Slashdot Mirror
Being Wireless: Viral Telecommunications
sh4na writes "3G is out before it is ever in... because, as Nicholas Negroponte puts it, the *real* next generation is the Wi-Fi "lily pads and frogs" concept. Wouldn't it be great?"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
This stupid acronym really needs to die. Who first coined this term? Sounds like something that emerged from a marketing meeting. Wireless Fidelity? That doesn't even make sense.
Just because NN is not getting any funding from Telecom he must tell them they are obsolete! WiFi has not taken off in Japan where they already have 3G bliss.
Unless, of course, Verizon, T-mobile, Voicestream, etc. "influence" their favorite congress rep and get some BS law passed claiming that VoIP on 802.11 is so cheap and available that the terrorists will use it to coordinate missions. And then, when someone uses your hub, you are now responsible for aiding terrorism.
On second thought, forget I ever posted this. Those bastards don't need any more ideas.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
This is all about people intentionally sharing their bandwidth. The people who buy the little WiFi thingamabob to shoot wireless Internet rays to all their computers don't have the slightest clue that they may be sharing with everyone.
Once some company comes along to close off these WiFi hotspots with their latest product, these viral whatzits are done for.
Then lets consider how ling it will take the "Bells" to wake up and notcie that thier stangle hold on the local telco market is threatened. It will not take too long for Congress to churn out some back-assward laws that stifle any creative use of Wi-Fi.
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
--Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio.
Like all the best ideas its simple ones that are the best.
I would do the same from my own home to the local neighbourhood BUT (there is always a but), I live in the countryside in the south of England, which means that the local telco (BT) will probably only get around to installing DSL in about 2012 AD.
PS BT doesn't only stand for British Telecom....
I really like the Linksys Wireless Routers/Firewalls, you can set up a dhcp reservation list by MAC address so if you want to share with your neighbors you can get their mac and let them in. things like that combined with keeping track of security notices, and basic security masures could make such a network as secure as your average broadband connection.
3G will not fail! Everyone just need to remember that it took more than 10 years for GSM to explode here in Europe, and it will probably take even longer for 3G since GSM allready handles talking. What the suppliers do not see is that we lack good services and a good way of charging for it. What is needed is a global standard for micropayments. I think that it would be great to get all the micropayments on my phonebill, even better if I could surf over to my service provider and check my spendings over the web using my phone/computer/camera/mp3-player/calendar/gamecent re...
And by the by, why isn'n there a plug-in enabling the new photo and video phone to show their images on a TV (when connected to the powergrid, the batteries will burn otherwise), and a plug-in to be able to play more advanced games... it would be (ta-da) the return of the cartridge games...
What about security and privacy? How do you choose who you want to provide with wireless access? Even if you lock users to certain IPs and MAC addresses.. those can still be faked. Connections are probably SSL-like encrypted.. but if you sniff both hashes, you can get all data. This is a bit harder on cable, because you need physical access.. and even harder on optics. But anyway... i think wireless telecomunications pose quite high security risk. Unless client is off-line provided with hash code.
Actually there is quite cheap equipment(just mod of ordinary satellite dish and software) to sniff all non-encrypted SAT-internet traffic. Most of traffic is unencrypted anyway and noone can detect you, because you are not transmitting a thing.. just receiving.
I know I must be missing something here because if this really happens, who is getting paid? Companies need paid for their bandwidth and usage and one guy with a link to the net isn't going to feed the ISP's families.
In a utopian society where everything is free and shared this would work great. But the ISP has to pay its employees and those employees have to pay their bills. If the ISP doesn't get paid the employee doesn't get paid and the employee doesn't get to pay his/her bills until they find a new job.
It doesn't seem to make economic sense to me is all. Can someone explain how it could work, financially, for everyone?
-= Why can't I add 'Anonymous Coward' to my list of Foes? =-
This looks so cool, but I must say, I've got my doubts about a carrier technology that is so vulnerable to interference being able to take out telcos who have the most powerful interference-generating machines on earth. It wouldn't take much to knock down the network, and the telcos and the government have their hands deep in each others pockets.
For that matter, it would be pretty easy for anyone with a beef to jam things up.
Between the greedy people, the stupid people and the malicious people...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Yeah, of course every consumer is going to share their broadband connection with every stranger geek walking past.
Consumers don't share, they consume. Peer to Peer is all about taking, not sharing. Most of the 'clueless home users' I know (and I can think of half a dozen right now) only share what they download; they don't add new resource to the network.
Once Joe(ly) consumer realises that his/her mp3s and porn will download 10% slower because of all this sharing of connections, he/she will call tech support, who will tell them how to restrict access to their own PCs.
For the people by the people doesn't work when most of the people are selfish.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
He mises one crucial point, the backbone, this posting for instance isn't going to magically bounce from the middle of the UK to Exodus(?) by 802.11 alone, as illustrated by the recent crackdownby cableco's on publicly listed access points they're reluctant to support an essentially public network that runs contrary to their business model, and transcending the traditional backbone requires organisation and capital, something absent from P2P systems.
A concern is the finite amount of spectrum available in regards to the scalability of P2P wireless systems, as the number of users increases so does the baseload just to maintain the system, some clever managed routing will be required along with a wired backbone between nodes, if you use daisy chain style off-air repeating between nodes you quickly deplete spectrum and diminish the benefit of local frequency replication, basically the "everyone shouting in a crowded room" scenario.
