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Do We Still Need Telcos (and ISPs)?
eraserewind asks: "Are telecom providers and ISPs going to continue to be necessary in the future? Why are we all paying subscriptions for communicating? What I want is a global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or newtork card or whatever). Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices. Remember there is no subscriptions, so don't expect to piggy-back on someone's paid for DSL bandwidth. What are the technological barriers? What kind of protocols would you need? What hardware advances? How would you solve problems of geographic isolation? Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?"
Yeah, I want everything for free too. Give me a break.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
And there never will be.
Remember there is no subscriptions
And apparently their ain't know grammar checker, either!
is global nirvana. It just might solve world hunger, end all wars, and bring us as a species to the 'next level'. I can't wait. spffff in my wet dreams!
1;
I dont know that people in my hood would like me. they would not have any bandwidth available. There is not an unlimited about of spectrum available. And i doubt the FCC would give you the spectrum needed anyhow.
I. Cringely had a great article a while back about rolling your own DSL. All you need is a copper pair into your domicile. Good luck getting it though
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
It's a great idea but so is the some of the stuff marx wrote heh. there wouldn't be enough respect simply put, your dealing with the general public.
" Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?"
Uhhhh, as long as the equipment to transmit wirelessly and the electricity to power out isn't free (not counting the multitude of people to roll it out and support it), you're always going to be paying something.
Hard to believe that a question devoid of basic Economics 101 would appear on Slashdot.
WTF are you talking about?
Who provides the bandwidth?
Wi-fi is great, but it the bandwidth isn't going to grow on trees....
Some would call this anarchy, in most systems (both technical and personal) you need some form of leadership, telcoâ(TM)s and ISPâ(TM)s provide this necessary service, like it or not.
Further more, the kind of hardware these groups you want to be no more use is far out of the price range of most private citizens, such hardware is required within any kind of system which is of any size.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
So, you want everybody to be restricted by the low-bandwith links common for last-mile today, no fast websites, and non-robust routing?
I don't think you understand the value of redundant OC48 backbones, BGP4 and IS-IS routing, and colocated servers on gigE links.
Your ad-hoc networks would be OK for MAN's (Metropolitan Area Networks), but are simply unusable for anykind of backbone.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Umm well who will pay for them? Well the people who want network access. Problems I see here are just physical, how to get around or over the mountain. Solar powered repeaters?
Nope, just route your own ethernet cable to every computer in the world. (and your phone cable, optionally)
Porn... FREE!!!
All you have to do is convince all of the companies involved (bandwidth owners, hardware manufacturers, administrators, etc.) to work for free and you'll be all set.
Seriously. Every part of the chain costs money. Eventually somebody is going to be putting money from their pocket into somebody elses so unless you want to pay $10,000 for a network card and have the network card companies pass everybody's share along, you're going to have to pay a subscription of some sort.
The big problem with this is, that without some "authority" moderating use of the "common" bandwidth, manufacturers of comm hardware have every incentive to build devices that hog bandwith, and other common resources, until the whole system becomes unusable.
-- Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
I think the RIAA would attack it because it could be used to transfer copyrighted material easily and freely.
"What I want is a global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or newtork card or whatever)."
What I want is all of Bill Gate's money, all of Jeff Bezos's patents, and a quick easy way of getting rid of SCO once and for all (e.g., a tactical nuke).
I think that my desire is more realistic.
Its a nice sounding idea, and in a perfect world it would be possible. But who is going to pay for this? There are huge costs involved in building the infrastructure to connect everyones devices together. Sure you can have ad-hoc networks to connect physically close groups together, but intercity and international links dont work that way. Someone has to own and pay for the backbones, servers and all other required infrastructure. There is no buisness model for this to work, and the world revolves around buisness models.
Is this guy looney? Who would pay for all of the energy, admin and other costs?
1. freeloader problem--your privately designed cell phones will be replaced with bandwidth suckers that don't do replays. No controlling body, so can't stop it.
2. no "backbone"--hopping accross phones works around the city (maybe), but how many hops will it take to get to.. japan? and don't forget that there's some countable amount of milliseconds per transfer--to get accross the nation is a lot of cell-phone coverage sized hops. Plus, we have to go around the grand canyon.
You would have a long time with islands of well connected individuals. And these islands wouldn't be connected to each other. I.E. how would cities be connected? Through a series of wireless cards in some farmers computer? I don't think so.
Excessive forking causes un-wanted children.
Who the hell do you think maintains those "global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice networks"?
They don't just happen by accident. There is TREMENDOUS expense and expertise necessary to keep them running and "servicing" the customers.
Service providers of some sort are not going to just disappear. Even if a giant network of wi-fi goes up(like in some citys), the internet can't be completely free
"The most looniest, zaniest, spontaneous, sporadic Impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict"
While this is a very interesting Neo-Utopian vision, it really falls the reality test. Simply put, there are - and always will be - set, fixed operating costs of keeping a system up and running. Those costs have to be carried by those that use the system.
That said, is it possible that we could get to the point - given the advances in technology - where there is very little, if any, variable costs associated with our telecom infrastructure? Yes, I do! TelCos and ISP are quickly moving to flat-rate pricing for services. You see it with packages of unlimited local and long distance for a flat monthly fee. The same with ISPs. Combine the two, and you have single, flat-rate, Connection subscription.
Free speech scares governments. That's why you need a licence to broadcast on the radio. (Sure, they say it's due to interference, etc.) If there were no ISPs, it would be a lot harder for the governments of this world to censor or block undesirable "mass communication".
With the current system, if Slashdot turned into a militant revolutionary site, inciting the citizens of the US to overthrow their government, the government could go to the ISP that Slashdot uses, and force it to pull the plug. That's why things like Freenet worry it too.
Get your own free personal location tracker
All I want is...
EVERYTHING...
and would you mind making it essentially free.
While you're at it, would you mind getting me a Rolls Royce for the price of the ignition key?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
With all due respect, this has to be the dumbest 'Ask Slashdot' topic I've ever read. Of course you don't NEED telco's or ISPs. Unless of course you want internet and phone service. Since the majority of people who have internet are still on dialup I think your are atleast 10 years to early for a global wireless solution where everyone peers off each other, if this ever happens at all.
Are telecom providers and ISPs going to continue to be necessary in the future?
Answer: Yes, the phone company will still be in existence.
Why are we all paying subscriptions for communicating?
Answer: Because string and two tin cans just doesn't cut it.
What I want is a global extremely high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or network card or whatever).
Answer: Isn't Science Fiction neat?
Devices communicate peer-to-peer, or routed via other people's idle devices. Remember there are no subscriptions, so don't expect to piggyback on someone's paid for DSL bandwidth.
Answer: If you are talking future state, what's up with the DSL reference? I think we should all grow prosthetic-tails, which act like antennas.
What are the technological barriers? What kind of protocols would you need? What hardware advances? How would you solve problems of geographic isolation? Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?"
Answer: 42
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Since there have to be machines that know the routes, there has to be somebody to administer them. In order for someone to administer enough machines, there have to either be enough volunteers or companies to pay them. If you have companies, you can be sure that they aren't volunteering. So somebody has to pay the companies. Who pays the companies? The user.
But if no users are paying companies (after all, you're trying to get rid of telcos and ISPs), there will be nobody to administer the routers. Now, you can talk to machines that are nearby (same subnet/broadcast area/whatever), or you hope that your packets can be randomly routed to the correct destination, and that the responses make it back to you.
In other words, no I don't see an internet without ISPs or telcos.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Satellites and undersea cables don't occur naturally. Someone has to pay for them to be shot up in the air, or laid across undersea trenches.
Not to mention the stringing of all those copper and fiberoptic phonelines that connect every house together..
One more point before I am done with this thread...
"why are we all paying subscriptions for communicating?"
Communicating is not what you are paying for. It's still free to communicate with anyone in the world. Just go get your plane ticket (mail your money, please) and fly on over to strike up your conversation.
This article is so assinine, I am already tired of writing.
what we need is a new moderation option for the original submission: "-1 Fucking Idiot"
I'm thing transatlantic here or interstate.
How fast can we transmit information on the long distance radio bands?
Yeah in the future we may not have to pay for short range stuff, say communications within the city. But until we think of a high bandwidth long distance wireless technology we will still have to pay to access \.^H^HHcomputer science research material from the other side of the planet.
... except getting every world government, telcom, and technological researcher on the same page. Easy as pie.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
So, yeah, it does meen making use of the existing (paid for) network first. How does that work? Well, first of all, everyone with a wireless link starts routing to all there peers (or at least, the early adopters build pringes can links to other early adopters), and shares their uplinks (free of charge).
The thing standing in the way of that happening (I've put a lot of thought into this already, myself) is the lack of a suitable dynamic routing protocol for these routers... how do you get these wireless mesh nodes with uplinks to the *real* internet to properly route and make good use of those uplinks? Currently no dynamic routing protocol is designed for such a task.
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
this is a baited question. I have 1/2 dozen or so phone bills but what i really need is for my cell phone to double as my wireless router to my home network, and get 3G/4G high speed service.
when the heck am i going to get that?
Sprint, hello? can you do that for me?
then i can cancel my landline and earthlink account and have only my cellphone bill.
Mesh networks are nice in some ways, and crappy in others. For example, for long distances, they're very slow, because the overhead gets added over and over and over again. Unless whatever device you're using can communicate for pretty long distances without being boosted (like, hundreds on miles), every cross-country ping would probably take seconds.
However, the throughput would be great. If you had some sort of scheme that randomly selected from closer nodes weighted by how much closer they were, you could potentially get thousands of nodes forwarding packets to you at the same time along many different paths from source to destination.
Long story short: ssh would suck, but downloading that mp3 would be zip quick.
having a potluck everyday!!!
Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?,em>
Yes. All of the above.
What in the world is a question this stupid doing on Slashdot?
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Wireless is cool yes , but imagine if everyone had to share 54mbps through out the world (or for that a few 100mbps) . It will still be better to have copper or fiber connections in addition to wireless . The problem is there is a very limited wireless specturm that we can use and we will only be able to crank a finite amount of bandwith out of it . Now I dont know about you but the other problem is that we will still need people to maintain routes , make sure that stuff works and fix it when it breaks. I dont think that everyone (except of course slashdot people) want to be responsible for maintining there own network routing even using advanced protocols (espicially for 911 type services which we currently really on telco's to provide) .
The other problem with wireless is from an infrastructure point of view if our phones or internet connections stop working that hurts our economy , its way to dam easy for anyone to disrupt wireless signals (even with DSS or FHSS its still easy) to really on them for everything which we currently really on telcos for .
step 1: calm down. step 2: google
probably wouldnt work unless there was an extreme density of cheap wireless devices. Something like this is far off down the road, although it is feasible in high density communities. If we had lots of money to throw around, local goverments could provide the wireless access in medium to large cities. Central government could cover rural and smaller towns. This is far flung to say the least. Large corp. users would probably want their access to be more secure and reliable, regardless of how secure and reliable a global wireless p2p network would be.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Yes.
Technical problems?
Yes. Wireless doesn't have the bandwidth to provide service everywhere everytime for everyone. Assuming the hardware was in place, there would be limits to how much traffic each node could pass and the aggregate bandwidth betweem all the nodes wouldn't be as great as that provided by fibre links.
Political problems?
ILECs, CLECs, Cable Co's, Govenments, etc., take your pick. It's an idyllic concept but too many people will want their piece of their pie.
Economic problems?
The system (were it technically workable) would require a large installed base before it would work AT ALL. Who's going to go out and buy new gear in the hopes the system will reach critical mass and become viable? Let's not forget the incumbants lobying the above point to keep from losing out on this point.
While the concept is certainly interesting, and could probably work on limited scales (p2p locally, then into a Supernode for long distance. I seem to remember Ricochet used something similar, with data hopping across subscriber nodes to reach the main towers) there's no way it'll work in the current social, economic, political, or technical climate.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
What I want is a global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or newtork card or whatever)
... And no, even if you could do it yourself, you wouldn't want to.
Yes well, what I want is a brand new Ferrari for the price of a used Skoda.
