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Buy Broadband From Your Neighbor
infractor writes "Wired has an article about a wireless project delivering free broadband to a rural community. Using Linux based devices called meshboxes from Locustworld, they've created a local mesh network. More detail in this article. With Wi-Fi friendly ISPs talking about micro-ISP deals for wireless sharers this could be the accelerator UK broadband has been waiting for." Last year we mentioned the MeshAP-05, a bootable CD which "turns a single board computer or laptop into a mesh node and access point," since updated to MeshAP-06. Update: 02/13 19:52 GMT by T : I see from comments that -08 is actually the current version of MeshAP, with -09 soon. Thanks.
Now if only we could get this sort of thing in the US. I'd pay my next-door neighbor to let me connect through his WAP. Too bad AT&T doesn't allow that sort of thing.
Despite millions of years of evolution, human beings, taken as a group, are still stupid, panicky animals.
The article talks about getting telcos permission to connect these networks to them, but once these networks get pervasive enough, they can cover the globe without needing to connect to telcos.
In case of slashdotting.
A networking tool designed to let soldiers maintain constant communication on the battlefield is being redeployed for a non-military purpose: providing free broadband connections.
Speaking of tools, it has come to the attention of some members of the slashdot community that the editors of this sight are just that: Tools. Sometimes, the ban moderators that are trying to spread the word. See the signature of this post for more info.
The devices, known as MeshBoxes, allow for hundreds of Internet users to share a single broadband connection.
* Story Tools
[Print story] [E-mail story] [Sync story]
* See also
* Wireless Is Star Again at CES
* Feds Label Wi-Fi a Terrorist Tool
* Wireless Bill: Too Much Too Soon?
* Future of Wi-Fi: Fast, Fast, Fast
* Unwired News: The Next Generation
* Discover more Net Culture
* You know IT/IS Important
* Give Yourself Some Business News
* Today's Top 5 Stories
* U.S. Tries E-Mail to Charm Iraqis
* Study: Couples Love Kissing Right
* Mesh Less Cost of Wireless
* More Fallout Over Greek Game Ban
* Data Flood Feeds Need for Speed
With just five MeshBoxes, the tiny municipality of Kingsbridge, Devon, in western England, was able to provide broadband access to the citizens who live in the center of town. A group of enthusiasts eventually wants to provide all 5,000 of the town's residents with wireless broadband.
Frustrated with British Telecommunications' slow progress in wiring the town with DSL, two members of the Kingsbridge Link project took charge. They purchased the MeshBoxes for around $2,400, and strategically placed them in the center of town.
The boxes piggyback off a single broadband pipeline owned by one of the local businesses and distribute bandwidth to the residents who tap into the network.
Users can download and swap information, share printers and even bandwidth -- for free. To partake in the network, they need only a PC card for their laptops ($80) or a Wi-Fi radio adapter for desktop computers that could be purchased off the shelf for about $160.
The eventual goal for the MeshBoxes is to get enough of them out on the street so that almost anyone could get Internet access from anywhere, said Jon Anderson, co-founder of LocustWorld, the company that sells the MeshBoxes.
According to Anderson, LocustWorld has sold about 270 MeshBoxes to date. He hopes the technology will eventually be used throughout Europe, such that anyone traveling outside their homes would be able to pop open their laptops and surf the Web wherever they go.
"The long-term plan for this is to build absolutely gigantic networks," he said. "It's evolving into such a total reality."
Industry analysts have doubts as to whether this plan could be implemented on a larger scale.
Seamus McAteer, an analyst with Zelos Group, said such a scenario requires the cooperation of individual users, who would have to agree to share the same phone line. Similarly, DSL providers, who own the pipelines, would have to back the idea.
However, the concept relies on two technologies that are already readily available: Wi-Fi and mesh networks.
Wi-Fi, the most popular form of wireless Internet access, is practically ubiquitous in coffee shops, airports, offices and homes in the United States. The technology was slow to catch on in Europe, but that appears to be changing.
The number of so-called hot spots in Europe -- places where people can receive Wi-Fi access -- has jumped from 269 at the end of 2001 to 1,150 at the end of last year, a gain of 327 percent, according to market research firm IDC.
Both a drastic decline in price for Wi-Fi gear and easing of federal restrictions surrounding the build-out of hot spots contributed to a surge in Wi-Fi use, IDC said in a recent report.