"Distance decay" is a feature of the traditional phone network yet on the net people no longer communicate on the basis of geography, did that Wired article come from a server in Silicon Valley, New York, London? Does it matter, I don't particularly care, I'm just interested in the content. However the "lily pads and frogs" architecture is deeply tied to locality, it's easy to communicate with local nodes but it progressively gets more difficult the farther you go, again this leads us back to the backbone problem.
Another issue is misuse, free wireless reminds me of the net of yester year, you could for instance use SMTP servers all over the globe and the vast majority of users didn't abuse that facility, but obviously the small majority of spammers swiftly made that a thing of the past and continue to annoy us today, how would open wireless networks be any different? Control is needed, which leads back to structure and capital.
Call me a pessimist, but it's not quite as rosy as he makes out.
Since I live in a high-density area, my system reaches perhaps 100 neighbors. I do not know how many use it (totally free) -- frankly, I do not care. I pay a fixed fee and am happy to share.
Umm... Aren't you still responsible for the data going out over your Access Point? If some script kiddie living next door sets up camp from his bedroom and starts sending out spam while using your Internet connection, you are going to be the one that gets shut down.
Also - I don't know about this guy but my bandwidth is too limited (even at cable speed) to let everyone on my street have a free ride. In some far off distant future utopian society that might be practical... but for now I only get 40kbps upstream and anywhere from 1Mbit to 3Mbit down so I'm not really anxious to share. Unless my data could somehow have priority over my neighbors. I'm the one paying for it after all so I should get full use of my pipe when I'm online. When I go to bed, they can have it.
In the future, each Wi-Fi system will also act like a small router, relaying to its nearest neighbors. Messages can hop peer-to-peer, leaping from lily to lily like frogs.
That will only work as long as you are inside city limits around neighborhoods and businesses. But what about when you're driving down the highway and you're out of range?
This idea is great ... in fact, in the U.S., it has been propoesed that the schools act as the stems of the lilly pads (since they all have bandwidth because of some gov't education bill) and that the amount of bandwidth provided to the school be greatly increased. The additional bandwidth costs will be added to the property taxes for the schol system.
... directly or indirectly). The MIT Media centner, like most educational institutions, never consider the negatives of an idea such as this one. The main problem is cheap skates! The bandwidth bill will be paid by people who "must have" their high speed network and by those that feel guilty taking something for nothing. The other 50%+ of the population will just take what they need, slowing down the paying customers, and not pay a red cent for it!
... the problem is getting everyone to pay for their share!
... the guy that never buys a round at the bar and comes to parties empty handed, would NEVER pay for this service, but he'd sure be happy to use it!
I like the above idea a bit better than the proposed "la-la" land idea outlined on wired.com. The idea above ensures that everyone pays for their bandwidth (everyone pays for property taxes
Yes, I would LOVE to be able to go anywhere with my laptop and always be plugged into the net. I work on a wireless campus (www.uakron.edu) where this can be done, but as soon as I go home, its back to the ethernet card. As with most great ideas, the problem isn't making the technology availble
I know my army brat friend, you know
I really think people (especially PhD types) need to think about these kind of issues before proposing "la-la land".
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Check out http://reseaucitoyen.be/, a project in Brussels that has been pushing this idea for some time.
It's in French. Translation: take a WiFi card, attach an external antenna.
Next, take an old Linux box, turn it into a router.
Aim towards another node, and you join the network.
Security is easy: treat this segment as being unsecure and use your existing firewalls.
Basically such an architecture creates a public infrastructure on which all kinds of services are possible.
It's cheap, robust, and a serious threat to the telcos.
Negroponte is right: 3G is the Telcos trying to define the future, when the future is busy happening somewhere else entirely!
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Sure the bandwidth between lily-pads would be susbstantial, compared to 3G, but the latency for skipping over a couple thousand lily-pads would drop throughput to next to nothing. In general, it's a good way to share access to a single high-speed connection, but I'm not sure this will ever take off to the point where it starts replacing the big internet backbone, owned, of course, by the big evil corporate bastards who will just raise the rate to connect to the pond if too many little frogs don't hop on board. I'm quite proud of that extended metaphor.
Anonymously yours,
scw
I really enjoy how invariably the posts in each slashdot article about cellphones are split 50/50 between:
a) "I HATE CELLPHONES THEY ARE THE BANE OF ALL THINGS GOOD AND SHOULD BE OUTLAWED, GREAT THIS JUST MEANS THAT EVEN MORE PEOPLE WILL BE YAPPING IN PUBLIC AND AT MOVIES" (seen here)
and
b) "FINALLY CRAPPY OLD AMERICA IS CATCHING UP WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD, FINALLY, WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG, WE'RE STILL BETTER, TAKE THAT AMERICAN CAPITALISM, CELL PHONES FOREVER!!" (seen here)
If you don't know what Zoo Blacklisting is, click here.
Isn't this similar to yelling "fire" in a crowded theater?
*watches as the Internet police whip out the cuffs*
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
The "Viral" part of the name is great. It makes the technology baaad.
If this sticks, it will be impossible for a large corporation to produce viral telco applications.
This is a poison pill designed to deter any hostile takeover.
For best results: Viral P2P File Swapping Network.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
If people can't set their AP up to do this easily, it won't happen, due to huge gaps in the net.
..is there to allow us to make lame "Bud.... Weis....Err" jokes?
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
Because further down the street, beyond the reach of my system, another neighbor has put in Wi-Fi. And another, and another. Think of a pond with one water lily, then two, then four, then many overlapping, with their stems reaching into the Internet. (Credit for the water lily analogy goes to Alessandro Ovi, technology adviser to European Commission president Romano Prodi.)
Which is a fine concept until all the water dries up and the lily pads die.