What is that POS article anyway ? do you view your ISP as an unnecessary maffia-like toll to get online ? who do you think runs your outgoing and incoming mail server, your news server, the box that serves your homepage, the dhcp box that gives you an IP when your DSL modem connects, the DNS server, link you up to the backbone
You don't want IPSs ? that's easy : be your own ISP : get a T1, get all the hardware, configure it all and after you're done, well, you're your own boss on the inurnet. And most likely you'll be so broke you'll have to sublet your services, like an ISP.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What if wireless repeaters became so common place globally, you didn't need 'copper'?
The the cost would be price of repeater, communication device, and electricity. Why would we needs Telcos?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
nice thought, but when was the last time you listened to any of the questions in the "tech" department of any retail store? most people don't have a clue. think of how many people AOL have to support. there's no way that the avg. consumer will be able to properly setup, much less manage, his/her own data connection. maybe a www3 or something, but i seriously doubt anything like this ever comes up in the current generation(s).
I think that most of those idle moble units will be switched off, or be resting in a receive-only mode, to save battery power. That means the linkages you envision aren't likely to be as available as you want.
Consensus in Aristocratic and Confucian Social Roles:
Ethical relations between the citizen and the society
Harmony throughout social and political strata is a main concern in many traditions and ethical systems throughout the world. Its capture on the intellectual and layperson can be understood in its immediate relevance. How ought one behave within society, and through what scope? What benefits would compliance entail, and what reciprocal action could one receive? Questions such as these illustrate underlying thoughts and ideas people have towards relationships between the individual and the society. In western ideas, it is between citizen and the populous, and to some extent, heaven itself. In eastern traditions, it is the interaction between the individual and the cosmos. Strikingly similar, this paper intends to discuss parallels between eastern and western thoughts on such topics, and ultimately strengthen a developing ethical system based on concessions between the two theories. In developing such a theory, one may hope that, in a practical sense, it may find expedient application in the modern world.
Aristotle believed in an ethical system of virtue, that proper action is initiated only due to the agent being ethical. In addition, Aristotle believed in actions being judged as fair or unfair based on his concept of Justice, in which one's action toward another is judged just/unjust by means of an Aristocratic proportion of merit. The connection, Aristotle posits, between the two concepts is that just actions are a result of the practice of perfect virtue. Aristotle states that a virtuous man and a keeper of the law is just. Thus Aristotle places an appropriate scope of Justice and Virtue in that there is a context of law in considering just and unjust actions. It is important to point out that by law, one can include legislature as well as natural/social laws. Therefore, the context of law may be synonymous with a context of society. Concluding from a previous essay, justice follows from an inclination to be virtuous and corresponding duties, within an appropriate social backdrop, the social Context. Note that there is no threat to dissolving into a relativistic system, as the system is objectively supported by a priori virtues as well as corresponding duties.
A student of Confucianism should immediately draw parallels between this Aristocratic Context and the teachings of Confucius and later disciples. Confucius advocates the idea of jen, virtue of humanness, to be the standard of all ethical behavior. In fact, Confucius believes jen to be the "perfect virtue," from which other virtues take shape. Through this and yi, which one may interpret as ethical principles of action, one may accomplish moral behavior, a ritualistic mode of interaction with others known as li. Accomplishing li, via jen and yi, an individual effects the social strata, ultimately dismissing the entropy of the cosmos. Structured around the people and within these strata, Confucius details the construction of a Jen-Government, lead by kingly figures, promoting and honoring jen, yi and li within individuals and their actions. The effective mark of the individual on his social environment is detailed within both the Aristocratic theory and Confucian tradition, and through an examination of the parallel between the Aristocratic Context and Confucian Jen-Government, a harmonious fusion can be determined, and applied nicely to the modern world.
In his teachings, Confucius detailed the concept of jen as perfect virtue, or the virtue of humanness. Far from detailing a idealist stance, Confucius believed that in the attempt to become like that which is superior, one initiates a cycle of jen based virtues, a similar note to Aristotle's habituation of virtue. Also similar to western virtue ethics is Confucius's identification of the inherent goodness of the mean path. The Confucian Doctrine of the Mean details the good of the middle way, stating,
"Perfect is the virtue which is according to the mean. They have
I happen to sell Rolls Royce ignition keys for 300,000 dollars. That may sound like a lot, but I throw in a free Rolls Royce with every purchase.
I do the same for Bentlies as well, but the price for an ignition key is starts at $600,000
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We could use P2P wireless and it could work. Its just a matter of us deciding its what we want to do and writing the code to do it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Well, I have to admit it's quite a pie-in-the-sky idea, and it would be wonderful if it could actually happen, but I wouldn't be on it anytime soon, and even so, I'd probably opt to pay. The two biggest problems with this potential idea stem from reliability and security.
:-)
Would you entrust your internet connection to the guy with a laptop and a wi-fi card in the apartment below you that comes and goes, connected to the guy with the gateway in the next building? Would you entrust the vital link that connects your business to the internet to a myriad of unknown, untrusted, insecure wireless devices to save $40/month on a DSL line? The security is terrible--virtually no way to keep your data private.
Shirky had an excellent write-up on something a little similar to this that Slashdot did a story on awhile back detailing the limitations of 802.11, contrasting "Nearlynets" vs. "Permanets."
Another problem: Global links? I doubt that there are too many people out there with their own satellites or trans-oceanic fiber lines that they'd be willing to leave open to the continent. Oh well. That, and it'd be supporting terrorism...
But wouldn't it be cool if...
...with the management of routing tables. Ever heard of convergence time and route flapping?
Hi,
could you explain a bit more how you think to manage such a scenario?
I'd also like to get my net access for free - but I cannot imagine who should pay the infrastructure.
We can treat the internet like we treat roads. Let the gov and taxes pay to built the network and then use our wireless connections and software to use the free network. It can work, the only problem would be reliability. I think the quality and reliability is something only an ISP can provide.
I would use an ISP for business, for commerce and so on, but I'd use the free internet to surf the web and do stuff like slashdot.
I think theres room for both.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Sorry, but this is one of the more ridiculous Ask Slashdot questions I've ever seen.
Certainly there is room for improvement in the way we pay for communications access today, but to expect that you won't have to pay anything is just plain silly.
We used to dial into a local "server" back in the days to check our newsgroups. Just a couple computers talking to each other. It was "neat" back then, and just like this, it was "something that could never grow". Then someone starts relaying email from server to server... all over a few phone connections. Yeah, I guess they were right... it'll never work. I'll go home now.
So, what happens when wireless connections get bigger and fatter (as they are heading already) and people realize that their home wireless network can talk to their neighbors wireless network? Hrm, now files can travel around without the local telco. Now we're back to skipping around the world but without Big Brother this time.
Sure, there's tons of hurdles, but if everyone sat around nay-saying everything we wouldn't even have an internet. Sheesh.
$.02 USD
-=sig=-
So, under such a system it would be FREE to call across the Atlantic... provided there is a solid line of swimmers with cell phones all spaced a half mile apart all the way between the coasts... personally, I'd rather pay somebody to build an infrastructure.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
P2P works. Linux works. Let's try it and see what happens.
Gregory Peck. Dead at 87
You know this sounds like a spammers dream come true.
1. Prohibitive Cost
2. Unstable network structure (routing)
3. Bandwidth hogging equipment and users
4. Anonymous spammers/hackers/scum
5. Lack of long-run cables (who'll run an OC48 over the Atlantic to feed the "Peoplenet"?)
Those would be just a few reasons it doesn't work. I think everyone will agree on the right Linux distro before that happens... (and for an encore the BSDs will unite, and both BSD and Linux unite in OSS heaven). If I wanted to dream that bad, it would involve several females and a bunch of other stuff you don't want to know about...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
I heartily endorse rolling your own!
Only on Slashdot can you find someone this cheap. Free operating systems, and now they want free Internet access. Nothing in the world is free, kid. Absolutely *nothing*.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
The Atlantic and Pacific oceans come to mind... Ad-hoc wireless networking may work great in an urban area, but as soon as you hit rural areas or need to communicate across oceans, you start needing some really powerful transmitters, and you'll have to put up with lots of hops for your traffic.
(tip for Karma Whores: reply to this post with some jokes about lousy Quake ping-times)
I can see how local connections might work, but
how are cross crountry connections going to be possible? If the individual cards only support a
11 Mbit/sec link how is one going to move all the
left-coast traffic to the right-coast? There just isn't enough per-hop bandwidth to move it all.
you want everything for free don't you... I hate you so much.
Criticisms about e. asking for a free lunch, or forgetting economics 101 are missing the point: can wireless technology evolve to a point where our dependency on land-lines is greatly reduced? And can technology be created that accomodates such a world, where every computer is both a transceiver and a relay for traffic?
I would strongly contend the answer is yes. Why? Several trends contribute to the answer.
There's more that would suggest that ISPs and Telcos of the future will either not exist or be radically different, but I haven't eaten my supper yet, so I'm too tired to articulate more thoroughly. It's easy to see that telcos will consolidate around providing high-capacity long-distance links for businesses--wireless will lag beyond land-lines for a long time on both counts will win. And ISPs? In a pervasively networked world, where many nodes are mobile (and many users may switch among multiple, personal nodes), some things have to remain at fixed, well-known nodes--leaving ISPs to consolidate around various forms of hosting and co-location. It may be that in the future, that's what happens to telcos and ISPs: network providers that offer co-location and hosting services.
Well no, but we're looking for suggestions to eliminate these also..
If the governments would provide antennas this could work, or maybe private funds combined with the governments. It's hard to imagine that the govs do not own some of the the fiber-optic cables in the ocean as well for their own uses and for reserve (future) uses. This may be this may well be such a reserved use: the cables can be used to link the worldwide systems together. If the system would be paid for with tax money / entree fee and solar powered it might work. If it does it will save a lot of money.. The telco's will be piseed though............!
The question: Why do we need telcos/ISPs? Sure, it doesn't make sense right now. Who will pay for the creation of the network, who will maintain it, etc.
But I don't understand the acclamation for all the knee-jerk "Yeah and world peace too" responses because it's not a totally stupid question. We already have things like distributed peer-to-peer networks. If you were to assume that you had a connection to at least one other node, and that node had a connection to at least one other node, etc -- why wouldn't this be possible? It's just a matter of figuring out the transport medium, right?
For a densely populated area (e.g. NYC) it sounds eminently feasible that given the right standards and the right wireless technology, people could just buy the right hardware and plug in without need for a centralized business providing you signal. What's so unimaginable about that?
So it boils down to what we need to bridge real distance, like for sparsely populated areas -- What technology could become pervasive (i.e. cheap) enough to hook up the folks in Alaska or Siberia to our imaginary freenet in NYC? Satellite and undersea fiber are expensive (hence telcos now) but what might we use in the future?
Apparently the timeout is too long when 14 or more connection attempts are made on this ad-hoc network site. Here's the article for those who can't get through:
Do We Still Need Telcos (and ISPs)?
Posted by Cliff on Thursday June 12, @02:33PM
from the beyond-their-effective-lifetime dept.
eraserewind asks: "Are telecom providers and ISPs going to continue to be necessary in the future? Why are we all paying subscriptions for communicating? What I want is a global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or newtork card or whatever). Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices. Remember there is no subscriptions, so don't expect to piggy-back on someone's paid for DSL bandwidth. What are the technological barriers? What kind of protocols would you need? What hardware advances? How would you solve problems of geographic isolation? Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?"
Let me know if anyone needs a mirror.
I think it'd be quite important to get the FCC involved to regulate the frequencies.
----- obSig
The original internet was based around the principles the original poster suggests. Individual sites provide content, and "pay" for their connectivity by providing a routing service for others.
If you consider a modern city, there is a high density of wireless devices (e.g. phones). Its not too great a stretch to imagine a high density of broadband wireless just a few years from now (e.g. multiple Mhz capacity per sq. meter). This bandwidth could be made available for routing at zero-added cost: people are going to pay for batteries (or other power source) anyway.
With enough overlap of wireless routers, freeloaders, etc. wouldn't be a problem: the routing protocols would naturally avoid devices that don't route efficiently.
