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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!!"
... a lot of sharing of music and video
Don't let the RIAA/MPAA find out about this. Then your NAN will be sued and shut down!
I'm wondering what'll happen when these independent networks grow until the space between them disappears and they start to merge. It seems like people will have duplicate addresses. (i.e. "Whaddya mean you're 192.168.4.66? That's me!") When everyone knows each other, they can agree on who gets what block of what addresses, or all share a DHCP server, but the whole idea goes down the tubes when things get big and spread out.
Will all the different "suburbs" have to be connected to each other through NAT/masquerading gateways or something like that? I think central authorities will be needed in order to make it easier to grow and scale. (That seems paradoxical! Centralization needed for scalability?!) Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Or does IPV6 somehow magically solve this? (I am quite IPV6-ignorant.)
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