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

Ping times? Multiple routers?

[KFury]

I'd love to find out more about this. My biggest concern is about latency: Ricochet's network was a 'web network' where APs would route packets amongst themselves until they got to a downlink router that had a hardline to the net. This resulted in 500ms latency, making it unusable for gaming and other realtime activities.

I'm also really curious how lookup tables and downlink load balancing would work in a system like this. If we have 50 AP transcievers, 10 of which are hooked to people's home DSL or cable modem hardlines, how will a router know which one to use to access the greater net? What's to stop one from getting flooded while another goes unused?

I'm sure these answers are easy for those folks with extensive TCP/IP networking experience, but it would be great to filter this knowledge down as the technologies and responsibilities for managing routers is falling into the end user's hands.

Re:A Sense of Community

[Drey]

Is JonKatz posting under a new ID now? ;-)