The suggestion of high density of available routes is valid for populated areas, but rural areas could have more problems. Who pays for the fat-pipe long-haul links? Contrast a different question: who pays for long-haul physical links (e.g. interstate highways)? Taxes can pay for national networks; international networks could be either pay-to-use, or could be provided as shared costs between states ("we route your traffic if your route ours" treaties). Consider the Channel-Tunnel (England-to-France) as an example of an international link.
So, it seems to me that there are no insumountable technical or economic problems. But the ISPs and telcos will fight hard to prevent it. Such a system would destroy existing business plans, and existing businesses have more money to pay lobyists than potential new businesses. They could probably be successful in restricting the available wireless spectrum, to prevent the necessary density of wireless connectivity, needed for this to work.
Opinions my own, statements of fact may contain errors
2) Charge others to use your new system
3) ???
4) Lose money!!!!
Face it dude, you gotta pay the bill somehow. They have to pay you, so you can pay them (read: the people who operate and maintain this network), so they can pay them (their creditors, the groceries), so they can... you get the idea. High school economics, anyone?
This sig no verb.
Achille Talon
Hop!
you need to have a way of knowing where the device at ip 53:68:102:59:04:90 (assuming ip6 or similar) is. making the network ad-hoc is much more complicated... how do you know what's where? you don't, unless you're clever about it. maybe you have to maintain some sort of central dbase with ip addresses and gps locations (introduces privacy concerns, and has latency problems). any thoughts on this?
Tried this earlier as anonymous, but it sank, so here it is with a name attached...
manetIt's the mobile ad-hoc networking IETF group doing just what he's talking about. And as everybody would probably expect, QoS is the biggest obstacle.
NOW: how is this done?
you have your communcation device - a telephone or laptop, and you type in your message. It gets transmitted tooo... an 802.11g transceiver/router. Who paid for that device? Starbarfs? Where did the money come from? Oh... your overpriced pseudo coffee drink...
OK - so now the information is transmitted along some wires out of the building into some telephone lines. WHO maintains those lines? Are those lines free? How much do the telephone poles cost? And the wire that connects them? Who pays for THAT? And who pays the people who repair the pole when some teenTard (TM) and his gang of idiot friends plows his car into the pole? And who pays for the truck that transports the repairmen to the site? And who pays for their tools?
Now the wire goes to some huge telco building. the telco building is filled to the gunnels and they need a new one to handle all the traffic, beucase the "Free" aspect means everyone is useing the living daylights out of it. WHO pays for the new building and the digital swiches in it? And who pays for the people who work there who maintain it? And who pays for the giant satellite dish that pops the data up to a telco satellite?
And WHO pays for the satellite? And who pays forthe extra satellites that will be needed to handle the traffic?
So the satellite beams your desperately important little message of:
"huh - this is k3wl. I'm like, sippin latte at Starbarfs and like, typing this message, d00d..."
To the Canadian telco reciever in Halifax, NS. From there it goes to land lines or microwave, and ALL the expenses of the telco/ISP system in SF are now replicated in NS, but now it's in Canadian dollars...
So it streams along to the craggy corner of NS called Advocate Harbour. But... THEN there has to be another wireless arena set uyup, and he's sitting 100 yards from the lighthouse. So, you'll need some very powerful transmitters, and WHO PAYS FOR THOSE? And who maintains them?
So finally, after all that, it ends up in his inbox, and he sees your name and deletes it without reading it, because he knows you're totally clueless about the simplest facts of economy, and have been ever since you got that job in 1997 at that dotbomb delivering cat litter by way of Fedex...
Your phantasy WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
People work, and when they work, they expect to get paid. A lot. And the more complex, specialised, and tedious the work, the more they need to make...
This is not a flame - I honestly want the parent to know that their question is utterly ridiculous in the most literal sense: worthy of ridicule: and WHY this is so, which is why I was so detailed in the response.
other than that simple point, malice toward none-
Shoes for industry, compadre,
RR
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
There are a lot of communities that are building mesh like networks.
I am preparing the routing software, if you want to contribute look at scrouter.sf.net
This question seems kind of silly to be asking... of course we will always needs TelCo's and ISPs, who do you think is running DNS/DHCP/Routing/etc etc etc that keeps the Internet actually *working*?
Wireless at some point will still be "wired" in the network. You're not going to achieve OC48 speeds by sending bits through the air, thus there will still be a necessity for backbones (and someone to support them) unless you are planning on having the world's slowest network.
Not trying to flamebait, but next time you might want to check up on your networking info before posting a question like this.
Because infrastructure and reliability costs money(no no, trust me, I get more insightful below. Well, maybe not insightful. It's hard to answer this story insightfully, I just point out the facts.) Communications mediums are WORTHLESS if they are unreliable, which is one of the reasons cell phones took decades to "take off"(realize that it's been at least 3 decades since the cell phone was invented, and only in the last 5-6 has there really been a cell phone boom, at least in the US. Realize that the # complaint with cell phones is still how unreliable they are.)
Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices.(snip) What are the technological barriers?
Well, you asked, so here goes:
There are also some hidden consequences, like "everyone's mobile device is no longer idle, it's processing someone else's packets, so its battery life goes into the toilet".
How would you solve problems of geographic isolation?
That's just it- you'd need wires/fiber/something...and that would cost money. But, reliability would be far better- so people would opt for wired connections they had to pay for. Oops, right back where you started.
Also related- the reason high-speed access costs so much money in the US is because of geographic isolation and population density. It's no surprise that several Asian countries have DSL service in the megabyte-per-second range to your door for $10-20/mo; after all, you're probably in a huge apartment complex, in a city.
If the population density isn't high enough to support pricing high speed access low enough, I doubt you'll have enough nodes to even occasionally get any kind of connectivity to anything else- much less guarantee it.
Back to the cell phone example- look at how many billions(if not trillions?) of dollars have been poured into the cellphone network(which in turn is reliant upon a larger wired network.) I don't care what network you're on, soon as you get a little bit beyond the suburbs, off a major highway- forget it, you're screwed.
Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?
Well, for one, if you did telephone calls over this "system", I'd move to another country. When I pick up the phone, I damn well expect a dialtone, because, oh, say, my house could be on fire. There are no doubt thousands of o
Please help metamoderate.
a) Your submission to slashdot finally gets accepted
b) Your submission lacked intelligence, forethought, and anything else that made a good story
c) Thousands of geeks read your article, and a great multitude reply back to clue you in on (b).
Seriously, a "how can I get XX which happens to cost YY for free" article is just lame. You're one of those people who buys those "you are paying for a site where you can get a PS2 for $20" ebay auctions, aren't you?
Cmon...didn't someone HAVE A BRAIN?
Troll POSTS are one thing.....
troll STORIES? jheez
Editors....YHL, YHBT, HAND.
*sigh*
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
OpenSource OpenTelco OpenCar OpenTV OpenRestaurant OpenBullshit
Browsing through all of the threads of this article I have found nothing but negative replies. Obviously the idea won't work tommorow, but does that mean that it will forever be unfeasible? C'mon I thought we were supposed to be the freethinkers, the idealists right? How 'bout instead of dismissing this because of its faults, someone post an alternative, or way that we could make it work?
I'll start:
Use cordless phones as a starting point. Have the base station of the phone repeat the signal accross many other base stations until it finds it's destination. when no base station is available, use the mobile phone equipment. It wouldn't be an answer to the problem, but it could serve as a springboard to new ideas and working technologies.
Or alternativly it could flop and be a great disappointment. Let's work on it.
D
D
Maybe I'll just go to my neighbor's when he's eating dinner and hop in his idle Lambourghini and drive to South Beach.
While I'm at it I should probably stop at his bank and pick up his money sitting idle in his bank accounts... you know them SoBe babes ain't cheap and they don't do nuttin for free.
Then I'll find a nice condo that's sitting idle and squat there for a week or so...
Dude you're spending way too much time in front of your computer, take a look out your window at the Matrix once in a while eh?
I love every bone in her body, especially mine!
the technology is readily avail. but it's the people who have the power over it that want to make a buck here and there...same with why do they not make cars that lost for a long time and run on something other than oil? becuase there is still money to be made...money is the root of all evil and it's what runs the world....it's a good idea to have everything free and such but it won't happen in our life times...
If we don't end war, War will end us. - H.G. Wells
This wireless network is totally free and is very scalable. It's also a good authentication-problem solver, since it uses some kind of https login. Cisco has tried making the same thing (and is so similar to NoCat that I wonder if they stole the idea).
www.nocat.net
What's it all about?
We are working to build a community supported 802.11b wireless network in Sonoma County, CA. We are also actively developing NoCatAuth, the centralized authentication code that make shared Internet services possible. This site is the central repository for our software, ideas, and general information.
no wait. i'll host a bank on my P4 at home.
Lots and lots of dope to pull somthing like this off. I agree its a good idea, but if this ever becomes a reality in my life time I will die of a heart attack.
/. may be notorious for it's SNR, but really you can do better than this.
Easily portable, battery-powered, packet switching radios with ranges of at least a mile are not impossible to mass-produce now. So the poster asks that, given the political will, what could happen in societies with a sufficient quorum (for want of a better word) of population density.
Did you really not understand the question, or are that many of that trollish?
Kind of reminds me of that old saying:
I don't think that there is enough bandwidth at
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or newtork card or whatever). Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices.
You do realize that about 250,000,000 people live between LA and NY right? Some sort of p2p system might be effective when 10million people live in 20mi^2, but wouldn't work too well in the rest of America. Maybe the next time you are flying from LAX to JFK you should look down and realize that that ground you are covering is where most Americans live.
Sure, it's possible, but no, it would never work.
First of all, you have the problem of latency. The only reason you can cross the USA in 40ms and the Atlantic in 100 is high-speed backbones. ad-hoc networks are going to have terrible latency, on the order of seconds.
Combine thousands of crappy routers with thin pipes contantly re-negotiating in between yourself and your target node, and you get crap latency.
Second of all, you've got to supply the other aspect backbones supply: links between population centers. You don't think every hick in Nebraska and every desert dweller in New Mexico is gonna contribute to this, do you?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I want a global chain of grocery stores, where the only cost of entry is a bag to carry stuff home in.
This post is dedicated to all of those
Slashdot had a post on researchers efficiently changing the frequency of light. There are some naturally occuring gaps in the electromagnetic spectrum, nothing creates signals/noise at these frequencies and nothing absorbs/shields them. If you could see the world in this color everything would be made of glass. Using GPS to aim and lasers that transmit at this color we could send light pulses at the person you wanted to talk to, even through the middle of the earth.
OK, No free long distance (problems crossing empty spaces).
OK, we need backbones.
I have very little problem with those guys. I have a big problem with the last mile companies, cable and telephone (esp. Verizon).
Is there a way to just bypass them?
Nice assumption. Send code. :-)
The job of an ISP is to take your traffic and deliver it to [another network that can carry it to]* its destination. It's called routing, and it's a reasonably intensive task. We have large, expensive machines dedicated to the task of mapping IP addresses to the correct next hop, and we have highly paid individuals (cough) whose job is to lay out the network that carries all this traffic. That's what you're paying for. Everyone wants to optimise this, but it's turning out to be somewhat intractable.
It's funny, people seem to make a lot of weird assumptions about what happens to a packet as it transits the network. There's quite a lot going on there, and there are a fair number of tradeoffs at work that aren't visible to the casual observer. I suppose this is good, it means we're doing our job properly ;-) and I think that if you're familiar with LAN networking, it's easy to assume that it scales up with the rest of the internet. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you can come up with an algorithm that obsoletes routing as we know it, you've got it made. Best of luck. :)
Dave
Obviously, TANSTAAFL. So who pays for lunch? We do, either through the free market (capitalism) or through taxes and central planning (communism/socialism). This proposal is obviously the latter type.
Unfortunately, in the good ol' USA, we only favor socialism for the rich. After all, they earned it, right? What with the job creation and all the trickling down and stuff. Advocating socialsm for the poor will get you branded a class warrior.
So if you hear a knock on the door, don't worry, that's just the thought police come to give you a little re-education.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What I want is a global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or newtork card or whatever)
And what I want is a pony.
I never expected that slashdot has so many ignorant people.
If you don't think that what this article talks about is possible you need to google for ad hoc networks.
Right now the only thing missing for this idea to come true is someone to come with an algorithm to solve the ad hoc network routing over Wifi nodes.
