anchored in real relationships since the NANs will be so local. Accordingly the NANs will become, strangely enough, the native environment for conducting ordinary purchases, sales and settlements in a way that the globally visible, anonymous and hacked Internet never achieved.

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?

Re:Latency in CSMA/CD vs TDMA networks. Eww.

[Doc Hopper]

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!