Broadband companies are not going to allow people to share their badnwidth over a large urban area like this. While it's a great concept (I would love this) it's not really feasible in a greedy corporate America.
-Tolerate my intolerance
First of all this article assumes Voice over ip will be perfect(HA!). Also, have you ever tried to download while warchalking? Its near impossible to roam from network to network (any 802.11 protocol) and still retain connections over TCP/IP. All the equipment handles roaming differently. Why? Take a look at the standard, there is hardly anything there to talk about Roaming. So all the hardware manufacturers have taken it upon themselves to devise their own way to implement roaming and in the process made sure that complete seemless roaming was impossible under the current scheme.
802.11 and the others like 802.11b were built to supplant wires, not to allow full movement like the mobile phone networks.
When you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey. --Arab Proverb
I bought one of the first GSM handsets in Europe. It cost an arm and a leg but it was worth it.
The market took time to get geographical coverage, and to get prices down to 'cheap'.
But it was profitable and useful from Day 1.
3G is a pipe dream. No-one wants it, no-one needs it, and chasing this particular dragon will bankrupt more than one European Telco.
If I had shares in Nokia, Ericsson, or any GSM operator I would sell them today.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Most of the 'clueless home users' I know (and I can think of half a dozen right now) only share what they download; they don't add new resource to the network.
When I was on WinMX, I shared some tracks ripped from the CDs I owned, as well as recordings of my own original performances. However, far fewer people downloaded my CD rips and original work than downloaded the music I had downloaded. Just because I share something doesn't mean that anybody will download it.
Besides, how is a new user supposed to obtain resources other than pop music (such as anime) in order to begin sharing them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Aside from the typical /. geek that knows the risks of WiFi (overlapping, channels, WEP, security, etc), this would be a nightmare if every Tom and Jane of the world tries to start up their own mesh node. Hell, it was hard enough getting the 300+ residents at my college to agree on the same damn workgroup and network settings back before we actually had wired dorms (we ran our own cables). A call for some type of infrastructure (no matter how basic) is still going to be required for this to work right. I can imagine someone getting a mesh working in a small town, then some dumb shmuck runs their own WAP and fucks the whole network up for 2 blocks. I don't mean to rant, but I can see a lot of headaches if this sort of thing isn't planned out properly.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
You're not giving away anything, aside from having your hardware switch packets, just like everything else.
What about giving your time for maintaining such hardware? And what about the cost of hardware upgrades when load increases?
Will I retire or break 10K?
and yet, those frogs never do bungee jumping.
irma trattino
eat.me at http://irmetta.free.fr
Correct me if I am wrong but isnt Wi-Fi stands for 802.11a with max bandwidth of 45 Mbps?
Secondly there is another major problm for 3 G especially in Europe. I live in Switzerland where ppl overall are fairly health conscience. Infact in cities here many places are not covered by cell phones because ppl dont like to have antennnas on top of their houses and thats for 2G. For 3G we require four times as many antennas as its range is smaller. SO that makes me wonder how are they gonna conver the cities here? I believe the situation is the same throughout Europe. So how are the phone companies gonna handle this?
What's under yellowstone?
the same principle can be used for vehicels and traffic as well - with proper protocols anything could be implemented, from GPS to communications.... I look forward to a future when I _know_ the exact positions of all vehicels on the road in a 3 or 4 mile radius... that would really improve security (and driving fun)
Powerful is he who overpowers his temptations.
I'd love to know where this guy gets the idea that data services are increasing at a rapid rate. Here in the US telcos are in financial trouble because they bet on that very same thing happening, and its not. Most folks use their cell phones to make phone calls and thats it.
Next I'd love to know why this guy thinks that there would be a critical mass of people savvy enough to participate in such a p2p network. How many of your friends and family know how to fully use their cell phones including all their various features?
Also who here would like to have their ability to make and recieve phone calls contingent on the good graces of others? Without telcos you have no garuntee of service. When there are service problems who will you call? Why on earth would the public at large want to manually handle their own communications networks? Its akin to everyone running their own switchboard just to save a buck. It might be great fun for the geeks out there but for folks who are either too lazy or too busy (i.e. everyone else) this just isn't going to appeal to them.
Lastly there is the is the issue of bandwidth. Just because you pay a "fixed fee" for a certain amount of service that does not absolve you from letting the neighborhood run buck wild with your connection. If enough people use your connection in a manner which disproportionately affects your ISP, they WILL bill your butt for the extra costs and then where will you be? Do you think any of your everything must be free loving neighbors will pitch in to help you in your plight? I don't think so. I'm also sure the fad will die down after the first few cases of someone's line being used to traffic in warez or illegal pr0n causes the authorities to come down on some unsupecting "ISP account sharer".
So in short, I really think the geeks should just stick to the technical stuff and leave the business plans, or non-business business plans to the professionals.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Taken from an article here
The result was that five licences were sold for a staggering total of £22.5 billion stg. The clear winner in the contest was the UK Exchequer, which bagged the money. Germany soon followed, raising $42.6bn, but by then doubts about the pricing had begun to emerge.
All those companies that paid those outrageous amounts for the 3G licences have got to be regretting it now. Especially since a good number of them are near bankruptcy. I never understood how prices like that could have happened. They just went nuts. And it was all done in auction style for the benefit of consumers.. Unfortunately, I think it will end up having the opposite effect. (At least in terms of the 3G stuff)..
If we all end up with cheaper, better service that has nothing to do with 3G, that would sure be ironic....
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Nice idea..