There are a lot of people working on the theory of this (it is a very tough problem). PtP networks work (in a sense) somewhat like what this idea works like.
And yes with the right algorithm you won't need a central "authority", you won't need someone to specify the routes, you won't need to pay to be connected. The only thing you'll pay will be the electricity and the hardware.
I believe that the posts in this article show clearly the western "civilized" mind. Where everything has to have a "dad" (authority) othewise it won't work. Where nothing is free unless it is bogus and broken.
To you all with the "Economics 101" arguments, with the "authority" arguments, with the "utopia" arguments i say that you are immature in throwing away ideas such as this article describes.
Google for ad hoc networks and hope that you'll understand the "how's" and the "why's".
If the technocrats of 70's were like you, then using exactly the arguments you describe, the Internet would be imposible.
Learn to think out of the box
Learn to dream
kanenas
noone.
I wanna newtork card too!!!!!
Uhm, whats that do?
You could roll ham radio into a new bundle called "FreeInternet" and sell it to your average consumer. Let me know how this business model works for you.
Laughable, but this is the type of network you're proposing; but without the operator intelligence to keep the thing from falling in on itself.
Worst. Ask Slashdot. Ever.
my pet machine
Thats all fine and dandy until someone puts an idle device on the net to grab credit cards or route packets to neverland and distrupts service. Who are you going to call if that happens?
This question is quasi-Marxist and stupid on a number of levels, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt.
What we are talking about here is totally decentralizing the internet, which isn't a bad idea, at least in theory. There would be no ISPs or backbones to go down, so the system would be pretty damn robust. However, there are a couple of conditions that have to be met, which make the solution in many ways worse than the problem.
In order for this to work, the following situation must exist:
1. Bandwith of each node is exponentially greater than the amount of data to be sent, on average. In other words, since Farmer John's wi-fi card is going to be called upon to link Baltimore to Philadelphia, it's going to have to be hugely, gigantically fast.
2. Power of each node is exponentially greater than the distance to be covered requires, on average. See above.
So an ad-hoc, dynamic system can only work if each node has a huge amount of bandwith and power to throw around, which will be wasted in 99% of cases. The current hierarchial system is advantageous because it lessens the requirements on most nodes and allocates bandwith to the links that need it.
I got used to free hi-speed when I was in college. Nothing like a T-1 connection right at your fingertips (this was before Napster, so the network actually PERFORMED like a T-1 connection).
But what you want just won't happen. Bandwidth IS NOT CHEAP. (NOTE: I work at an ISP, so I know what I'm talking about). A whole node of service could be taken out by one person abusing what is provided. That's why there are different rates for service. Those who want more speed pay more to offset the costs of hooking up more fast pipes to the network.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
We don't need no stinking Telcos (and ISPs)? We're doing just fine witho^ÏÆ'©âcgs7ww8
+++
NO CARRIER
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
"What I want is a global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or newtork card or whatever). Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices. Remember there is no subscriptions, so don't expect to piggy-back on someone's paid for DSL bandwidth."
In other words, you found out, while watching SciFi, your ISP have raised their prices.
What I want is a global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc wireless data & voice network, where the only entry cost is a mobile phone (or newtork card or whatever).
Hold on while I pull that out of my ass.
Basically this is a "not now, maybe later." That is, by the time wireless data communication can reach landline speeds (or near so) as well as maintaining an international reach, then we'll be ready for such a plan. Until then, your best chance at getting anything with decent latency between large distances is still going to be using somebody else's landline/satellite for the uplink, and that costs money.
The "Editors" will keep posting this kind of shit.
If metropolitan areas were linked by a peer system - where the "price" of having a telephone or a being able to view the popular media of that culture (in whatever form, whether written or not) were to buy a box for a couple hundred bucks and pay the energy bill on its use, then that would become the fair unit of exchange. We would no longer value "bandwidth" because it would no longer be a limited resource (just like the printing press - duh). And if these metro areas wanted to communicate with other areas at higher speed, they could pool resources (ie taxes) to a national agency that would maintain such a high speed infrastructure for their use.
Of course, that would put the individual metro areas at the mercy of this national organization - not a good thing. So the sensible thing would be to contract with many providers and let them compete with one another for their share of that aggregated bandwidth.
Which is really pretty much what we have - or could have - right now. Nothing at all preventing you from forming a community network and accepting a monthly fee to pool for the connection to the world. Individuals could even participate for free in the local community (ie local phone service and local TV) for nothing, but would contribute to the pool if they wanted to access the greater network.
What's most limiting this right now is the lack of standardized hardware that people feel comfortable with - ie a telephone, a radio receiver, a TV set. If we could buy an 802.xxx telephone at wal-mart for twenty bucks, or a radio, or a completely plug and play box that could act as a bridge to our existing telephones and TVs, then such community networks would likely explode in number.
Or perhaps I should say when and will...
Infrastructure costs money. It's easy to say "Let's just stick a bunch of wireless radios all over the world", but it's much more difficult to implement. Who is going to foot the costs of the radios, leasing land or roof space, maintaining connections, etc. etc.
This question has most definately come from someone with end-user only experience. Anyone who actually "makes the wires work" knows it isn't easy, and it's certainly not cheap. This is just the unchecked imagination of an idealistic DSL user fed up with paying for services. You don't get your electricity, water, gas, cable, or any of the other utilities free, why should communication services be any different?
A more reasonable question would be, why are we still paying such high prices for these services. The answer to that, however, is simple. The public infrastructure is owned by government sponsored monopolies.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
nt
+&x
According to your plan, all the information on earth will have to pass through his phone! It'll have to be huge!
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I work in the Telco industry and have had a good think about this, and you know if you scratch a little deeper, it is possible.
Initially I was ranting on about infrastructure, licences, etc, but if you use all IP based services you could just make it work. Youâ(TM)re basically rolling out Jabber and using handsets to access it.
Youâ(TM)ll need a community of people with a WIFI compatible handset, and a set of servers on the web that you can route all your packets to.
Now for individuals to chat, text and browse within your community (90% of what people do), youâ(TM)ll need some form of Call Management System so that I can define unique identifies for each handset and route it to a specific place (like an IM server). Youâ(TM)ll probably need some from of encryption over the network too so that your routed packets cant been easily decoded.
There may be issues with lag as it will take time for the packets to be sent to your communityâ(TM)s server and then down to the phone where they are re-assembled. Iâ(TM)ve worked with systems that do similar over 2.5G and the best I can describe a voice chat is like a walky-talky with a 5 â" 10 second gap between international communication; over the web your bandwidth will be higher, but not reliable (the end nodes the phones connect to are the unknowns).
So we have a free and basic service where we can run anything IP based as long as you donâ(TM)t want real time communication. Voice services can be run from a VOIP server (which is very expensive and not in the open-source community yet) if you really want to get fancy.
Assuming thatâ(TM)s OK, your problems are:
WIFI access. When at home / office or âoeknownâ location you can move around and use the network you know is there. But what about if your out in the sticks or going to somewhere new. Basically youâ(TM)re talking about rolling out WIFI across the globe. Remember itâ(TM)s not just your access; itâ(TM)s your recipients too.
There needs to be a standard for all these communities to work together so that one can talk to the other. Something along the lines of the DNS system on the web that allows each community to locate each other.
Introduction of new services across the network will rely on each community to upgrade their servers and handsets at the same time so that all subscribers have access. There would have to be some sexy thinking going on here to work out exactly how each community knows what type of services you have and the person your âoetalkingâ to has.
Location based systems would be nearly impossible over IP. The best you could do is build a GPS system into the handsetâ¦but that costs.
The only other one I can think of is when you want to talk to me on an existing Telcoâ(TM)s network. There is no way their going to open up their network to âoea bunch of freeloadersâ, because thatâ(TM)s what theyâ(TM)ll think, and eventually youâ(TM)ll erode their subscribers and profits to a point where they have to close (they wont like that).
So thatâ(TM)s it, basically sort out the WIFI access and I recon with a bit of elbow grease you could put together a free network where the only thing you have to for access is buy a handset and subscribe to a community.
At the same time, airwaves are instrinsically less secure than wires, so business clients (and paranoid types) will always want a "secured" alternative to what the masses use.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1925.html
The answer is yes.
RTFS
Call me a Realist, but this will probably never happen. At least not in our lifetime.
The reason is simple. Do you think the huge media companies who own the networks, ISPs, etc. are going to let their strong-hold on communications slip away? No way. Its that old "those in power keep themselves in power" sort of thing.
ISPs and media/communication companies are strengthening their grasp on the industry. And with market share going to a few large companies, their is less of a reason to drop prices -- even as the technology becomes more of the "norm". So not only do I think we will continue to pay, we will probably be forced to pay more. Just look at the cable providers. Fewer and fewer cable companies, higher and higher prices.
Its what happens when you have one cable company to choose from, one broadbad company to choose from, one telephone company to choose from....
Ya know.. I only have limited time every day. This is SO AMAZINGLY aimed at just pissing people off and saying. Hey stupid.
come on.. get back to the news.
----
Just remove the spaces and do the intelligent thing to email me.
I think possible in the future some scheme like this could be possible, but probably not anytime soon. The main problem that I see is the massive amounts of traffic each node(cell phone, NIC, etc.) would need to receive and process. Take for instance, If I initiate a phone call to someone else, assuming that their phone is mobile, I have no Idea where they might be, so I have to broadcast to every device near me hoping that it can route. It in turn must then broadcast to everyone it is next to, and so forth. You can see that the number of packets present in the system gets exponentially big from just this one packet. Now imagine that that you are the receiving handset. You may receive millions of the same packet from various sources around the world as the packet was passed around trying to find you. Esentially every packet in the system would have to be passed around to nearly everyone else. You could potentially get around this by "checking in" to a central server somewhere and tell it your present location. Then you could find an optimal path to pass the packets in the right direction always to eliminate most excess packets. The problem is that then you are talking about some sort of Telco or ISP again.
Weeks? That sounds like an improvement to me. I've had to wait nearly 2 months to get a line from Ameritech. Who cares if they are nationally owned or not? Most telcos are monopolies that only make changes when they are fined massive amounts of money by utility boards.
btw, are you a spammer ?
1) Instead of WiFi 54 mb/s, you need 80 gb/s wireless (otherwise it would be slower than the current networks we have.)
2) You need an uncrackable (RSA 4096?) method to uniquely identify a person (I can currently identify customers to the signature on the contract and the address the circuit is installed.)
3) You need a organization to provide unique identities (an ARIN like entity; maybe verisign can do it with their CA servers.)
4) You need WiFi routers to support BGP4 over IPV6 (obvious.)
5) You need EVERYONE (including businesses who need reliable connections) to switch (or it will never have enough momentum to materialize.)
6) You need to use a central IP routing database keyed off the unique identity (so that IP theft is unlikely.)
7) All these little WiFi routers need about 48 terabytes of ram (you need about 2.2 kb of ram to hold a bgp4 route; there are about 120k routes today in IPV4; IPV6 addresses will likely consume 4 times the space as IPV4 addresses do now; consider most people say you need about 6 billion IPV6 blocks since you need 1 per person in the world; doing the math comes to 6 billion*2.2 kb*4 = 48tb.)
If you don't do it like I describe above, you will have P2P type network reliability/speed. So imaging telneting/sshing/filling out forms on web pages/web browsing/Internet gaming at 2-60 second ping times? I would shoot myself if this were the best I could do.
I work a a major ISP doing networking planning and BGP engineering. The only way I could see this happening is if the government stepped up to pay for all the infrastructure and pay for the interconnects to the rest of the world. But even then you, do you want budget crises to slow your network down? At least now, the networks can stand on their own feet (if they make money, there is incentive to improve and compete.)
So all my data and voice goes through you and your friends? I prefer to pay an ISP for that, thanks. Maybe I could encrypt everything, but you would be able to store all my data (for an offline attack in 10 years when my 1024-bit encryption becomes weak in face of new technology), halt my communication and eventually threaten to cut my access to the world if I don't pay you. Bingo! You just went back to capitalism again.
I guess the governments still want to be sure who is doing communications inside of there country.
Especially in the US it will be hard at the moment with the wars going on.
Lars
and a horrible abuse of karma bonus...