Even though the concept of tapping into Wi-Fi networks for Internet access is fairly new in the region, some European communities are already looking at ways to connect these hot spots for wide-area seamless coverage. That's where mesh networks come into play.
Story continued on Page 2
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Soldiers in remote areas and emergency rescue workers already use mesh networks to communicate directly with one another rather than rely on an on-site base station, or in the case of Kingsbridge, an Ethernet connection in every single home.
Generally, when someone makes a cell-phone call, the phone's signal travels to a cell tower and then to another person's handset. A mesh network decreases dependence on cell towers by allowing the signals of one phone to jump directly to another handset.
* Story Tools
[Print story] [E-mail story] [Sync story]
* See also
* Wireless Is Star Again at CES
* Feds Label Wi-Fi a Terrorist Tool
* Wireless Bill: Too Much Too Soon?
* Future of Wi-Fi: Fast, Fast, Fast
* Unwired News: The Next Generation
* Discover more Net Culture
* You know IT/IS Important
* Give Yourself Some Business News
* Today's Top 5 Stories
* U.S. Tries E-Mail to Charm Iraqis
* Study: Couples Love Kissing Right
* Mesh Less Cost of Wireless
* More Fallout Over Greek Game Ban
* Data Flood Feeds Need for Speed
Peter Stanforth, chief technology officer for peer-to-peer wireless provider Mesh Networks, said the advantage of a mesh network is that individuals can communicate with one another without having to build expensive infrastructure like cell-phone towers or additional broadband pipelines. The signal from one device like a cell phone or a desktop computer could jump from one handset to another until it reaches its final destination.
Such a system could reduce the amount of dropped calls and spotty coverage, which can arise when the cell tower is overwhelmed with calls. It would be easier and cheaper to install a mesh network and more affordable for customers to use, Stanforth said.
The one disadvantage of this relay system is a slight latency -- usually lasting milliseconds.
"We felt that this was the way wireless should be done in the future," Stanforth said. "The ability to use a lower-powered radio to help with the whole cost of scalability -- that's really what it's all about it."
A couple of groups that won't view this technology as a convenience are the phone companies and cable service providers.
Considering that they installed the broadband pipelines to begin with, they don't like the idea of residents selling the bandwidth or giving it away for free, McAteer said.
Even if the more open-minded telcos were to allow it -- Anderson said he's been approached by an Internet service provider open to bandwidth sharing -- this doesn't mean that the residents will go for it.
"First of all you would have to have an agreed upon protocol to authenticate users and give access across a host of networks, cooperating access-point providers and getting everyone to agree to share," McAteer said. "I think it's a stretch."
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
I'm going to sue their asses off when all that wireless Kazaa traffic gives me a brain tumour!
Trolling is a art,
Don't you know that distributing wireless access to your neighbors supports terrorism!
.. one day the internet will be rivaled by a community born network? The pieces are almost in place, networking's cheap and easy, peer to peer, desire to do it, etc.
A year or two ago I couldn't imagine it, but I can today. Two of the apartment complexes I've lived in I had neighbors that would have been interested in networking their computers with mine. If wireless had come around sooner (price-wise I mean) we would likely have done it.
Okay, I'm not really on topic. It's just this article put an interesting image in my mind of what I'll be connecting to within the next 5 years.
Just get your neighbor to buy a WiFi router to hook up to his/her cable modem and your in business!
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
"Welcome to [town name]! Here is your fruit basket, your laundry detergent, your book of coupons, and your block of IP addresses."
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I was going to help a buddy of mine set this up with his neighbor, so they could both have broadband. (Because one is in the DSL range, and one is not. Damn SBC to the firey-pits of hell.)
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
The TIA/RIAA/MPAA are putting Secret Coded Messages in the Kazaa traffic that's getting injected straight into your neurons allowing them to read and control your very thoughts to ensure that those thoughts are all in accordance with the accepted standards of the hard left freeper big government libertarian philosophy which they espouse!
Best Slashdot Co
This is a noble goal, but one whose story has been posted several times here on Slashdot. So.. what do you do if your area has NO broadband in the first place? You can't hook up your wireless network point to a 56k modem and share that about.
