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.

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.

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?