Threads like this are a wonderful place to load up your friends/foes list. If someone has nothing better to say than "this is a fucking stupid thing to post, you are stupid, and your family eats poo." then it's very doubtful they'll ever post anything i want to read. Foes list. On the otherhand, there's some really good posts here about WHY this might not currently work, or how to make it work, or how it might be made to work in the future. Friends list. +1 bonus to friends, -1 to foes, signal to noise ratio greatly increases.
-1 offtopic
The Romans made water a public service by taxing the citizens and building aqueducts. Later Europeans did the same for sewage, then gas, then electricity. It's ridiculous to think of a streetlamp with a coin slot, or a monthly service plan that allows you to sip from Zapulzon Water fountains, but that's because it's just too darn useful (and relatively inexpensive per person) to have those services freely available.
Is the same coming for bandwidth? Absolutely. I predict we'll see the first bandwidth public utilties within 5-10 years (it may already be happening).
Will it ever be free? That seems unlikely. There's still a physical cost. People are willing to donate countless hours of their own time to contribute to a greater good (e.g. Open Source). But how many of us have opened our pocketbooks to
give to the EFF? And more importantly, do we have the resources to give away bandwidth? I don't think so.
A parallel is socialized medicine. What is supposedly "free" ends up being rationed because there are more takers than the system is prepared to provide for.
When I download a file from Kazaa (a legal one, for certain), I sometimes get great download speed and other times, I get a low one. But I frequently get "more sources needed."
When I download via BitTorrent, sometimes I get incredible DL speed, other times, when the seeders disappear, I get nothing.
Now imagine, you're talking to your mom, and it drops out ("More Sources Needed") because the only guy covering a particular small span moved too far away from one of the hops. Or your phone call ends because the route is not currently available. Or the quality is low because some of the stretches are running close to the attenuation lengths.
With wireless technology in its infancy, you're putting the cart before the horse. With Bluetooth at a mere 33 feet and 802.11's no more than a hundred yards or so, we need much more coverage, probably miles per device, before this is realistic.
Installing the network will always be expensive.
But I think that, if the conduit (wire, wireless,fiber, cable, etc) providers become divorced (separate) from the service providers, real competition will return to the isp market.
The situation that we have now does not create a truly competative market.
Cable companies enjoy monopolies in providing cablemodem service to thier markets, Phone companies (very soon will) enjoy monopolies in providing dsl, and most community based high bandwidth projects have a single service provider.
If these conduits were operated separately from the services they now carry, it would be possible for a consumer to choose phone service, cable programming, and internet access from any provider they chose. The connection providers could charge the ISP's for access to the market
Pricing would become competative (remember the advent of $9.95/month 56k modem access, same thing, but high-band), and competition between the different transmission mediums (assuming the could not be owned by the same company) would keep those prices in check.
It would require a major shift in thinking for the cable/telco industries, so I'm sure it will be a long time before anything like this becomes a reality.
Read, L
we have a network were
1) you use everyone else's excess capacity
2) you don't pay for your use, and you don't get a surcharge if you use a lot
3) there is noone to control "goalkeepers" to prevent you from being flooded by the network in any way not thought of by the initial protocol designers
4) the use of this network is not subject to restrictions of political speech
so
a) this network is spammer haven
b) DOS DDOS and other floods are to be expected
c) you don't have any "point of contact" to reach in case the network is flooding you, just buy a new card
d) use of the network during an election can break democracy through creative flooding, if enough people have it
Have I summarized it correctly?
What you're proposing is getting off the ground in the Philadelphia area already (being lead mostly by the Philadelphia Linux Users Group right now), and is already in various stages of deployment in other major cities. I think the first trick is to get free wireless broadband to the last mile, and sort out the wide area connectivity later. Note I'm not implying free Internet here, but rather free high speed services to local or regional content.
Here's another problem with this Utopian networking plan. Imagine MSN a bunch of devices out "into the field" that will gladly pass along most messages, but will intercept any request for a Yahoo-owned site and return the functionally-equal MSN-owned competitor. Yahoo would be powerless to defend against it... there's no way to encrypt the address headers and then expect devices that you're trying to hide the address from to help you your message.
Far too many networking concepts, even ones that ended up actually getting taken into production, falsely assume that everybody will play the game fairly, in the way that the network designers didn't want them to do. Would the founding fathers of the Internet really have implemented SMTP the standard for e-mail transfer if they knew that spam was going to be such a problem?
I recall some years ago there was FIDONET, not very high-speed, but largely decentralized communication network that delivered electronic mail. So, for example, if you were a FIDO subscriber in Soviet Russia, somewhere in Siberia, and you sent a message to another subscriber in the Capitalist West, it would go to some other friendly person's computer in your town and when they coughed up to make a 9600bps modem connection to their friend in Moscow the message would get relayed there and in a few hours or days would reach the West.
Obviously I haven't used it and have no idea what i'm talking about, but it was a system relying on private voluntary provision of "ISP functions."
Go back 10 years. Assume slashdot existed 10 years ago(?) and the following ask slashdot was posted:
"Is the RIAA going to continue to be necessary in the future? Why are we all paying for music? What I want is a global extremely-high-speed ad-hoc music service, where the only entry cost is a PC. Devices communicate peer to peer, or routed via other people's idle devices. Remember there is no subscriptions, so don't expect to piggy-back on someone's paid for music albums. What are the technological barriers? What kind of protocols would you need? What hardware advances? How would you solve problems of geographic isolation? Are there theoretical, political or economic reasons it couldn't work?"
Would you have made the same comment?
but first you'll have to re-institute slavery
Scarcity and delivery.
Currently bandwidth is a limited resource that has to be delivered into our homes so we pay for it, like water and electricity.
But what I think most of the responses have missed is that it doesn't always have to work that way. For example, I don't have to pay anyone for the air I breath because it's so plentiful and no one has to deliver it to me.
It's conceivable, I'd say even likely, that bandwidth could one day work the same way.
However from the responses to this article I think the biggest hurdle won't be technical so much as overcoming peoples' preconceptions.
Where you can always count on the flames being modded up to Insightful...
Anyways, sure the original post was a bit off I think, but it was a perfectly legitimate "what-if" in my mind, no need to flame him all to hell for posing the question. How it got included in the day's headlines I'm not sure, but I would seriously doubt nobody in the studio audience here has pondered a similar idea. No need to flame him for asking a question and trying to start a discussion. Uh oh, I feel warm already....FLAMES AWAY!
As far as my thoughts on the subject...I don't think it would work technologically. I think the political barriers would be IMMENSE (ie: who would govern what is 'right and decent' to allow through the 'network', normal political BS that goes on anyway and would be hugely amplified by this type of thing), and I don't know if people would be ready for it (I mean really, do you really want everyone in the world bouncing through your computer to get their kiddie pron? Do you want to be held legally responsible if they do, because you know somehow a government would make you be held liable for what users access through your hops?)
Oh well, flame away, this probably isn't that useful a post on this thread, but mainly because I have to pee and am trying to be brief.
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" - Dennis Miller
This has got to be the worst Ask Slashdot ever. Next in the series will be "Do We Still Need To Walk?", "Do We Still Need Procreation?" and "Do We Still Need Water?"
"You get what you pay for after all." --
Bandwidth and internet access isn't a God given right. It's a luxury and there are costs all over the place. Even if you cut out all the marketing and advertising you still have the cost of equipment and the cost of the people who have to run it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
[End: Comic Book Guy Voice]
Yeah, that's it. Remove accountability, remove IP address tracking, make everything wireless and one big peer-to-peer cluster f***... know what you get?
Spammitopia with a good helping of Advertis-mania thrown in and crappy service to boot.
No thanks. I like using my money as a tool to get people to do stuff I want, that includes bandwidth, routing and spam-blocking. Capitolism is good because it is self-organizing; suppliers and buyers agree to do stuff for money.
I can see it now, geo-spam-hunt, use your radio direction finder to find some spammer that hid a wireless access point in a park gazebo, only to find out it belonged to the FBI, and the one you were really after was the one in the garbage can.
You think it's bad now, just wait until spammers can move the fricken server on a bicycle WHILE spamming and nobody knows what state they are in cuz all the routing done by some default Linksys configuration....
Its amazing how in just a few replies the majority of you crush a simple idea. Not too many foward thinkers here. I could envision a completely private network over wireless, or any other medium. ISP's have been doing it for years. I was an ISP for a few years, not too much of a challenger. It looks like a natural evolution for this topic... who would have thought there would have been so much fuss over things like the Instant Messenger between M$ and AOL. Its not much different. Its more about the community, not the all-mighty dollar. All of you who are home-town Linux evangelist's and all you hackers and mod'ers aught to put your heads together and come up with a 'real service' based on products that share your vision. These people that want to talk about bandwidth limits and spammers are just trying to look important... not the type of people who are very creative. It could upset me enough to look at putting 'tried and true' projects together for just such a network. Look at some things here... LRP, Bluetooth, and all the cheap hardware that we have now. Why should we continue to be screwed by the TelCo's? Its a free world, shake things up a bit.
Okay, I'll bite.
A free wireless network isn't happening anytime soon, for reasons mentioned by.. everybody. I'd like to also pull attention to the routing problem, which is just as big (larger?) than the huge-gap problem.
The best solution is not getting rid of infrastucture, but making it invisiable and if not free.. very close to that and with hidden costs. Call it Iridium2.
Assume the following technological advances, none which are fundemental breakthorughs (a la telepathy and anti-grav):
- cheap hardware
- cheap space launch
- incredible wireless bandwidth (compression, or other methods)
- incredible wireless range from improved antennae, etc.
Have the government(s) launch a shell of uber bandwidth sats. Ignore the concentration of power we just gave big brother. Assume that the gov gives universal free access and no one notices the additional $5 on their tax bill. (precedents: GPS nav system; the internet).
Now we have routable, free internet and phone for everyone with no coverage gaps and no ugly wires. The costs are dispersed/hidden and maintainance is low. But its highly centralized and control is possible. Pick one.
Yes we still need ISPs - without mine, I wouldn't have a job right now (ISP admin for 6+ years) !!
People think that the Internet is truely peer-to-peer and that it doesn't have a central data center... the problem with that idea is that the Internet actually has many well-distributed data centers.
Consider any point where one data services provider connects with another data services of equal size on a peering basis to be a mini-MAE, and then think about all of the places that we actually call MAEs where a lot of data service provider network meet. Even though UUnet and Sprint are competitors out "in the field", there are many points at which their two networks intentionally shake hands and meet nicely on a nice big fat two-way data pipe. Why do they do this? Because this is exactly what makes the Internet work.
There are many small-town ISPs that do nothing but gather up Internet traffic from a 3-town region into a single data-center, and then put that traffic on a T3 pipe towards the nearest big-city ISP. Big city ISP then gathers the traffic from its own customers and a few other small-town ISPs onto fiber links that go to UUnet, with a couple spare fiber links from Cogent that they maintain just in case UUnet has a major problem for any length of time.
All roads lead to the major backbone providers, and the major backbone providers join with each other all over the place to swap traffic that starts on one backbone that's headed to a tributary of another backbone provider. The Internet depends on these backbone providers so that somebody on Verizon DSL in Boston can connect "directly" to somebody on a Charter Pipeline cable modem in Washington State.
If we didn't have the backbone providers, the Internet just plain would exist. The Internet is a result of networks connected to networks... or if you really want to deconstruct the word it is the network that goes between networks. You're really just connected to (name of ISP here)'s network... it's just the fact that (name of ISP here) has a connection to the Internet as the main attraction on the network that makes you want to connect to them.