Unfortunatly reality isn't that simple. First, the routing problems are a lot different from those in tradiotional ip or gsm networks. Suppose you would have 1000+ wifi node network in your city, how would you find the way hopping from node to node to your friend? Even worse, many of the nodes are moving in cars and busses, and just as you have found a nice route through the network some of the nodes have moved or went down.
I'm not saying routing dynamic mesh network is impossible, it's just very hard, and can easily consume most of the bandwidth available.
Besides, if a hop is aroung 100m, a packet travelling 100km would be a 1000 hops away! A user of mesh network will miss the low latency and reliability of gprs networks with the current technology.
The main problem with mesh networks is that they do not scale very well.
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
everybody harps on the "payment for bandwidth" issue. An 802.11 backbone is independant of the internet. People on this network can share files, play games etc at 11 mb/s. On a large-enough scale, that is a cool network by itself.
Not everyone has to gateway. Nobody has to gateway. Or get everyone on your street to pitch in for a fat pipe (but who gets it, i know). Everyone gets a wicked link and you all save a heap.
Sorry, I meant doesn't WIfi stand for blah blah blah... :-)
Hey, Blah Blah Blah doesnt mean that I dint have anything important to say though
What's under yellowstone?
> This stupid acronym really needs to die.
And while you're out there laying waste to dopey acronyms, could you maybe put a bullet through that totally pretentious and apropos of nothing "War-" prefix used to designate the catalogs and cataloguers of un-secured wireless networks?
Any bets on how long this article will be available until the guy retracts it claiming "Sorry... It sounded like a good idea but do to the overwhelming number of e-mails I've been receiving from Slashdot users telling me what an idiot I am, I am going to retract my article."
... the list or problems not addressed by his article is huge ...
There are numerous flaws with his article, all of which have already been pointed out by other posters so I wont bother restating them. But here's a summary.
1. Data access. You are responsible for the data on your router. If your neighbor sets up a kiddie porn site after hijacking your net connection, at the very least your connection will be shut down and your life will be highly inconvenienced. At most, you go to jail.
2. Roaming. Switching from one wireless network to another isn't this magical thing that just happens transparently and seamlessly like this article suggests. If you exceed the range of one wireless network in the middle of a download, your download isn't going to magically start up again when you hit the next wireless network. (Granted you can "resume" if you are using proper software.)
3. Money. If dozens of people start cancelling their cable/DSL because they are all taking part in a neighborhood wireless Internet pool, the cable/DSL guys are going to raise prices or go out of business.
4. VoIP. Hahahahaha. Enough said.
umm what happens when you have no 802.11b signal what do you fall down to ?
..... I dont think so
what happens when your out in the middle of backwater and you really do need that towtruck ?
you need GSM still
3g networks are not stupid they would much rather have VoIP and manage everything as data anyway and are infact asking handset people about this Nokia is very keen to sell stuff that use's VoIP and management of bandwidth strange
regards
John Jones
Note that the telco and cable monopolies are fighting this already. Most of the EULAs contain terms that ban reselling the service. They are actively searching for customers who install a wireless access point, and threatening them with legal action (or just terminating their service). They understand the challenge, and want to maintain their monopoly.
/. several times.
One of the more entertaining aspects is the customers who fight back by pointing out that they
aren't reselling the service, they're giving it away for free. The telco/cable guys aren't amused.
This has already been reported on
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The biggest problem that the article barely touches on is that there aren't a huge number of non-overlapping channels. If three homes in a row all use the same channel, stand out on the street and watch what happens to your signal quality.
As others have noted, if one home is on xDSL from company Y using one public IP address and the next "hop" is using Cable from comany Z using another public IP address, at best case scenario, your data transmission will suffer a temporary silence. In more likely scenario, you lose connection with an associated AP, your PC attempts to renegotiate with an AP, grabs IP information and reinitiates IP connection.
How long does this take? Too damn long for VoIP or even a web page to load. You could of course set IP Leases to expire every second to help, but talk about broadcast storm.
Also, until full T1's or T3's start getting run to every home, DSL's and/or Cable modems just can't handle 25+ people all downloading files acceptably. Put the number up around 100 and it is not a pretty picture to paint.
Even if the performance were to be acceptable, how long do you think it would take for DSL providers to realize that for every 1 customer, 15 are using it without additional revenues for them? Expect heavy handed TOS to put and end to that quick.
I think the idea is right, but his visualized implementation is flawed. Now if he said a meshed network powered by WISP's with a cooperative agreement, that would make more sense to me.
Just my $0.02 worth.
1) Could someone comment on whether any IPv6 features would be particularly suited or not suited for the froghop concept in the article?
2) What does Mesh network mean? How is mesh different from the decentralized wired networks that TCP/IP was designed for decades ago?
3) The Backbone Problem: What about the Internet2 example -- Wouldn't Universities and similar orgs be natural city-to-city backbones? And what about governments (I know, I know) for country/ocean connections?
I case you don't know him, he is the perpetual tech optimist Gilder Tech Report.
These wall street, talking heads are always so optimistic about technologies that they fail to see their shortcommings. I love new technology as much as any slashdotter, but do you think for a minute that reliable wireless data will be built on a technology that can be knocked out with a 2.4 GHz cordless telephone?
Gimme a break.
-ted
And from the article:
"The new thinking will also impact places where wireless penetration is conspicuously low -- among real water lilies and frogs, ironically, in some of the most rural, remote parts of our world. A dirty little secret about 802.11b is that it can cover more than 20 kilometers with suitably directional antennas."