If this town already has DSL or cable modem, then sharing this with the townfolk who rarely use the Internet is great.. but if THEY can get DSL, then surely anyone in the town can? That's not solving a problem of availability! Just one of cost..
People want to use wireless networking to use broadband that is located elsewhere, but since a telephone exchange in the UK can cover more than a 20 mile area, and few rural exchanges have DSL, having wireless broadband is almost an impossibility.
What's worse is that the ISPs and telcos are focusing on wireless broadband in places that ALREADY HAVE DSL AND CABLE!!! Talk about oversaturation.
mogorific carpentry experiments
.. I'm disgusted with all these new fangled additions to networking and the internet. I think it would only be courteous to ask the father of the Internet, Al Gore, for his opinion before running ahead haphazardly.
Trolling is a art,
The current version available for download is actually v8, with a major release in v9 imminent.
The newer builds are so far only for read-write media such as a hard drive or (as in the case of the hardware MeshBox) a CompactFlash card.
There is a lot of activity on the mailing list, and I recommend anyone interested in participating to subscribe.
/ David H
Wi-Fi, the most popular form of wireless Internet access, is practically ubiquitous in coffee shops, airports, offices and homes in the United States.
When did this happen? And why hasn't anybody notified any local Net providers? I'm still on dialup, and I'm just a few miles from the center of town. I know I'm not the last dialup holdout. Ubiquitous in San Francisco maybe, but not in the US. This author is off her rocker.
Yes I agree this is way cool.
But if this group is anything like the small Amuteur Radio groups I used to work with thier budget is zip/nada.
So we link thier page, hosted at www.globalgold.co.uk, from the main story.
Anyonw here going to help out with thier excess charges??
Think people how you would feel if you had to spend the budget for your next 250 quid access point on excess hosting charges instead.
The commercial and news site links - fair game - but is it really fair to hit the little guys, did we really need that link on the front page?
It's good for people that don't have anyone providing service to individuals in their area but the real problem here is "He who controls the phat pipes controls the Internet" so you are still subject to censorship and surveillance.
Look at the parents history if you don't believe me. He is a known troll, add to your enemy list immediatly an mod accordingly.
Please read before modding down automaticaly :)
Anyways, this sounds like a great idea on paper. But, it seems to be relying on one thing: human goodness. Communism also sounds good on paper. In fact, it is utopia. But, it will NEVER work as it should because humans are greedy.
In this case, what is stopping anyone from geting on Kazaa and using up all the available bandwidth? Well, there goes the high speeds for the other neighbors out the window.
Yes, they could impliment some sort of bandwidth throttling, but where do you cut it at? You would need a speed at which is fast enough to make the technology and effort viable, but a speed slow enough to prevent misuse... A hard thing to decide.
So, in conclusion, I agree that this is a very interesting new application of technology in theory, but in actual implimenttion, I see some serious design flaws.
But I use cat5, and after 2 years of doing it...
I've had to patch the cable 5 times because the dog got it. The last time she got it there were so many patches on the cable it would no longer work.
His son loves downloading stuff on kazaa, since we're on the same subnet, all his little kazza worms have no problems finding machines on my network to harass.
The worst part is, if anything goes wrong with any of their computers, it's MY FAULT. They forgot where they saved something? Ask toqer. The machine slows to a crawl because they used a newscraper to d/l pr0n until it ate up all their availiable space, ask toqer. Dog is scraping it's butt on the ground, ask toqer.
I urge anyone out there even considering sharing their broadband to reconsider unless it's with another geek.
I'm certainly not the first to point this out, but there's something skwewy going on around here!
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
and sit in front of this wireless 802.11g transmitter. Take your foil lined hat off. Comfy now? Good. Now just sit there while we start the network traffic running with the messages from our media lords and masters. Just relax....
Best Slashdot Co
As cool as this technology is, people need to be able to download porn faster before they can use it!
---
what is the practical range of a wifi card? I'm talking here about with real houses and stuff. mine does not seem to reach the room on the far side of the house. (I have concrete interior walls.) So I know it wont reach my neighbor on the far side of that room.
on top of this my 2.4Ghz phone does an excellent job of jamming the connection. I suspect the microwave deteriorates the signal too. Thus I have real worries about if networks based on wifi are practical at the micro-isp level.