- Wifi becomes really really fast
- Long-range Wifi becomes really cheap
- All Wifi stations are connected on a huge Mesh network
- Everything is encrypted and signed
- Bandwidth and memory are so abundant that keeping a list of all nodes and routes on this huge network becomes easy
- Batteries get replaced by hydrogen power cells which promise a theoretical 100-fold improvement over batteries
- Camera's get really small
- retina-laser-projection HUD displays are default in glasses
- You control what you do or who you communicate to by looking at your HUD (that's also possible already)
It's inevitable - probably during our lifetime we'll be wiressly connected just about everywhere while being able to talk to everybody for free and sending high resolution life-video from just about everywhere to just about everywhere. Control TV's, stereo's, lights and microwaves wirelessly with your eye-movements. Work on the beach lying in the sun on your back. But your head's in the office/school. Or in the cinema:) And ordering a drink is a matter of seconds.But there's more:
- Cam, HUD and videofilters will make the sun shine everywhere and you can be in any possible virtual room you want together with all your friends
- Face-recognition will bring up names next to people while they automatically send you their business card, blink once to talk - even if the other person is pretty far away
- Zooming is default on all glasses
IMHO all this is just a matter of time - all basic technologies exist and everything's getting faster, cheaper, smaller, wider...0x or or snor perron?!
Hot damn, why don't we all get together, build our own roads, and stop paying the portion of our taxes that go to highway maintenence? We wouldn't have to worry about getting pulled over by the police on our highways or all those time-consuming road work crews always holding up traffic!
oh, wait . . .
`which fortune`
I see a lot of sarcastic narrow minded responses to your posting, which are examples of exactly the way the telco's want us to think. That it is impossible. When it was 25 - 35 cents/minute 20 years ago (equivalent to at least 50 - 75 cents/minute by todays economy) and the telco's were laughing all the way to the bank with their government granted monopoly (ie. the 1934 telecom act), they had most people I encountered believing that the technology was such a miracle that it was a real bargain.
What you are proposing is far from impossible. The biggest technological barrier is the current lack of low latency routing hardware and protocols because you will be potentially routing your packets through a lot of hops before connecting to your destination or into a backbone. For example, if we had a wireless 1 mile grid of point to point nodes across the continental US, to achieve 100 ms routing times it would require that packets be resent from each hop within 33 micro-seconds of their reception based on 3000 hops. This would require that the packet be able to be re-sent at the same time as it is being received, just a few bytes apart (just enough for a routing header or maybe even an IP header). This is very possible to do but I have not yet seen any products quite that innovative. Don't count on the telco's designing them :-). Such a grid could easily be
done on an ad-hoc basis by the public installing repeaters/routers on
their private properties. Golly gee, the ham radio community managed
to pull their resources and launch their own satellites!
The large backbone providers will likely stay around, especially for over seas connections. Groups of people can combine resources for the expenses of connecting into the existing backbones, bringing the cost down to very little per person. In fact it can become nearly free as the wireless grid covers more and more territory because the bandwidth consumption of the backbone will drop.
The primary political/social reason it would not work is this:Because of the 62 years of the communist 1934 telecommunications act that restricted public wireless communications and propaganda from the telecoms about how expensive and impossible it is, the public is like the elephant that used to have a chain around it's leg. Once the act was finally overturned during the Clinton administration, the public is now like the same elephant only tied by a string that has been conditioned that it cannot break free.
If anybody is offended this, may the string fit.
In a Socialist Utopia we will all be fucked up the ass by multiple tiny socialist dicks at once leading us to look like the guy at goatse.cx. At least when we get fucked up the ass by well hung capitalists like George W. Bush, it doesn't cause any damage.
Why not opticalfibers to all homes - financed by a cooperative where all the customers are the owners. Everybody share the costs and the surplus is devided to the members.
:)
There is LOTS of successfull cooperatives around the world, for example the biggest food chain and gasstation chains here in sweden are cooperatives
We're talking WIRELESS YOU DIPSHITS!!! Not wired, wireless is by far less expensive and longer range, and with the advent of better tech it's forseeable that in a 20 or so years such of a peer 2 peer system will evolve out of nothing.
The admittance price to such of a network would be the equipment and that equipment would become like a router; taking in information and broadcasting it out to a global network of computers listening for packets coming to them, broadcasting the ones that aren't. There is no need for an ISP, there never would be. The only thing that'd be needed is something that can transverse the ocean, and don't think someone won't put out money for that.
The only problem with this kind of a system is that you've got no idea what the sheer amount EM waves you're talking can or would do to the enviroment. We'd all have wireless bandwidth, but on the other hand we'd all be impotent.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Pure and simple, really. I'm not talking about the current entrenched corporate infrastructure, I'm talking about good ol' entrepreneurship.
Given the inherant nature of an ad hoc network with an ungoverned populace, you will end up with an unreliable and unstable communication system.
Eventually, someone will stick their neck out, shell out the bucks for some heavy duty long distance repeaters, and figure out how to charge people per packet passed. Those who want, and can afford the service, will buy in. Viola. Suddenly, we're back in the land of ISPs and major carriers.
However, I don't think the idea should be dismissed -- there is definitely room for decentralized, public wireless networks (emphasis on the public). I think it's important for developing economies and impoverished metropolitan areas to have free access to the Internet, for the sake of information, education, and community.
Wasn't there an article several weeks(months?) ago about some project that was already trying to do a nation-wide wireless network independant of the internet?
--Posting AC because I forgot my password and didn't take the time to fill in the form...
no subscription cost beyond a ham license. The protocol accounts for high packet loss IIRC. Speed leaves a lot to be desired, but it's still an interesting tech.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Everything would still inevitably be regulated by the government, and would certainly be more of a headache. For example, rural users might have to apply for a government grant to install wireless transceivers along the path to their homes instead of making a simple call to the telcos. When your network piggybacks signal from your neighbor, and his cat chews through the repeater's power cord while he's on vacation, you have no recourse. And with everything ad-hoc, any spammer with a laptop could send whatever he/she wants, to whomever. You're paying the telcos a lot for accountability, false contrition, and some measure of reliability, not just for the data that streams into your house.
You have to ask yourself, "Is it worth the hassle?" If so, get one of those fancy 5-km WiFi antennas, mount it next to your satellite dish on the roof, and just leach.
--Jasin Natael
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Hasn't been since 1983,
The subsidy was temporary and lasted during the duration of "The Postal Service Reorganisation Act" from 1971 to 1983. The rest of its history, the mail has paid for itself by selling postage, and it still does. See the USPS History page.
And the Federal government has provided plenty of subsidies to telcom and internet infrastructure.
But I do agree with (most of) your argument, just not your examples.
Read, L
er... to avoid a nightmare scenario of the whole world running some IGP like OSPF or ISIS or god forbid- RIP, you gotta run BGP.
BGP assumes the existence of autonomous systems (AS). So without AS's you cant route traffic past your local routing domain.
ASs normally get payed to do the job, but I suppose thats not necessary (in lala land). These payed ASs normally call themselves ISPs.
so... though its theoretically possible to have a global internet without paying a cent, its not possible to run it without organizations administrating its AS. Since they want money.. well I cant see a future internet based on IPv4 or IPv6 or whatever which is free...
Maybe once Arnold is done promoting the new movie, we could get him to carry around big bags of letters and distribute them for free, all around the world!
What's so impossible about free? What's so impossible about technological advancement without a monetary system? Why is it so hard for people to understand that money is just as ficticious as government?
I can only guess that if you're born with your head in your ass that you'd think that's the way the world is and you'd carry on just so.
There is no FREEdom without free. I guess we'll all carry on just so.
And fuck you for it you godamn dumbasses.
Who defines free and open? All the companies that provide backbone data service are (to my knowledge) publically held companies; they are subject to regulation from the FCC and the federal government. They aren't "publically unaccountable". And, all-in-all, they do a fairly good job of moving bits from place to place. Why should we induce the inherent inefficiencies of a government buracracy in to this equation? There are already publically accessable computers available for those who can't afford internet access -- go to virtually any public library in the country; the government provides special funds for computers with Internet access (encumbered by restrictions, true, but funds are still provided). As far as I'm concerned, this is enough "information infrastructure" already.
is better schools, cheaper colleges, ethical police offiers, etc etc etc., the list goes on. What we don't need at the moment is high speed pr0n access so you can jerk off to nekked ladies on your cell phone while driving. It'd be nice if the US public school system wasn't such a joke. These are things we need right now. If half of you took an interest in what we needed rather than your geek dreams we'd be much better off. And that's my condensed rant.
Though, I'm not going to stand on my pedastol for long--I'd much appreciate high-speed pr0n.
Do we still need eraserewind?
Some years ago, I thought that the world would need to move to a new network paradigm: move into a cubicle/office/home, connect your PC into 8 or 16 of the fibers available, tell the computer what your goals are (profit, low-cost, high performance, or some set of trade-offs).
...
The networking subsystem advertises its location/address, connections==routes,
It negotiates for name services, and chooses connections via a bidding system. Because it is a router, it can bid on requests for bandwidth.
Routing is recursive: systems that want to bid ask for bids on the remaining portion of the route.
So, not a free network, rather a capitalist system that starts by people connecting their systems through neighborhoods.
Wireless hubs fit well into this approach.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
You make some great points, and here's one more to add to the list:
Wireless access kind of needs to be a broadcast medium (how else can it be done?). In, say, an office environment, you set up a network with a switch, so that (ideally) any two communicating parties can get 10mbits/sec. But with a broadcast medium, it's pretty likely that only one person can talk at once. Collisions with the scale of network that eraserewind is talking about would cause a HIDEOUS performance penalty. I suppose that this could be alleviated by using many frequencies dynamically, but I'm still dubious.
Telcos? Not in there present form, no. ISPs? How else can you approach the problem? Peer-to-peer everything? I guess if you're willing to purchase gigabit ethernet and your own Cisco switching hardware on the condition that your neighbor agrees to connect his equipment up to yours, then its an exciting possibility. Hopefully no disputes would arise over who is hogging who's bandwidth. As for ranchers in Montana who don't have many neighbors close by and can't afford to lay that much cable, they would probably have to depend on some sort of isp. It's good that questions like this are asked, but the way to answer them is not to wait for some sort of consensus on an answer but instead to get off your duff and work on your own solution.
reading the responses here is so depressing! you pepole have no vision! this idea is largely possible, we just have to do it. don't wait for the telcos to make a high speed network in your neighborhood or apartment building. DO IT YOURSELF. NOW.
1. create a high speed ad-hoc network covering say 100 households
2. create a high speed connection to a neighboring community who has done similar.
3. repeat
stir in Internet connections via radio or fiber as needed.
and while you are at it, get some good bandwidth back from the military (through government lobbying).
no really, we can have free high speed internet access. i give my neighbors free access through a wireless router.
it happens gradually.
fear is the mind killer
would you like your children medium or well done??
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
Well, here are some ideas about what you would need to make this work and to deal with the problems.
Problem 1: Freeloaders. Well, you could design a tit-for-tat protocol where you never rebroadcast packets from a freeloader. Think Bittorrent, where if you don't share, you don't get good download badnwidth. The game-theoretic knowledge is there to design an ad hoc protocol where the Nash equilibrium behavior is to not freeload.
Problem 2: Long Hops. OK, so long distance pipes cost money. And they won't go away soon, because some, posibly large, fraction of traffic needs them. So let the operators of the pipes charge tolls. You could have a whole ad hoc marketplace where some people let you use their hardware for free, and others charge. You tell your computer how much money and what QoS you want, and it tries to route effectively.
There are problems here, of course. One is how to establish trust -- how to do billing in an anonymous ad hoc system? Some sort of self-signed certs might be made to work... or maybe we'd need a palladium-ish technology? Either of these solutions can also help with the problem of needing end-to-end encryption on everything.
So there. I've thrown out some solutions. They may have problems, but at least its a start, instead of grousing about the original question.
Think of countries like Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and others that try to enter the tech market and attract businesses. They all spend billions in the wrong places. A small portion of the national budget can power fibre optics in every street, installing of which will take some capital, but its maintenance will not. It will soon be in the best interest of the government to keep upgrading the speeds and capabilities of the network.. just like USA working hard for oil. Oil runs the economy of the USA, where everyone over 16 has a car and too many people telecommute long distances to work. This obviously gives an edge to the USA over countries where people have to actually walk to work.
The same analogy applies to communications. We can see the benefits of the Internet, imagine it fast, free and available to everyone. It only takes a smart politician to set the ball rolling.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
hipothesize?
hipothesize?
hipothesize?
hipothesize?