I agree that WiFi, even with 20 km PoPs, is still not a GSM or 3G, etc replacement. I live in a rural area myself and there are no WiFi spots that I know of. This is mainly because you can ONLY get dialup!! What's the point of sharing a 28.8 (sorry, we are too far from the city 56k) over 1000 feet whetn your closest neighbour is 1 km away and you don't have a big enough pipe to support your own home LAN?
Yes, I agree that mobile phones will not go away any time soon, but it would be more interesting for VoIP to be able to tap into 802.11 frequencies automatically and communicate over the internet. Now THAT would make both 802.11 and mobile phones more useful, and give companies that produce both devices a new lease on life. It would also allow for you to get phone reception in your apartment, in the hallway, in the basement, etc where you don't get any signal right now.
(Note: I have heard that such things were tried already in Europe, under the name of 'Kermit' and some other names as well. They were failures. The difference here is that the phone would use 802.11 as a backup as opposed to tying you down to a PoP all the time.
Remember, when mobile phones first came along, "mobile" meant "not fixed to the wall". You could not move while talking. There was no handover. If you went out of reach of your base station, you would lose the call.
Still, this was a huge first step, as is Wi-Fi.
The real pushback could and probably will come from the ISPs. You don't really have a legal right to share your home connection with your neighbors. Of course, it depends on your service contract, but most home service contracts probably explicitely disallow this, and we have heard about ISPs taking steps to stop it.
What few of the businesses in the effected market segments (3G, home DSL and broadband) realize is that any control they have could be strictly temporary. As the article points out, once the density of lilly pads is high enough, you have a robust mesh of nodes, and everyone is connected.
Obviously, there are technical issues to work out. The network needs some heirachy, or you have to hop through thousands of nodes to get accross country, and the latency will kill you. As it stands now, it is a star topology, since I don't think any typical base stations will route through neighboring base stations. On the other hand, there are some really promissing technologies that could do this very well.
All it will take is a bit more advocacy, but some of the current advocacy approaches can't work in the long run because of problems mentioned above. Instead of promoting the use of security loopholes in existing basestations, we have have to develop the free/open hardware and software to implement the appropriate infrastructure. A small box with an array antenna and a smart router could provide all the local coverage and network connectivity through neighboring identical boxes, and a few high end routers with more complex tranceivers, and even hard wired connections could connect the rest to the backbone.
If this is done right, it can't be stopped easily by legislation. The only real difficulty would be getting enough people to install these rather than something that wouldn't play with this network. It could look very much like the Linux vs. MS competition. Many of the commercial players will at least attempt to behave like MS and use any tactic to squash it, and this will make it difficult, at least initially, to penetrate the market.
Although this certainly hasn't played out yet in the OS market, I claim that the all or nothing approach that MS has taken will ultimately destroy them. In the short run, all sorts of things can happen, but in the end it is much more powerful to share knowledge freely, and those that attempt to hoard it will lose.
Oh dear.. If Nicholas Negroponte's opinion constitutes a brilling insight into the future of wireless technology, that must make you and I look like friggin' Nostradamus. He's not only stating the obvious, he's stating what packet radio geeks have known for decades. Lilypad computing is an inevitable consequence of mobile communications. To anyone familliar with the technology, its obvious. Yeesh....I dont mean to slam Negroponte, but....Heheheh, if stating the obvious is the only pre-requisite for getting your name in lights on Slashdot, I would like to offer a few of my own radically futuristic thoughts and observations.
o Computers are cool, and are getting more and more powerful each year!
o In my opinion, the sky is likely to stay blue.... for a long, long time.
o Many politicians are corrupt!
o Food will become stinky if left out too long.
o If you don't tie your shoe laces, you may trip over them, or worse --- You may fall down!
o Community networks such as the ones described by Negroponte are a natural outgrowth of its adoption by consumers. Duh.
o People who end up in car accidents will, oddly enough, send their car in....for repairs!
o Babies smell nice!
o Wireless clouds are rapidly becoming wireless fabrics. Soon, the nation will be filled with people out wardriving who don't even know they're doing so. Welcome to 1975, Nicholas! We've got a great big convoy, rockin' through the night! Oh-we've got a great big connnnvoy, ain't she a beautiful sight.....Coooonnnvoooooy....
Bowie J. Poag
Of course, there's Sputnik
If your packet stayed on the surface of the water, on the pad the whole time, then yeah, routing is a bitch. But the idea is that it routes on the surface only until it finds a pad with a "stem" (internet connection). Then it tunnels down that high speed connection to come up much closer to your friend. But not everyone has to share their internet connection, those that are not simply pass along traffic on wireless only.
The real trick to this setup is how do you know where your friend is? I mean, if you're on wireless and he's on wireless, then the route to either one of you via the pads is a minor PITA. But not nearly as hard as the scaling problem you're describing.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Negroponte can make predictions as to how succesful 3G will be?
How? What makes him an "expert" in telecommunications? To make it clearer, what makes Negroponte an expert in anything?
Does the MIT association and the fact that the media love to have an "expert" handy make his words mean more than they should, to infinitely more people than it matters?
To make it plain for everyone. 3G doesn't exist YET, in the sense of a product that can be bought.
There was a phone prototype, which melt down, simply because the equalizer designed to resolve the multipaths, couldn't handle the load.
Europe and Japan seem hellbent on introducing 3G and what will really make or break it, is the price of the final product and the content offered. The U.S. is another matter altogether. Management of 2G networks is frankly pants and most US telcos have decided that they don't want/need 3G now, 2.5G in the form of EDGE and other things is enough.
As it can be understood, the 3G saga has a long way to go. So does 4G, on which any research institution/lab worth a dime is mainly working.
