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 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.
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?
If people can't set their AP up to do this easily, it won't happen, due to huge gaps in the net.
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'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.
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.
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