The guy *snip* was on crack
Individuals, with no wires or terribly sophisticated equipment, have been able to broadcast voice across the world for decades using ham radio, and digital has proven to be a hell of a lot more efficient than voice. Look at what has been achieved in the way of wireless just using scraps of some of the worst spectrum, the unregulated dregs. Given the right protocols to avoid saturation, along with deregulation of the airwaves, there should be no problem implementing such a system with minimal hops.
The areas Iâ(TM)d say were most relevant to the problem would be first, achieving enough processing power in the devices to deal with the fact that they would be basically analysing the entire spectrum all the time looking for relevant broadcasts. Secondly, achieving enough power storage efficiency to run the thing portably, and third, more precise emitters and sensitive receivers to allow increased signal granularity and give the protocols something to work with.
We could probably make a pretty good go at such a setup now, if the airwaves werenâ(TM)t so thoroughly regulated. But don't expect it to come from any of the existing commercial entities.... they'd probably have you shot if they thought you could make it work.
<rant> Oh, and a big fuck you to the multitude of rabid capitalists who think thereâ(TM)s something inherently wrong with not wanting to pay for stuff. You can take your American Dream, consumer culture, built-in obsolescence, slave to the machine, bleached pop culture ideas and go fucking rot. Itâ(TM)s idiots with a attitudes like yours that make it possible for someone to sell boxes of fucking diapers to clean your floor with when a fucking mop will do. You are the modern day serf... go back to your damned cubicle and shut up.</rant>
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Hmmmm.. This sounds interesting. So you want a communications network that doesn't actually require an infrastructure? If there's any additional equipment required, you'll always have to have someone to pay for it. Your phone bill goes to your telco's costs, like paying for the wires, hardware, physical locations, staff, etc, etc, etc...
:) You're limited to being within range of their AP's though.
I like the idea of the wireless peer networking idea.. If you're in range of other devices, you can relay through them. There was a PDA out a year or two ago targeted towards school kids that could do that. But it was limited to about 100' range. I suppose it could be done with an ad-hoc network, but there are definate problems with it.. Like, what happens if you have too many people in the same place? What if you're the only link to the next network?
I'd definately not want to be the only point between two large groups.
But, it's not on "the" internet, unless there's a peering.. Peerings don't come free. Without a peering, you don't see the Internet.
Wireless, as it is, won't cut it. There are a few places in the world that would be obsticles to this, such as oceans (a subtle percentage of the earth's surface), and deserts.. I drove across I-10 not too long ago, and saw a whole lot of dirt and rocks, but had no signal on my phone, and no AM or FM reception. I know what I drove across (4 lanes of pavement 2000+ miles long) is a very small sample of what's out there. A boost in power could work, but it would also cause *LOTS* of interference. Imagine 10 people broadcasting at high power in the middle of the desert. They'd have no problems reaching each other.. Now imagine the same broadcast power in a "hyperdense" area. 83,000 people per square mile in New York.. That would be messy. Good thing cell phones are low power, and they have a lot of towers.
To get access *anywhere*, you'd need a more distributed method.. Iridium has a beautiful network of satellites, with both data and voice service, but you're going to have to pay for using it.. Someone paid a few dollars to get those satellites up there.
Until people are willing to do things for free, and receive things for free, you won't see free connectivity.. Now you're looking at a Star Trek Utopia that will never happen.
I for one, am willing to give my time, but it's going to take a lot more than the two of us, and someone's going to have to figure out where the equipment comes from to do something like this. You can just go war-driving, and find poorly configured access points, and do VoIP on those.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Ok so the idea is that you want to own your own hardware. you want it wireless and you want it as a big mesh network.
Have you thought of
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing?
whitepaper here
It's supposed to be great at handling multipath. and it's the foundation of the G4 mobile phones. There is talk of incorporating it into an 802.11 Wlan standard.
so don't worry about the doomsayers. there are smart people out there trying to make the world a better place.
________________________________________
The Spiders are Coming. Next episode: June 13, 2003
Can a /. article be flagged TROLL???
Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone is saying how it won't work because of tech issues like latency, battery, whatever. But, it seems we have forgotten an interesting possability: The networks themselves. If a technology/movement/etc was about to come online that would make landlines and ISP's obsolete, or even just offer a viable alternative, you _know_ they are going to do something about it. Look at what the RIAA did when their members [thought they] lost money due to file sharing: hordes of uberlawyers came in and tried to shut it down. Look what happens whenever anyone minorly encroaches on Microsoft's domain: hordes of uberlawyers come in and try to shut it down. It's capitalistic darwinism: companies evolve until they are so powerful they can survive. And survive they will. Anything that is considered an extreme threat to an entity, and that entity has the power to neutralize that threat, it is destroied. Look at the history books: Zeus, eating his children. Countless Emperors/Popes/Kings/Leaders killing their politcal rivals. Korea/Vietnam wars, trying to stop communism. Iraq/Afganistan, trying to stop terrorism. And sorry to not be an optimist, but The Actual Part of Slashdot That Actually Means To Do What They Suggest (tm) vs. Bell, Verizion, AT&T, MSN, AOL Time Warner, and all of them! I don't like the odds.
No, we shouldn't continue to depend upon ISP's. The only way for the internet to actually reach its potential of a completely decentralized, open, liberating entity is to abandon the hard-wired network. The network must be wireless. It must be possible for users to completely control their access to the network. Not through the rented DSL, cable, or dial-up lines that make you a slave to your upstream provider. Find a way to move the internet to short-wave and now you have true internet freedom.
The way I see this, is that he means that his computer is connected to all of those around him, they in turn are connected to all those around them, etc. Think about this for a minute. My computer is 1 km away from yours, and we can connect to one another wirelessly, but you can't reach a computer 2 km away. However I can reach that computer, and relay the information back to you.
A lot of the posters here have got it in their heads that "it can't work without internet access." Don't they realise that this is a form of internet access? Instead of the commercial internet, we could end up having a world wide INTRAnet arrangement.
Someone said "what if Bob went away and took his computer with him, Susan turned hers off and mine is broken... the network would fail." I disagree on this point. You are looking at the problem of A connects to B connects to C, etc. Think a little bit outside the square and create an actual WEB (after all that is what it is, isn't it.... World Wide Web) Why can't A connect to B, C, D, E, F. Then B could connect to A, C, E, G, H. Now for A to connect to H, the packets must go via B, but D is also connected to H, therefore they can go via D. Think of an actual spider web where every computer is connected to hundreds or thousands around it.
Naturally there are some problems which have been brought up, namely accessing the other continents, but he was also talking about the future. In time that will be no problem. Think about how far we have come.
But who knows... prehaps I am dreaming... but remember this, there is nothing that man can dream that he cannot create/do
I am not stubborn. I am right!
Wow, I've never seen so many negative, narrow minded comments ever. Of course this idea may seems far fetched today, but in 5, 10, or 20 years, hopefully this is the way it will be. Look how far we have come with computers in the last 40 years, or even in the last 10. I'm sure people 100 years ago would have thought having a live video conference with someone half-way around the world would be impossible.
don't waste our time with this stupid shit.
Barriers to free p2p wireless? Hmm... that would be... the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and... greed. :)
--
Power to the Peaceful
Buy your own network now and save. (I'm joking about the Buffett part, he only partially bought Level 3, and it was to help a friend). There are plenty of long haul carriers that can be purchased for nearly nothing, I think touch america could be had for about $75 million, Global crossing is likely to go for less than a billion, there are many others, that have been destroyed by the crash, and are now quite cheap. All you would need is a decent sized group of like minded friends willing to kick in a few thousand, and you would have your long haul problems solved, for pennies on the dollar.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
If you're going to make such a network, then you'd have to change the entire structure of the web first. Right now we have thousands of people all trying to connect to slashdot at once. That means slashdot has to have a large pipe. You can't just route it through the 5 people who happen to live nearby. You could use 5 links, but they'd still have to be huge. It's much easier to spread out the data hierarchicaly.
Now if we got rid of the web, and used something like freenet or bittorrent (a cross between the two?), then maybe such a scheme could work.
It certainly would be inefficient to use omni antennas as far as electricity is concerned. But from a cost perspective the maintenance costs of wires probably outweighs the savings in electricity.
As was mentioned by others, the economics then becomes a bit of a problem. But unlike a virtual network overtop of the internet, here we have locality in our favor. Private keys could be transferred physically, so if there were any problems with abuse we'd know who to contact first. Of course, there would have to be a lot of laws passed, basically forcing everyone to provide a certain amount of bandwidth to each of their neighbors free of charge, but once those laws were set up most people would probably play fair.
Finally, despite what many of us learned in our internet technologies classes, IPv4 doesn't handle dynamic routing very well. In fact, in practice it doesn't really handle it at all. For this reason as well as the first, this is really only going to work on a citywide area, at least for the forseeable future.
Network backbones really need fiber or something like it. You can't run a modern telco without fiber, and there are huge operational costs wins by using fat pipes and routing or switching rather than using very large numbers of small pipes and patching the things together and trying to keep them load-balanced.
Edge distribution is an area where wireless *can* replace some traditional services. Telephony-speed wiring to your house could do fine over radio - a big reason we didn't develop that technology in the US is that the Roosevelt Administration's pro-monopoly policies (yes, I really mean that!) gave radio to the broadcast entertainment industry and telephony to the phone companies and prevented anybody from competing in the others' space, but now that we're mostly over that, it may be possible to adapt wireless to replace some of the traditional wired applications. On the other hand, it'll be tough to get to DSL-like speeds without a reasonably amount of distribution networks - you can replace the last mile, but the last 10 miles is harder because of aggregate bandwidth demands.
Reliability is another huge issue - if you get very much packet loss, TCP spends all its time retransmitting and can't reach high throughputs, and it becomes tempting to reinvent X.25-like link retransmissions because radio acts too much like barbed-wire if you're not careful. Rain fade is a real problem - there are technologies that work really well in Phoenix that you simply can't sell to Microsoft because Seattle is too rainly.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Clearly RFC 1149 would be the best for this.
What's so impossible about free? What's so impossible about technological advancement without a monetary system? Why is it so hard for people to understand that money is just as ficticious as government? I can only guess that if you're born with your head in your ass that you'd think that's the way the world is and you'd carry on just so. There is no FREEdom without free. I guess we'll all carry on just so.
I remember when Slashdot used to be the voice of the fringe. Now, the only posts to get modded up are cynical, capitalistic, main stream horse leavings. That being said, I tend to agree with the cynical horses with the runs on this one. It would be nice if ubiquitous, FREE commo existed, however.
640k is more than anyone will ever need. - Microsoft why would any normal person want a computer in their home? - HP you want xerox to market a product called a "mouse"? - Xerox well i don't see a problem with that, all the money is in the hardware anyway, not this "software" stuff - IBM
scott king
Without the local phone loop provider or the wireless provider, these devices that are gaining popularity wouldn't even exist. These technology firms are developing technology and getting phone monopoly contracts to pay for the manufacturing. So.. lets get it for free? Considering the telco's eat most of the cost of that $500 phone you paid $20/month for, it makes more sense for a company to develop products for a telco, then people. people are cheap, i wouldn't pay $500 for a lower grade of service.
I looked into something like this about a decade ago. The application was game consoles. The idea was that all the game consoles in a neighborhood would form into a wireless network, and you'd have a LAN party with your neighbors. The numbers didn't work.
A related idea is legal pirate radio, where each boom box nets with other boom boxes, covering an entire inner-city area. That suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem - you have to deploy lots of units before it works. And battery-powered relay units are a pain - you eat batteries just staying on the net.
In Australia at least, anyone wanting to be considered eligble under the law as a telco provider needs to be able to guarantee connection for phone calls to emergency services.
I know this is has presented itself for wireless networks seeking official blessing and the freedom to carry certain kinds of traffic legally.
Generally, ad-hoc networks can't (at least not without major investment) deliver this fundamental.
I for one think this requirement is a good reason to keep telcos - Sorry, no route to host errors when you need an ambulance would not be fun.
"but at some point any joule of electrical energy has to be produced somewhere, and that costs significant cash."
His post is an example of focusing on the wrong problem. The middle in a lot of models is relatively cheap. It's the endpoints that cost. Now to the main subject at hand. How about quantum entanglement as links? All the "link" issues go away. And one only has to worry about the cost of the end-points.