So my question is this: Is Negroponte's commentary nothing but media friendly FUD?
Is he offering his services as a consultant to the telco industry? If the answer to the second question is yes, what makes Negroponte different from Arthur Andersen, when almost 2 decades ago they advised AT&T, that the users of mobile phones in the year 2000 wouldn't exceed 20 million worldwide and they would advise AT&T stick to wired comms? This led AT&T to close almost all their wireless labs down and as a result they're now lightyears behind compared to their competitors in the wireless market.
If anyone wants "predictions" about 3G thay can ask my gran. Her predictions are more accurate than Negroponte's (or any Negroponte's) will ever be.
/. Where the truth
It sounds like an intriguing problem. If a frog is
in the east side of the pond want to find another
frog on the west side of the pond. Which lily pad
should this frog jump to ? And the bigger questions is, how did the frog A know where frog B
is in the first place ?
These frogs are all mobile.
Could someone give me an idea.
they already have the fbi warning people about the dangerous hackers using their unsecured wi-fi & wasn't nokia just calling it a crime a few days ago (reported on at the bbc for those that missed it)
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
in this arena is a system whereby you grab your wireless lappie, sit in ton somewhere and connect to the nearest/strongest wireless signal. it assigns you an address automatically and nat's you onto the internet. the owner of the WAP (and indeed, wired connection it's connected to) should have priority over the bandwidth so that he doesn't really notice you and the others intruding. however, when he's not using the connection it's available for you to use.
the system should be able to cope with a WAP or connection the wap is connected to going down (ie find another wap and get a new address). the wap's should have the intelligence to realise that the owner is using all the bandwidth on the wired connection and route your data to another nearby wap which isn't congested. it would be very cool if the wap could up your bandwidth by allowing you access to both it's own wired connection and any of nearby wap's (3 wap's, all on 2 meg lines, 6 megs of bandwidth available).
I can also see a need for some form of authentication, ie taking responsibility for your actions when you use someone else's connection. otherwise there is scope for alot of abuse.
I think that people would be happy to share their andwidth if it doesn't impact them too much, after all it's a sharing, caring thing. I mean in this system, the owner would be able to utilise the unused bandwidth of his neighbours too.
thoughts?
dave
Freely exchanging ideas is our right, although it may be threatened at times and in some places. With an active community keeping close tabs on legislative attempts to curtail this, I think we can manage to fend off the worst effects of industry bought and paid legislators. Oct. 9th will tell us a lot about whether the Supreme court can be bought.
Check out the MANET (mobile adhoc network) IETFt ml
working group:
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/manet-charter.h
Lots of university research going on in this area.
This is a great concept, but the author makes one serious error. The average user will not, in the next few years, become a person who spends hundreds of dollars to access the internet, much less to allow his/her friends to do so.
Recently I was ranting against AOL to a friend of mine, who replied, "But I like AOL. I just click one time and I'm on the internet". Nevermind that she has to put up with all the AOL crap, that AOL screws with her internet settings, that she's subjected to their advertisments, and that it's expensive compared to the alternatives. She doesn't care. She doesn't care because it's simple and lets her check her e-mail, and that's all she wants to do.
Until the average internet user becomes more like today's educated user/enthusiast, cheap and simple will dominate the consumer market.
Those are with directional antenna on the AP and the client. It's not a replacement for a cell phone unless you have a way to get the AP to lock onto your position. To get cell phone funtionality, the AP has to at least be omnidirectional, and for practical purposes the phone should be too.
However, I can see a good product would be an 802.11b VOIP phone that falls back to other cellular networks when unable to access an AP. This way, when you get signal, all your cell phone hours belong to you. You can just get a low hour plan to use in emergencies.
A VOIP system that would accept incoming calls and forward them on to your cell number would be good too
-no broken link
with directional antenae you could leap frog from neighbour to neighbour until you reach a broadband access point. if you are that spread out, you shouldn't have too much traffic to chew up whatever bandwidth you can squeeze out of the system. of course a regular 1000' reception per base station should be able to keep you within range at most times.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
Mesh tech won't solve this and preserve your 11 megabits. The routing protocols eat bandwidth leaving you with a pittance of what you once had. Look for maybe 2 megabits under ideal conditions.
Another problem with this lilypad approach is that any mobile device on the network has a very tenuous connection to the Internet. This connection has many single points of failure and no support process/mechanism. How could an innovator, in good faith, roll out a new service on such a fragile and uncoordinated medium?
You get what you pay for. I'd rather pay for a reliable 14.4 than receive an iffy 11 Megs at no cost. If you answer to clients (and care), you'll agree.
I have an idea: CUT OUT THE ISP! This is not possible today (it is on a small level however), but imagine entire cities hooked up into one huge wireless network and no connection to the internet. The city could create its own internet, and by having huge wireless connections to other cities, this internet could expand. The technology for this is really almost there and if this was to happen, well... hot damn it'd be the best thing since sliced bread.
If this takes off, it really will create a mesh so that even in rural areas, the base station on top of your house (or better yet, the silo) will be able to connect to a handful of neighbors, and provide a fully redundant connection. I will be the only one suffering if I cut the power line to the router with the backhoe, because all the neighbors won't make the same mistake all at once.
Commercial providers aren't even interested in the remote areas, because there just aren't enough dollars to extract. Those annoying "can you hear me now" commercials just confirm my long time theory about corporate image advertising. They are always trying to reverse a real or perceived problem in their public image, and typically this is instead of actually trying to fix the problem. Anyone remember AT&T's "easy to do business with" campaign?
