Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
According to this report, the CEO of Juniper networks just labelled broadband users as "communists".
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.
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. -=-=-=-=-
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.
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 !
Or put it this way, would you be happy to hand your credit card details
Whatever happened to encryption? Any one on a local network can packet sniff your information anyway, so handle it properly and no one can read it.
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.
I'm sure Martha Stewart and the heads of Enron had to sign papers saying they would not embezzle, cheat and scam their way to fortune. It didn't stop them.
The thing is if we're all on kazaa, then the p2p network begins to kick ass because we have more bandwidth to our neighbor than the kazaa node a few hundred miles away. So not only would the bandwidth increase, more content would be available. If you're into that sort of thing.
But general net bandwidth might get a slight impact from the additional network usage. Its unlikely it would be very noticable, and the widespread adoption of broadband would fund new technologies to provide the infrastructure all those new connected users are going to want. Its good for the economy.
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.