Another question is if a wifi pcmcia card, and a typical link-sys or airport basestation unit have the same range. That is to say if I run software basestation on my mac does this have the same range and throughput as a real basestation?
comments?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Buying broadband is interesting and all that, but what about sharing it? When neighbors get together and link up with wireless and a hub, it's usually to avoid paying for another connection. What if both have a connection, and you have software that can join them together? Then you can get a nice doubling of speed. My neighbor can use my bandwidth when I'm not using it, and vice versa.
If several people get together, you can put together a lot of bandwidth in a hurry. Neato.
The Reg covered this story back in December - its cool technology alright! http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/59/28972.html
Gavinsblog.com
According to this report, the CEO of Juniper networks just labelled broadband users as "communists".
This reminds me of a former job I had at a large site (circa 1990) of 400 Sun workstations.
:-)
The ehternet network was all daisy chained together.
Well, you can only imagine what happend every time I needed to pop a new server in the loop.
"Hey! Who unplugged the network?!"
I assume a mesh will not have this issue in its core, but it will on the fringe.
That an analyst is named "Seamus McAteer". It almost sounds like someone is making pun on analysts. :)
OMG, that's like SOOOO funny, you took a computer issue and attached John Ashcroft's name to it. Truly you are the master of subtle political satire and I bow before your brilliance.
It is very cool that more HW and SW are becoming available to do this sort of thing. You still probably want a service provider that does the support, or a community based organization to fill this role (as in one of the links in the story). I'm going to keep watching this and looking for an opportunity to jump in.
The Internet is what it is... A massive, ever expanding community that encompasses to some degree or another, all heterogenous smaller networks. It transcends the "Geographic community" model, and allows for the stronger "Interest based communities" (Such as Slashdot) to form irrespective of Geography. Therin lies it's power.
How could an Apartment complex, or Neighborhood, ever rival that?
I certainly see some special purpose ad-hoc networks offering certain advantages, such as in a college dorm, for a gaming LAN, but even then, the community would only be as good as it's members. Even then, it's not like you'd disconnect from the Internet, or if you did, not permanently.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Who gets to warrant the privacy of data? Telecoms companies are bound by some pretty strong laws to protect the privacy of the voice and data traffic they carry - home supported APs wont
How gets it now? Are you really sure about your privacy?
Anyways it would be to many backs for the gov ppl scratch. Today they only have to fill a couple of big pockets to get what they want ant thats much easyer then filling lots of small pockets.
You are spending too much time on Kazaa. The Internet, and the majority of its casual users, hit a very small number of high traffic sites (Slashdot, google, CNN) that are sitting on very fat pipes. While these sites are distributed somewhat to different geographic locations, it is still very centralized, and not very peer-to-peer.
While it is can be argued that the end points of the small-time user part of the Net may become free from certain ISP based constraints, there will always be a need for Telcos and their fat pipes for a majority of the mainstream content on the web.
-Donut
ps. Before you grip about homogenous content being the death of freedom, reflect on how much more diverse the net is to the bygone days of the Big Three TV networks.
Informative rating: 0
Funny rating: +5
ffs ...
You'll rue the day you hooked the AP up to your modem...
We're talking total rue-age.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
The article never covered how much distance their Wi-Fi signals travel. If anyone has some links to how far the signal goes, i would thank you. Wouldn't a better idea be to put microwave receiving dishes on everyone's house ? You could get satellite and ground link microwave reception.Didn't the gov release some of the frequency for the public. We need to take back the radio spectrum from the government who just sells to highest bidder . It's a pure ripoff if you ask me. The radio spectrum should be FREE . It belongs to the people and not Corporate america .
Wi-Fi ... is practically ubiquitous...
I'm still on dialup...
You're apparently the "practically".
This brings up the point of hardwiring a house. A few people I know have had CAT5 jacks put in thier house. But now, if I were to buy a house, would I do that considering how cheap wireless is? Or both? I don't know, but I guess I'd probably go for the wireless.
-Valiss
... Anyways, this sounds like a great idea on paper. But, it seems to be relying on one thing: human goodness. ... In this case, what is stopping anyone from geting on Kazaa and using up all the available bandwidth? ...
Is there any part of your argument that doesn't apply to cable modems, ethernet, or prettu mych any other part of the internet?
They seem to be doing ok, considering.