Just curious, I've been wondering for a while what your sig meant :-/
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
if you think about this for 2 seconds, you end up with nothing but hyped air. let's see:
1 - sharing 811b networks: cool, but an old hat. has been happening for years. no need to talk about that one.
2 - backbone-less internet. packets are transmitted without the help of a central carrier, from 811b to 811b, passed on until they reach the destination. the lilys and ponds scheme.
this would be a revolutionary concept, and put a lot of telcos out of business. the reason why it doesn't work it that it ends at the city borders. there are not enough people/wireless networks in any of the following: outside major cities in the US, oceans, mountain ranges, etc.
note to nicholas: not all people live in metropolitan areas, and not all metropolitan areas are right next to other metropolitan areas.
As has been discussed lower down, if a whole community pitches in for a T3 and a big "lillypad" then the bandwidth will be OK. And as it is now, many people (such as whoever wrote the article) are happy to share bandwidth, it's the same mentality that drives opensource.
:-)
As soon as I can afford to go wireless I plan to put a bulletproof firewall round my files and then leave my connection for anyone who has the knowledge to use it.
If everyone is sharing everyone else's bandwidth it's ok, and it really doesn't do any harm giving out free connection use when your offline
Big problems include recognizing resources of such a network is not merely nodes, but more.
At best you'll see this in some semblance of usability in 13 years at 3 cities in Japan, and 4 regions smaller than 10 miles wide somewhere in California and Washington State.
It's interesting how less than ten years of technology can totally change a person's tune, isn't it?
The argument about backbone fails to recognize the enormous supply of dark fiber resulting from the telecom debacles.
Seastead this.
I remember back in the day having a 14.4k modem - then a 33.6k - then a 56k. Eventually I got ADSL and then SDSL and then I had some shared T1. So what?
Over the last 6 months I have made the switch to a wireless DSL provider. They tell me it's based on 802.11b (but it's PtP which makes me think its not) - it runs great. BUT my problem is that it will OFTEN falls apart - either something goes wrong on there end with the signal strength or theres to many people in the area suddenly joining my network that it kills my connection.
Basically surfing the net felt WAY stabler on "ground" lines then relying on this hippie pixie wireless internet crap.
Maybe some day we'll all have T3's in our houses - maybe then I won't experience lag.
Ave Molech Setting
I believe you are a troll. A lot of things can be automated by the hardware and software so that a newbie user doesnt have to think about it. They're just plugging themselves into the net to get access to the internet. No difficulties. Techincal problems are solved by individuals, but this shouldnt be a problem as there can easily be enough other broadcasts in the area to provide access if one is down.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I have no real reason to believe that 3G will be much of a success, but I expect that an unregulated, bottom-up mesh network would not do well, certainly not if it were based on existing 802.11 technology.
Networks like the GSM digital phone networks function because of their cellular organization scheme. There is a certain set of channel frequencies. Each "cell" uses a subset of this, and the the cells are organized in such a way that cells using the same channels can never overlap. In any system, such as 802.11, with a constrained set of data channels, there must be discipline to make sure that there is no overlap. Also, there is an absolute upper limit on how many access points can occupy a given area. The long ranges that the article mentions only make this harder to arrange. I can see a scheme where the hardware does its best to minimize the possibility of overlap, but in high density living areas, wireless network frequency doesn't strech very far.
I'd like to know where he gets the idea that performance increases with the number of stations. Just as with a traditional LAN, performance increases only with the number of switches/access points for local traffic or the number of uplinks, for internet traffic. Additional client systems do downgrade performance.
This sort of thing is interesting, but not in the way everyone seems to be discussing it. The potential for this sort of local wireless umbrella shouldn't be to connect everyone to the internet, but to create an independent local network.
Think of it like this: If we negate the issue of ISP and telco interference by removing internet access from the main picture, we create a local freenet where people can connect freely to resources in their area and pay only for backbone access to distant resources from ISPs or what have you.
1: People get information and services they need without having to pay for access and can get services they want by paying.
2: Telcos and ISPs will still have a market for access to the networks they have invested in building, and therefore
3: There won't be any legislative smackdown.
Just a thought.
-----
On an unrelated note, your sig befuddles me as well:
"(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)"
As nearly as I can tell, you've posted nearly 500 comments, but have never answered the immortal question: What's a "deltic?"
This is what I know:
- You've claimed here to have written a Space Invaders clone on your ARM-based Acorn when you were 15, which sets an upper limit of 30 on your current age--so I'd wager senility isn't an issue.
- From this post I'd assume that you were admitted to Bournebouth University--so basic literacy probably isn't an obstacle either.
- Several have tried--and failed--to get you to explain this condition:
But I have to admit, the question consumes me. Mister Jones, could you enlighten us, please?- What's a "deltic"?
by smartfart on Mon Sep 23, '02 10:43 AM
- OT: Deltic?
by Anonymous Coward on Wed May 29, '02 11:43 AM
- "Deltic" = "Doesn't Like Spellcheckers"
:-)
by billstewart on Thu Apr 11, '02 09:27 PM
- what the f*** is "a deltic"?
by Anonymous Coward on Tue Aug 14, '01 04:10 PM
- Re:What's a deltic?
