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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.
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!
"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."
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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 .
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.
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 !
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.
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.