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.

Re:telco's

[CharlieO]

Errr - do you have any idea of the size of traffic carried by backhaul telcos?

Or the very very serious iron needed in switches and management systems to make sure it works?

And who gets to decide the routing priority in these networks?

Who gets to warrant the privacy of data? Telecoms companies are bound by some pretty strong laws to protect the privacy of the voice and data traffic they carry - home supported APs wont.

Fools!

[saihung]

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

Anybody else think...

[Anonvmous Coward]

.. 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.

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."

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.

Clarification

[cybe]

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

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.

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.

Re:What is the range?

[grid geek]

Stanford had a guest lecture a couple of weeks ago from a group setting up a wireless network in Laos.

It's intended to connect about 5 villages with a town (the town has telephone lines to the rest of the world) on the other side of a hill/mountain. It allows them video conferencing with the rest of the world as they are using a verbal only language - so keyboards aren't much use. The gear is all battery powered, recharged using a modified exercise bike. They installed it a couple of weeks ago and are getting a couple of miles with it.

I seem to remember a couple of articles a few months ago about some academics managing to get about 20-50 miles with wireless over water - this of course is an idealised example as there are few areas that flat on land. And of course rain can screw up your signals a lot.

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.

Quite ironic really

[Salsaman]

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

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.

T1: Landlords as ISPs

[axxackall]

DSL? Cable? Again? Oh no!

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.

Re:Accountability IS important

[dvdeug]

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.