by KlomDark on Tue Nov 14, '00 06:43 PM
--So you're either either not reading the replies to your posts (in which case this question is moot), or you're none too eager to discuss deltism.attached to Being Wireless: Viral Telecommunications posted on Mon Sep 23, '02 07:47 AM
attached to Intel Itanium 2 Benchmarks posted on Wed May 29, '02 08:01 AM
attached to AMD Targets Web Pad & PDA Processor Market posted on Tue Apr 09, '02 02:28 PM
Re:what the f*** is "a deltic"? by Head Lice on Wed Aug 15, '01 06:03 AM
attached to Best "Visual Studio" Alternative On Linux posted on Mon Aug 13, '01 04:14 PM
Re:What's a deltic? by KlomDark on Sun Nov 26, '00 06:26 PM
Re:What's a deltic? by Donut2099 on Tue Nov 14, '00 09:01 PM
attached to 3dfx Drops Video Card Division posted on Tue Nov 14, '00 08:56 PM
Obviously this would require dynamic routing of never before-seen levels of power. Does anyone have any links or book suggestions on dynamic routing? I've become curious.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
It is difficult for a "troll" to be modded +3 Insightful. Who is going to design this hardware and software that will automate everything? More importantly who is going to maintain it and accept responsibility for its performance? Who will give assurances as to the QoS (Quality of Service)? Running a phone system is a bit more critical and important than keeping your run of the mill open-source flavor of the week mysql server up and running for more than a few days straight. It simply cannot be allowed to fail ever. People could die as they would not be able to dial for help.
This is simply more evidence that this idea has not been thought through properly.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
3G is so going to fail! Telephone companies are greedy! Anyone who pays $0.25 for a email message has more money than brains!
Digital services are slow to catch on here because the interface sucks, and the telcos screw you over on charges. Unlike Japan, there is no model (i-Mode services) for third parties to bring on their own revenue models. The greedy telcos want to provide everything for everyone, because they know best. That's why they're doing so well on the markets right now *cough cough*
This apathy on the part of telcos (and don't forget the greed) is allowing alternatives like 802.11 to gain hold. Don't forget that it's not just the technology, but social acceptance of the technology. If people just get used to there being 802.11 hotspots around a city where they stop - say, at the mall, grocery store, coffee place - and the devices to provide that access - say, handhelds and notebooks instead of cell phones - get entrenched, then 3G is dead in the cradle. I already see this happening, because the cost to set up a 802.11 access point is so small.
Another wildcard is a crackdown on PtP. It would be very easy for communities to set up their own PtP networks for this purpose - I know of a few university residences doing this to combat draconian rules on usage. More people get used to wireless, the more places it appears.
My $0.02..
..don't panic
A year and a half ago I started a project to do something pretty close to this. The goal is to use all opensourced hardware and software to make PDA/phone devices and a wireless grid. All the technology already exists and is even available in opensource versions. When you want to make a call you select the user from your address book or enter their address and they are tracked using Jabber to gain their presence info, then a VoIP connection is initiated between the two users. Of course this also makes implementing instant messaging, web browsing, etc rather easy. It's not a problem to encrypt the entire connection either of course and to handle roaming issues you can use a virtual network so as you real connection breaks and is reconencted (sometimes through a different route) everything stays stable because the virtual network hides all the little flaws from the end protocols. You don't need to select just one wireless protocol either. Put PCMCIA slots in the back of the PDA/phone and then as technology changes you can change with it without having to get a whole new phone. Put more than one slot and you have a multiband phone or can even connect over dial-up or normal ethernet.
My dream is to some day see it how the phones worked in Bruce Sterling's book Distraction. We're not quite that far yet but we certainly have all the technology to make a working opensourced phone network and phones.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Naming naming naming... How do we find and name resources on the network, or advertise our own services? DNS is a hierarchical system, you have a group of root servers, and that will be a weak point in a distributed system such as ad-hoc networks. The network might be free, but resolving objects will still rely on a centralized system. ANd the telcos, or whatever enemies of the ad-hoc network, can attack that.
Josh
--
Power to the Peaceful
Seems to me that security should be an end-to-end concern of any application over TCP/IP. We have secure versions of many important apps, but not all. https and ssh handle some of the most critical aspects, and certainly IP-phones should be encrypted even if it isn't a particularly long key.
By the way, with analog cell phones, you can just follow your target around with a standard scanner and probably pick up any call they make. A bit harder with digital, but no more secure. Note that in your example, you don't have to 'capture' their signal either, just monitor it.
I'm a little late to this discussion, but this sort of technology already exists. Check out Mesh Networks: http://www.meshnetworks.com/ They make the software for the end user, routers that you can place on street poles, and access points. The client is simple for the end user to install and works on existing hardware. They have a demo set up all throughout Orlando, and it is quite impressive. It hasn't yet become big, because I believe the company had some financing problems, but don't quote me on that.
I am carying both the Glock and the M1911. Let me ask you something. Can you help me install Linux 7.3 on this machine?
The interesting point, which seems to have gotten by the wayside, is that most traffic is local. People chatting between houses, playing in MUDs, sharing files, etc.
The wi-fi can provide an alternative to the internet in cases like this, as most of the packets would be able to lily-pad-hop.
Any, it's something to think about. If I want to share, for example, ISOs of the latest linux install, neither I nor the receipient needs to be connected to the internet at that point.
Best regards, Tom
"You mean, if you allow the master to be uncivil, to treat you
any old way he likes, and to insult your dignity, then he may deem you
fit to hear his view of things?"
"Quite the contrary. You must defend your integrity, assuming
you have integrity to defend. But you must defend it nobly, not by
imitating his own low behavior. If you are gentle where he is rough,
if you are polite where he is uncouth, then he will recognize you as
potentially worthy. If he does not, then he is not a master, after all,
and you may feel free to kick his ass."
-- Tom Robbins, "Jitterbug Perfume"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...