Hehehe. A good use for traffic shaping. If you saturate the line for more than a few minutes (ie, longer than a burst), you get throttled back to a minimum connection (maybe a few bytes.) Seriously though, I see this as a way of fostering a local community (ie, local filesharing, games, IP telephony, etc.) while enabling some advantages of the internet as a whole (ie, e-mail, newsgroups, world wide web.) Yes, spam will be a problem - don't want people to saturate the link downloading crap. Newsgroups is a problem - the spool sizes are way too big, and there's too much spam. World wide web is a problem - maybe we should set up a proxy to filter out graphics, etc. - ie, a web-lite.
:)
But connecting via modem can be done!
Yep, been doing it for 2 years also. I'm lucky though - he's a good guy who always pays on time and he knows computers so he rarely requires any kind of tech support. It's been great. We both get broadband for half price. It's above board too - we told the ISP beforehand and bought a business account. I host a domain for each of us on my server/router so we each have Gigs of web space, our own email server with spam and virus filtering, etc. It's great. We burried cat-5 in PVC conduit between our houses. He's got 4 computers on his network and I've got 3 on mine (we both have families). I've also set up Samba on the internal side so we can drag-and-drop website updates from our workstations to the web directories on the server. We've also got our own caching DNS server and Squid to speed things up. Of course we both use php/sql, ssh, bla bla bla. I love being my own host/service provider because I get to do whatever I want. If I want a jabber gateway I set one up. If I want an ftp repository I turn one on. yada yada.
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
Are you really sure about your privacy?
No - I'm not. But I do make a value judgment, and that judgement is that I'd prefer my privacy to be in the hands of a legally accountable entity, rather than trusting someone who may not even be traceable.
I hold various radio licenses in the UK and I can show you the agreements I have to sign that make me legally accountable for protecting any information I am privy to in the use of those licenses.
In fact its one of the biggest difficulties in setting up internet tunnels and access points for radio packet data networks.
I also work in the service industry side of telecoms - I can show you some pretty stringent legal agreements that have to be worked within in this industry designed to protect your privacy.
Can you explain how my privacy is likely to be any better in a network run by hundreds of people with no legal accountabilty and no way to verify thier trustworthyness?
Or put it this way, would you be happy to hand your credit card details, home address, and other identity numbers on the back of your buisness card to every single person that attends a Linux Conference - because those are the sort of people who will be running those nodes, and that will be the kind of data you will at some point send via the systems under thier care.
A very great number of enlightened, trustworthy and down right honest people run linux/bsd systems for the good of the community, but then again its also the platform used by some of the most untrustworthy people on the net who would delight on being able to use your details to run up credit buying hardware for thier own purposes.
In all these discussions I never see any proposal to seperate the good geek from the bad geek. Assuming all geeks are rosy cheeked wholesome people is just as dangerous as believing every single government worker is out to get you.
Oh, wait... That's not right. Here, try this one...
Ahhh... Much better.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
... is:
h arges-to-his-ISP-per-month'. This allows the wireless network to grow at a rate that is sustainable by the people willing to share their broadband access. It also encourages others who have direct broadband to share their connection with nearly ZERO risk of having to pay additional monthly charges. (this is sort of already done with Kazaa, where you can limit the upload speed, how many users can download from you etc.. only we'd need, max output per month, max speed per second, max users sharing service -- CONTROLS.)
1) METHOD TO DEAL WITH PER GIG COSTS PER MONTH:
To have software installed on each of these computers that are connected to the broadband access directly to monitor how much traffic they've sent and received that month.This should be simple enough to accomplish. I say this because if this thing really takes off, it won't be long before Telco's clue in and start charging per gig per month for direct broadband users. With such software the user willing to share his broadband connection to a comfortable threshold limit... say 50% of his 'free-bandwidth-before-he-has-to-pay-additional-c
2) DONATION/PAYMENT AUTHENTICATION PROTOCOL: Imagine a wireless user turns on his laptop in an area with multiple shared broadband connections, a dialog box comes up displaying a list of 10 different connections he can choose from. This list would be sortable by: available speed, cost per gig, max users, etc. The laptop wireless user then can click on the cheapest connection, or the one with the most available bandwidth (if he has deeper pockets), and start surfing the net. The donation authentication protocol would allow the laptop user to automagically transfer funds from his paypal (or-insert-future-online- digital-fund-transfer-systems-here) to the broad band service provider (the user sharing his DSL/cable modem), and thus we have created:
a) A cost per use wireless network
b) A method to allow for individual directly broadband connected individuals to have free internet access (their monthly fees would be paid by their wireless customers)
A WIN:WIN for everyone? I think so... even the telcos could benefit if they choose to start charging per gig.. that would just end up eventually defining more precisely the cost per meg/gig a wireless user would have to pay depending on the area he's in.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Nice try, but still not as good as the one in my sig. Incedentally, if you know who did it, post.
