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Lanlink Linking The Coasts
Dan Bricker writes "A guy in Parma Heights, Ohio has a website to promote an idea of linking the east coast to the west coast using standard off-the-shelf 802.11 equipment. He is aiming for a July 4th, 2006 first coast-to-coast ping. This project appears to be totally volunteer based, With no other stated reason than fun with pringle cans and bad weather, and do it just to do it. Can this be done? What real world applications does this have?"
I was a Junior High student when they proposed hands across America, and it was stated it was impossible. As I recall it came off mostly intact. I seem to recall some guffaw about a gap or two, but in general it happened.
Question: Can we, the geeks, mobilize as well as that? My own sedentary nature tends to lead me to be pessimistic.
The real world application is, perhaps, psychological: getting people to realize that with a bit of effort each, we can all be networked to each other at high speed WITHOUT paying some company OR government for the privelege of just moving data around using equipment we own and airwaves that belong to everyone.
Reality: Assume the project works. They get it done, have a party, and so on. Then what? It's either put to use, or mothballed. And all those people with all that equipment will want to do something with it. Making a hotspot is a natural move.
And even if it is put to use, for what? A private community? People will be all over this network like white on rice, rules or no. It may not be connected to the internet by a member, but someone will hook it all together.
Or, say the project fails. You've still got the same situation, but if anything, with more drive. You've got lots of people, with lots of equipment, who are stinging from failure. Setting up a hotspot would be a natural move toward some sense of "Well, at least I accomplished something.
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I was recently involved in a fairly casual discussion of how to create a WAN link between computer labs at two different campuses of a university in Ghana. The main campus, in the capital city of Akra (sp?) has a limited satellite connection to the Internet costing something around a few thousand a month, supposedly. None of the other three campuses have or can afford a similar connection. This isn't a big enough gateway to share WWW access, but a WAN could allow Intranet and Internet-based email, as well as Intranet sites, file sharing, and perhaps even VoIP to augment the poor phone systems.
So the big problem was how to set up this connection. The telco system apparently isn't too good; only around 400 new lines are added per year, so getting ahold of a large number of leased lines would be virtual impossible. Obviously, setting up an independent wired backbone is financially out of the question. So we started toying with the idea of a WiFi link, which seemed like the only possibility.
The only problem is that if we are trying to set up a 200km link (between the main campus and one in the north; I don't recall the name of the city) we would need repeaters in some remote areas without consistent power, not to mention having to plot good line-of-site and build fairly secure base stations. What we realised was that we could attempt to piggyback the existing private cell-phone infrastructure. There is a cell system spanning the north and south, which means a stable backbone, on which we can either rent data bandwidth (probably expensive) or, better yet, on who's repeater stations (probably microwave antennas) we could rent physical space.
Our informal conclusion was that the University should consider renting space on repeater stations for their own WiFi hubs and create a WAN using long-distance line-of-site connections with off-the-shelf, inexpensive WiFi components. Projects like this pave the way to practical, inexpensive applications of WiFi technology.
I meant other than the max power for the license. Since my license says that I can transmit at 1500 W on almost band I please with a few exceptions, I assume that I can also do that in the microwave range. They don't expressly limit it, therefore, it is the maximum for the license.
Of course, it isn't exactly smart since 1500 W at 2.4 GHz would most likely boil all water within quite an impressive distance in a few seconds.
that was one example of a network whose structure could handle host disconnects. also freenet, which has redundancy built into its design. and gnutella, as you point out.
all of these essentially use P2P as their structure, but fidonet and freenet remind us that P2P-the-structure has a far wider range of uses than just downloading mp3's. right now the internet dominates "cause it's there" but even its structure was historically envisioned (by some, anyway) as much more decentralized than it is now. as it moves toward centralization it becomes increasingly unsatisfactory for many purposes, and momentum grows to build and use alternative, decentralized structures.