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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.
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.
Hell, P2P would be dead if that were the case!
"This food is problematic."
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
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?
Okay, I'm not really on topic. :)
Almost on topic, and more interesting than most of the rest of this thread
I suggest you read Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. It's a fascinating insight into the evolution of Peer to Peer networks, and makes the point that some P2P networks actually have a larger mapping of sensible information to IP address than DNS.
TCP/IP is designed for multiple routes, so (in theory) should work very well over a mesh topology, possibly more efficiently than it does now. What is really required for this to function, however, is a way of mapping IP address to geographical location, so that a sensible route can be guessed the first time. With the development of WiFi, it may be possible for base stations to determine the physical location of each other, and generate this information, at least on a local level. (You can't do it very well with cable, since the signal distance over cable is not the same as the straight line distance so knowing the cable distance from 2 points to a third point does not actually give you much information about the location of the third one).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
This was my problem too. I am the only townhome in my complex that doesn't get DSL, and I'm practically in the middle! In fact, Qwest sent around a guy to everyones door to try and sell us DSL, and I told him I couldn't get DSL and he said "sure you can we just upgraded this area, so all these townhomes can get DSL" in response to this I pulled out a 20 from my wallet and told him that if I qualified for DSL I'd give it to him and sign up, so he calls Qwest on his "bat-line" as he called it and sure enough I didn't qualify.
So, I asked my neighbor who can get DSL and I offered to pay 100% of the monthly costs and do all the computer setup and wireless equipment purchases. Sure, it was a high initial investment, but it's been working well for over a year or so with no complaints on either side.
Go wireless!
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
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.
Seriously, according to my broadband ISP contract, I'm not allowed to run any server application of any type!
Not only does this mean I can't have an ftp or mp3 server, technically it means I can't run VNC, or even do JSP/servlet/webservices development from home!
When companies make blanket statements like that, they'll get blanket rejections as a response.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
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.
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 give my downstairs neighbor an ethernet drop for free cause I'm a nice guy and he let me use his washer/dryer the first few months I lived here until I got my own, and he gives me food when he bbqs. I've spent maybe 2 hours total helping him with computer stuff unrelated to setting up broadband, about the limit of what I'll do for a friend/neighbor for free. The good thing is, he's starting his own business, and is about to put me on a retainer to be his 'IT guy'.
This was probobly pretty rare though, it's not that often you have a good neighbor who's relativly smart and friendly, without being a pain in the neck.
Interesting - I live in a house on a street where the backyards of all the houses face a walking path alongside a drainage canal. There are a lot of houses along this way. One day I was walking along the path, and I noticed this cable laying on the ground next to the back fence. It wasn't CAT anything, as best I could tell just from looking (no markings, and the line was cut - visible wires weren't tp) - but looked to be about 15 or more wires in the bundle. The end I was at was cut, and a dangling piece lay over the fence and into someone's backyard. I didn't look over to see where it went to, but instead followed the rest of the cable - it layed on the ground for a bit, then swooped up on top of the fence where it passed through eye bolts, then was tied to a tree branch, then back down onto the ground - about 4-5 houses down it ended in a cut end, with no other end in sight. Now, I know that at least three people were involved (the guy with the cable hanging over the fence, the guy with the tree in the backyard to which the cable was tied, and the eyebolts on his fence through which the cable was run, and the final dude, wherever it originally terminated). At first, I thought it might be a networking type attempt (people trying to share cox.net broadband), but the cutting, and the lack of one of the ends bothered me - I gave it some thought, and I don't know if my hunch is right - but I tend to wonder if there wasn't some sort of other clandestine networking going on, but for a phone system? I dunno - maybe one of these days I will knock on their door or something, and find out what is happening. A friend and I have talked about doing a neighborhood mesh, but we don't know the geek density in our area (he lives nearby) yet...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
You would think that would work would ya? I know of an apartment complex here, my friend lives there, that offers free DSL access. They have a shared tier 3 (1.2 down/512 up) DSL line available to anyone who wants it for *free*. Just plug in your ethernet cable and go. Now out of 100 some apartments how many people do you think opt to use this *free* DSL? 4. Yep. 4. High speed internet just isn't a priority to alot of people apparently since you can't even give DSL away ...