Nice try, but still not as good as the one in my sig. Incedentally, if you know who did it, post.
Was going for the Karma bonus box...
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Charge them more money, and "support costs". Don't forget the BOFH-style torment.
Then put a firewall between your little network, and their little network (which I'm assuming is one windows box), so that their kazaa worms can only harass your one firewall, not your whole network.
This is a very good point. Slashdot should implement some sort of policy about such things. The /. effect can be very detrimental to these small sites and can have them shut down as a result. Yet again the idea of having a /. cache of the site is valid, I'm sure they will not sue for copyright violations if /. is saving them a ton of money.
Oh well, I expect this post to be ignored like all the rest by the Slashdot editors. They are not very professional when it comes to these things, but here I am again preaching to the choir.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
Stranger things have happened? Do you include a free bong with that installation or do they have to roll their own?
Hint, burry the cable in a 6" deep slit just wide enough to fit it where it crosses the yard and use enough water pipe where it comes up the wall to shield it from dog attack. That's what the cable guy did, only he called the water pipe a "conduit".
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm already doing this. Off of three broadband lines I'm connecting over 15 households for a total of over 30 computers, and I'm making $150 profit per month to support the network. They get 100% reliable broadband for under half price (I have three different ISPs on two broadband types, so if one goes down, the rest can take over ... and their neighbor is the maintenance man for the network preventing uncomfortable calls to Verizon and Co.), I get cash. Another plus is that since they are students, I give them flexible billing. If they want to pay at the beginning or end of the month it's okay. If they miss a couple of months and then catch up later, its okay. If they don't pay for a few months I just drop them an IM to remind them, and they let me know what's up. I haven't had one completely delinquent bill yet, and considering that my customers are 18-26 years old, that is absolutely amazing.
... pretty expensive, but I have a max bandwidth of about 10Mbps down/2Mbps up for $150. I can download like a mother when network traffic is low ....
The other benefit is that since we're all college age, it makes for one hell of a gaming network. It's like a 24/7/365 Lan Party.
The only downside is the load-balancing boxes I needed to buy
I have much better idea to propose to landlords of big appartment buidlings:
Make a deal with some good ISP, get a T1 from them to the building, put Linux server there in the building, and sell the connection to your tenants.
Most of modern building have enough of C5 phone cables, so the access media should not be a problem. Otherwise - wireless.
Tenants can have even own web servers. One option: if the landlord rents a class C subnet. Another option: use that Linux router as a frontend (NAT or proxy - your choice).
I hate DHCP of most of DSL and cable providers. And it's hard to find good ISP with static address, high speed and low price. I think it's realistic to calculate the business model in a way to share that T1 for $40 per tenant monthly.
Less is more !
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10 738,2908192,00.html
good article.
In America, people buy resources from the govt. The land, for instance, is not the peoples, unless they paid the govt for it. Not sure how the the FCC gives out bandwidth, but they should chagre for people who want to broadcast off off their own property. This way the bandwidth isn't being wasted, but instead used for something that's worth at least the price being charged for the bandwidth, if the company is to remain in business. Your comment makes no sense because someone has to put up the satellite, and they should pay the govt. for the bandwidth, and sell you some of it at a profit. I believe this was MSs plan for awhile anyway.
Vote for Pedro
You are with the wrong company. I have adsl 768/128 (and am actually getting 160 up and over 800 down) for $50, and there are faster connections at higher prices.
They are a gnu/linux friendly company, and are knowledgeable and helpful when it comes to gnu/linux. The founder is also the former co-founder of another dsl company that became very successful. Once the non-compete clause ran out, he started the new company. The company is located in a class A wired building, with a huge overcapacity of bandwidth, and redundant connections.
