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.

Comments

Fools!

[saihung]

Don't you know that distributing wireless access to your neighbors supports terrorism!

Great idea

[2names]

"Welcome to [town name]! Here is your fruit basket, your laundry detergent, your book of coupons, and your block of IP addresses."

Truthfully..

[grub]

.. 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.

I sell broadband to my neighbor

[t0qer]

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.

Re:I sell broadband to my neighbor

[Chocolate Teapot]

Dog is scraping it's butt on the ground, ask toqer.

If your staple diet was Cat5 Ethernet cable, you'd be scraping your butt on the ground too. Just curious, how did you troubleshoot that one? Never mind. I'd rather not know.

Quite ironic really

[Salsaman]

According to this report, the CEO of Juniper networks just labelled broadband users as "communists".

Re:Over a modem... Sounds Fantastic!

[Pii]

Absolutely... Can be done, but I'd like to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurrasic Park:

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists.

Oh, wait... That's not right. Here, try this one...

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but your [bandwidth sharers] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

Ahhh... Much better.