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

telco's

[hackwrench]

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.

Re:telco's

[I'm a racist.]

Ummm... not quite. Assuming you did coat the globe in these things (including the oceans, which you'd have to do if you want to cut out the telcos completely) you'd have really really shitty throughput (at least over long distances). Not that I said throughput and not bandwidth.

For long haul signal tranfer the best available technology is [DWDM] fiber (which there happens to be a bit of a surplus of it, at the moment). I suppose satellites could cut in on some of this action. As of now, all non-local backbone traffic (including voice, IP, etc.) is carried over fiber. This probably won't change anytime soon (if ever). Radio is nice, but it's short range. Microwave is really only good for point-to-point. High-energy (x-ray, gamma-ray) is exactly that, high-energy (read: expensive/unrealistic). The really low frequencies suffer from lots of interference. The only thing that may ever beat optical is some kind of quantum entanglement based system (such a thing may not even be "mathematically possible", and even if it is, it's probably unworkable for use by the masses).

This is one of the things about all this wireless networking that kind of bothered me. Aside from the issue of interference, when you have a huge number of users, you end up with a lot of "routers" in ad-hoc networks. This can become extremely cumbersome. I'd guess that data transfer rates drop at least linearly with distance from "static" (non-ad-hoc) routing nodes.

At best, I can see wireless technologies handling last-mile links. But, as the user load increases, these last-mile networks will need some good regimentation (to allow for optimized routing, like cellular BSC layouts). From what I know of 802.11 (and the competitors), it's really only good for ad-hoc networking.

Getting the broadband in the first place

[wackybrit]

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.

Re:Getting the broadband in the first place

[keytoe]

You can't hook up your wireless network point to a 56k modem and share that about.

Well, since we're talking about ad-hoc routing meshes anyway, why not have every user with a modem dial out and let the routing software handle bandwidth allocation.

While the average bandwidth for all people with modems would remain the same (56k), there would be an aggregate max speed of 56k*$users. Based on typical usage patterns, this would be percieved by each individual user as significantly faster than the single modem speed. Thus, the percieved average speed will increase without actually changing. Nothing would have really changed but the implicit contract of sharing 'spare' bandwidth with your local mesh.

Amazing - an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. All it requires is cooperation. And WiFi hardware. But we've all got that already, right?

Wi-fi ubiquitous in the US??

[NineNine]

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.

Nice one guys - slashdot a group of hard up people

[CharlieO]

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?

What is the range?

[goombah99]

Okay here's a practical question some here can answer.

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?

Re:What is the range?

[Pharmboy]

what is the practical range of a wifi card?
Varies alot. I have cable modem connected to a LinkSys cable/wifi router. My lap top gets about 150 feet if the aluminum window frames are not directly inbetween the laptop and router. even at short distances (in my sunroom, 35 feet away) aluminum frame windows really screw with my reception.

I have a workshop 150 feet from the house that has a steel exterior. couldn't get it to access in there, so I bought an external USB wifi receiver (140 bucks), drilled a hole in the steel, place the transceiver in a clear watertight Tupperwear container, with fiberglass insulation surrounding it (to keep unit from getting hot in direct sun). Bolted this Tupperwear unit under the window unit AC to further protect from rain, and ran the cable thru the hole, where i could connect to any computer with USB. that one gets great connectivity.

It may seem like a lot to do, but it was much easier than running cat5 or bnc underground. It has been up over a year, never a failure.

As to your second question: my router and external tranceiver are linksys, my two pcmcia transceiver (my wife has one of these too) are D-Link. The pcmcia do not seem to have as good of range as the external unit. The pcmcia also seem to link at a lower speed than the external unit. Also, MY pcmcia unit seems to fade in and out of range more at a given distance than the wifes, even tho they are same brand and model (dlink dwl-650)

Your milage may vary, but this is what my experiences have been over the last year. All and all, I have been pretty happy with the linksys router, EXCEPT its not good for gaming (wired or wireless), since it appears to stall every few seconds for half a second. Just long enough to get your head blown off. So i have two ips, one for gaming, one for wireless.

Sharing Broadband

[rossjudson]

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.

Re:Over a modem... Sounds Fantastic!

[silentbozo]

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! :)

I sell broadband to my neighbor too!

[osjedi]

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.

I'm already doing this!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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 ... 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 ....