No ports are blocked. That means you can do what you want with it, run servers, run vnc, vpn, whatever.
And it is NOT a PPPoE connection. It works with Westel (check spelling), I'm using a Zyxel router, and others. I show up as another lan on my isp's lan.
With the multiple ips, I have several separate lans, public servers, and a private lan behind another router doing nat.
You can easily add a wireless router to this, and connect friends. One thing you should be aware of however, is that if you are the orderer/owner, you are, and would expect to be, legally responsible for anything that happens through your ip addresses. Make sure you know who is connecting to your lan, use encryption, use vpn, use mac address authentication. Do it right, or don't do it at all.
When the neighbors move in to the houses being built next door, I'll be offering them wireless access to internet, multiple email addresses with generous storage/imap/webmail, and wireless access disk storage space for a low (about the same as aol dial up cost) monthly fee. They'll be subsidizing a faster connection, and redundant connection (and a large power backup setup).
One problem that most wireless ISP's or wireless projects have is the ability to charge users, and authenticate them.
passym wireless routers has a great device that allows people to authenticate when they connect to your wireless network via their browser.
They do charge a fee per month per router, but so far it's worked great for me.
I deleted my sig years ago.
its a good idea, but i prefer the technology of DSL or fiber. I dont think which a wireless connection have security. I can mistake, But im here for understand the opinion of buddies of slashdot.So you guess which the connections Wireless may be security??best regards. Blueice88
Been reading too much Machiavelli? Maybe Hobbes? Not everyone is self seeking. What about the people who hook up their neighbors with free access? I did it for three years with an ISDN line and two friends. If you are worried about bandwidth hogs, get two connections, one for you and one for everyone else. Better yet, just turn off the WAP for a while. After all, it is your to begin with right?
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
the better deal. Our highways are an excellent example. They don't sell them to the highest bidder. It's used by everyone. This should be the model.
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10 738,2908192,00.html
have a good day.
Makes you appreciate what businesses have to deal with, right?
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10 738,2908192,00.html
The link you gave had a space in it, thus no one could cut and paste without editing it. A corrected link to that story that he was referring to can be found here.
:-)
The Preview button keaps yuo from makign misteaks
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I'm being totally naive and unrealistic, aren't I? :(
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
burry the cable in a 6" deep slit just wide enough to fit it where it crosses the yard and use enough water pipe where it comes up the wall to shield it from dog attack.
Shoot the dog.
there is a always the windows update network install for service packs and patches that doesnt require you to download anything more than what you already have. YOu could just put that file on a central server on THIS side of the modem, and then everyone can get it and not have thier windoze box crash.. good day
sig is broken try again tomorrow
that link wont work. try again?
Give me a break. They put a site up on the internet. If the wanted to decide how many hits the site got, it's very easy to choke it back to a certain level. If they didn't take steps to prevent stuff like this, then I have as much sympathy for them as I do for my friends who bitch about their 800 dollar cell phone bills.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
All the linked articles and the website are very light on technical details. The mentioned mailing list has no archives it looks like, and I don't want to join it. Has anyone found an article or whitepaper or anything with more real info? How it works, routing, etc? I am getting the idea that the mesh network itself is a backbone type thing, that you can't just walk up and use a laptop on it. Guessing the meshbox can share out it's connection on the wired ethernet side?
Are you prepared for when someone sends a threat to the President through your network? Unleashes a virus? Decides to become the point man for kiddie porn in your area? Uses it to coordinate Al-Qaeda cell activities? Are you paying taxes on your profit? What about business taxes? No? Then dismantle that illegal network immediately.
So what is the performance of a mesh network built out of 802.11 nodes? Many people would say 11 Mbps to 54 Mbps minus the usual overhead depending on the type of 802.11 being used, but raw bandwidth is only a piece of the overall performance.
I would think that latency would be the main limiter of a mesh network. The nodes would have to be placed relatively close together if built with off-the-shelf 802.11 equipment, so it would take quite a few hops to traverse any long distance. Each node would have to analyze and route the traffic which adds further latency.
I also wonder what the scalability of a such mesh network is. As the mesh grows to a large number of nodes, I imagine that congested hot spots will develop which will add latency as traffic waits to be processed or has to route around the congestion. I wouldn't be surprised if packets could take minutes to get across country if only a mesh network is used.
For a small number of nodes, the mesh probably provides a reasonable solution for small networks and for providing the "last mile" from a conventional wired internet connection. For latency tolerant applications like email, a larger mesh might be acceptable (anyone remember Fidonet?). I have my doubts that a large mesh could be used as an equivalent replacement for a wired internet.
Some ILEC will make a "donation" to the FCC or some FCC controlling element and it'll never have the freedom we need to make our dreams of a telco free life happen.
Preview button doesn't keep you from writing links without the a href tag and having spaces appear. The spaces in the hyperlinks is a slashdot feature, probably to keep idiots that don't know the first thing about html from posting hyperlinks.
When you hit the preview button, the hyperlink may look correct. But when you hit submit, if the hyperlink is not properly placed with the a href tag, a space will automatically be inserted somewhere in the hyperlink to break the link.
Write an email to Cowboy Neal for an explanation. But get your facts straight before criticizing someone else.
But get your facts straight ....
Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, pot.
Looks like it was polite response to a link, by correcting the link, and nicely refering the guy to using preview.
Your smug reply, however, doesn't meet the same polite standard. Right or wrong, your the one being critical.
Take the space out. I'd do it for you, but zdnet is so pro microsoft that they slant their articles in microsoft's favor, and against gnu/linux, so I won't point to anything for them.
h ol d=-1&commentsort=0&tid=95&mode=thread&pid=5297 828
This link has the explanation, and the same link without the tags is shown here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=53759&thres
Note that I did input it correctly, but slashcode is automatically sticking a space somewhere in the url, breaking the link. So if you want to follow the link, you can click on the one above it ("This link"), or you can copy/paste the lower one, but take the space out before clicking on go or hitting enter.
This will happen to all links that aren't enclosed in the a href tag on posts to slashdot. To give you an idea of why, think of why you get rtfm instead of someone actually supplying an easy answer, then you'll understand.
On the lower link above, the space was inserted into between the l and the d on the threshold part of the hyperlink, and a second space is inserted 3 digits from the end. This may change when I hit submit, as I suspect it randomizes, but there will still be one or more spaces somewhere. What you need to do is to copy it, paste it into browser, then take the space(s) out before hitting enter or go.
This applies to all links on slashdot without the a href tags.
Come on, if the /. editors can't be bothered with the basic site management what makes you think that they would ever get off their collective butts to do something as proactive as contacting the thrid party sites to which they're linking?
/. editor won't check each story submission for spelling mistakes and accurate links what makes you think they'll lift a finger to do anything more difficult?
/. in the long run. If /. can't take itself seriously then how is anyone else supposed to do so?
/. has already found a financial big brother because if you tried to market a site as badly managed as this one as an investment opportunity VCs would laugh in your face.
I mean, if a
How many dupes, fakes and blatant adverts have you seen in the last three months? 10? 20? more? It seems as if at least one story every other day is a dupe - how hard could it be to implement a basic system to weed these out?
The sad thing is such blatant unprofessionalism only hurts
It's a good thing (for Taco, if not anybody else) that
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
You'll be pleased to know that myself and about 90% of us here never read the article, thus slowing the effect of the slashdot effect!
DRTFA!
I'm not too familiar with the meshing protocol used by these machines, but perhaps it would be a good idea to use ipv6 instead of ipv4 to allow for unlimited expandability as well as a few routing advangates. ipv6 + wifi + mesh topology just seems to make sense to me for some reason.
$.02
using wifi among a group of individuals who already have broadband? Wouldn't it be handy for each household in the group to be able to tap into the idle bandwidth of other household's cable/DSL? At worst you'd get your regular broadband speed, at best you'd max out your theoretical limit, eh?
I can assure you that in a college town, it works :)
Finkployd
Commerce Department.
They ordered the FCC to prohibit the import of 802.11 products for outdoor use citing aircraft control concerns. It was about three months back.
ok
remember that. sorry.
> Also another major deciding factor is availability of source code.
> It just gives everybody a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that there is
> source code available to the product you are using. It allows everybody
> to improve on the product and fix bugs etc. sooner that the author(s)
> would get the time/chance to.
I think this is one the really BIG reasons for the snowball/onslaught
of Linux and the wealth of stuff available that gets enhanced faster
than the real vendors can keep up.
-- Norman
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