Unless linksys can come up with T3 links for 49.99, I doubt anything like this will ever work. If it works with current consumer technologies, then you can kiss your 100K+ downloads goodbye.
Even if you have multiple paths, it will be way too slow.
And to answer your question about ISP's and Telco. Yes we need them, or at least we need silly people with cash. Why are a lot of telco's now owning backbones? They have 1 word in mind: VoIP. If they weren't owning the backbones, I bet we'd be counting their days right now. They made a wise move.
-- Leeeter than leet
I ask a simple question in the hopes of stimulating some debate. You people are so closed minded. Well, you live an learn. You won't be hearing more from me on slashdot after this post. (are those cheers I hear?!)
Thank you to everyone who answered with reasonable answers either for or against. Before I go I'll answer some of the points people raised.
Land Lines & Infrastructure
I am talking about a wireless network with no central infrastructure, no land lines, just peer devices.
The initial costs of a centralised netowrk are huge. Do you think that operators are going to continue to roll out huge networks after the fiasco that was 3G? (and regular broadband/cable TV in many areas). I think we'll wait a long time before we see those kind of investment by any central organisation again.
The total costs of a distributed network are even more huge. However the cost is spread among whoever wants to pay for their devices. See that FAX story on slashdot from a while ago for an analogy.
Free as in ... peer?
I don't want the infrastructure or services I need for free.
I am not a freeloader or pirate. I am quite willing to pay for my equipment. I just want it to be subscriptionless. The cost of the network is built into the the device and whatever it costs in electricity (at least until I fine tune the cold fusion process & matter replicator that I've been working on that is). If this means $50bn devices as someone mentioned, then so be it ;) Technology prices come down all the time though. How much is an ethernet card today compared to when it first arrived?
Let me ask a question, do you pay a subscription for a bluetooth PAN? For WiFi in your home? Why not? Are you ripping someone off by not doing so? Why not extend the metaphor to communities, or towns, or cities, or the world? I am quite aware that there are problems of scale and many others which was why I asked the question. I wanted to see what you all thought could be potential solutions. Seems you'd mostly prefer to take cheap shots or try to look cool or whatever.
I don't expect to connect to existing networks like the internet, GSM, POTS etc. for free. They are largely owned by private operators and if you want to connect to them they are going to charge you for that privelege. However if you have a no-subscription network out there then maybe web sites, and all those other services that appear on communication networks would start to appear on it, or even migrate exclusively to it.
Spectrum saturation & interference
I don't know enough about about spectrum to answer this myself, so I'll point you at this GnuRadio: MeshNetworks and also this slashdot story The Myth of Radio Spectrum Interference which was featured on slashdot a while ago, and ask it it just BS? They seem to me to be saying that the more nodes in a wireless network, the greater the bandwidth.
Battery life:
This is a problem that is going to take a long time to solve unless there are some major breakthroughs in battery technology. I have no suggestions.
Routing:
Difficult? For sure, but impossible?
You don't have to use IP you know. It's not the internet. I think that it is going to be possible for devices to route to others. I'm not saying it's easy but surely not impossible to at least get a "good enough" algorighm?
I recall reading somewhere about a routing algorithm that was modeled on ant's behaviour to achieve good enough shortest path finding. Is there no scope within this or other areas of research to make advances? Here's a link to one similar paper I found now just to proove I'm not hallucinating: http://www.computer.org/proceedings/icppw/1680/168 00079abs.htm . Use g
2) Now, let's add a couple hundred gigs to each node for caching. This will absolutely not take care of any initial requests, but it will allow data to flow across the net like synapses. And once a few requests have gone out and the data begins to flow toward the source, those further requests would have multiple routes to the data in increasingly localized cache stores.
Yeah, there's a lot of if in there, but so what? There's also a lot of effort going into p2p routing issues and it's not at all unreasonable to expect some significant advances in mesh and swarm routing structures. In fact, I would argue this type of technology is the next natural step in the evolution of the 'net.
if you pull real hard, does it fall onto your house?
I'm a believer - give me the koolaid!
And it's already there: IP
Sure, it's there ... but nothing like a little peer preasure(eg mesh networks) to get the giants to play nicely - at least on it's perimeter.
And I think Time Warner is almost to A...they're testing IP phones that are damn good
interesting aint it? i'm considering biz class cable service (web/tv/phone when I can) in lieu of a colo of a couple servers and may share the connection with my neighbors with my 40 foot antenna. <notetoself>wonder if cable will mind?</notetoself>I'm gonna run Only Unpatched MS stuff too,...muhaaaaaaaa.
paul
my other sig sucks less
Wow. Slashdot has really lost it. I have never been more ashamed of crap moderation in any thread I can remember. This is a great question and it deserves a serious answer. None of the parents of this post have said a single usefull thing.
Boo-Hiss to the idiots who posted all of the ancestor posts above this one. Double boo-hiss to the idiots who moderated this article. As I post this, all four ancestors of my reply are +5 posts, none of which has ANY FUCKING MERIT AT ALL.
"Yeah, I want everything for free too. Give me a break." -- Sorry, not funny. Not interesting. Should be (-1 TROLL)
"I'm glad it's free to run giant fiber optic cables across the ocean." -- Sorry the question is not about running fiber across the ocean. It's about high density peer-to-peer WIRELESS networks and more specifically what the barriers are that need to be overcome to achieve it. Should be (0 Offtopic)
"Basically what the guy wants is nationalization of all telcos, so that your taxes pay for everything." -- Should be (-2 YOU ARE ON CRACK) The guy said he wanted TO ELIMINATE THE NEED FOR TELCOS, not socialize them. Wow, that is a moronic post.
"And of course, the upkeep costs on lines that are already there" -- I'll be kind (0 Offtopic) It's about the potential for WIRELESS peer-to-peer networks to allow people to unplug themselves from these upkeep costs.
Well, except for the fact that the artificially high price of stamps due to a legal monopoly on letter carrying constitutes a type of tax.
Great Question. As I said above Boo-Hiss to the early responses and moderation. I'll try a serious answer.
The technological barriers are:
1) Wireless equipment cost -- it has to come down by a factor of 10 or 20 so that ordinary people can afford to solve their own personal connectivity problems by direct personal action. The range and bandwidth per dollar have to imporve. Mass production of cheep roof-based antenae and other WiFi gear needs to happen. When you can get a 1 mile range for $30, this will take off.
2) Routing protocols -- TCP/IP probably wont work because there will be too many hops and it is too hard to administrate. The network topology will be an order of magnitude more complicated. TCP/IP doesn't deal well with ad-hoc roaming connectivity. Rest assured some really smart people are working on these problems.
3) Making the technology user-friendly and turnkey. Joe sixpack isn't going to want to look at a linux prompt to administrate his peer-to-peer router.
4) New application protocols -- if you throw out TCP/IP to deal with adhoc roaming P2P, you have to rethink everything that rides on top of it: DNS, EMAIL, HTTP, etc... Consider something as simple as establishing your default gateway. What if it wanders out of range?
The geographic isolation problem is directly a function of cost, range, and popularity. Keep in mind that in rural settings, people generally don't have cable or DSL anyway, so the pressure is even greater to find a high bandwidth solution. People were willing to put antenaes on their roofs to get TV -- I'd exect they'd do it for free broadband too. It's a simple matter of making it affordable to use repeaters when necessary.
The political barriers are IMHO the most likely to kill this. AT&T, Sprint, WorldCom etc simply don't want people to obsolete them. You think the RIAA and MPAA are a formidable lobby? Try the telcos. They would attack the uncontrollability of such networks. How do you stop child porn on a P2P wireless network? How do you stop copyright infringement? How do you wiretap terrorists and organized crime when there are no wires?
The economic barriers for deployment are pretty straight forward: equipment cost, range, and bandwidth. But the real question is how do you deal with malicious behavior by network participants? I imagine that trust networks problems have to be solved. How do you avoid the tradgedy of the commons (ie bandwidth hogs). Spam will still be a problem.
This is a great question. I'm for this: Nay, as soon as we can.
The barriers are financial. (READ AS: greed $$)
"Waitress I need two more boat-drinks..."
Ricochet's approach will probably end up being the sensible one - telcos go away, but ISPs do not, unless all you want is to talk over the local mesh to a machine in the same town.
Don't worry about the politics. Buggy-whip makers may well have been politically powerful, and likewise typewriter-makers and telegraph companies. No politics on earth will keep a technologically unnecesary industry solvent, unless they find a way to profit from the tech that's replacing them. Ask the RIAA. (Or for that matter, IBM, who used to be big in typewriters).
More importantly, when routing and participating in "the mesh" is in your best interest, why would you want to "opt out?" If your box isn't participating in the routing of information then the cache to your node will always be lagging - why would you want that? And there would surely be a means of identifying nodes that were in need of repair, and a node that wasn't routing traffic would, in such a system, be identified as "faulty." Given that such a mesh could also serve as a means of helping preserve anonymity, why would you want to draw attention to yourself by intentionally operating a faulty node?
It may take 2 days to get a DNS routed across the globe, but there aren't a few hundred million DNS servers sharing that information through multiply redundant connections, either.
Keep in mind I'm not arguing that we don't need any worldwide infrastructure - but I am making the argument that most of what we rely on locally (the "last 10 miles") could be done with meshes and collective data pooling agreements. Until just a few years ago our own phone company was still operating as a co-op, and there are hundreds of power co-ops operating across the country to this day. Our water is a community operated co-op and, except for occasional outages when the power to the pump fails, it works just fine. No reason at all a communications infrastructure couldn't be run the same way. Communities would get a valuable resource, and some unemployed IT workers would get a means of contributing to their community while earning a reasonable living.
What's really in the way? figuring a more efficient use of limited bandwith on the usable radio frequencies. (Imagine hooking everybody up to one hub, think of how many collisions you would have.)
73
KG4WWN
PS I'm writing this at 3AM, hope it is coherent in the morning.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
You have obviously no clue how networks or routing work. You probably never heard the words "congestion", "traffic engineering" and "quality of service".
Fucking Clueless Idiot Information Services (inc)
Subspace Radio!... Maybe even Improbability Transcievers! Yeah that's the ticket! In every home.
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
Good management and policy by the FCC would allow in the near future many solutions.
However, donâ(TM)t expect â¦, do expect anti-competitive freq-hogging by telcos to keep control of local market.
In the near future, it should be possible to provide 100% wireless voice, data, TV, ⦠multiple carriers/providers over the most populated areas. Allowing the customers to swap (totally, 100%) providers/services for QoS or cost reasons. I look forward to getting rid of the wires in the house and the local-bell. The USA Government and businesses are not in the lead on these technology sectors.
PLEASE, check out these technology concepts: http://www.airship.com
REVOLUTIONARY AEROSPACE SOLUTIONS FOR TRANSPORT AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
There are other companies around the world (Europe) moving in this direction.
Take a look at http://www.cargolifter.com/2002/repository/splash_ e.html
Take a look at http://www.aiaa.org/images/about/01_TC_Highlights/ aiaa-lta.pdf
Take a look at http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/systems/haa.h tm
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
How'd you expect to backhaul large amounts of traffic via an ad-hoc, peer-to-peer, network? Cross the oceans? Who fixes problems? Who manages allocations (addresses and such)? Who provides support?
C'mon, *think*.
i believe that authark ip networks have to come and have to be developed since the networks of the major
....
...
companies are getting more and more unreliable....
unreliable in terms of security, privacy and prices
is ist paranoid to say, that most of the ip traffic in public nets is sniffed by gov. agencies?
is it crazy to draw an image, where in the near future only the one who have big money can use high-bandwith net access?
so for me there is a strong need to build up authark network
and at this point everybody can take response for e.g. environmental issues, how much electricity does it take ( the authark model applies for power supply methods as well) and so on...
there are examples from the economy field e.g. in south america, where the productivity and the benefit for the workers increases when a company is taken over by the workers themselves! (burkman factory in venezuela i think..)
so for me there is a big need to get authark
this goes for living, producing, communication and so on !
this is no utopist-whishes but plain reality and plain nesicity (exc. my english)
and it is a step that is taken by more and more ppl. i btw. live in a mostly authark community of 150 ppl. in portugal - the thing that is not athark is the internetaccess...
movint towards the new century - full on
Hi all,
This is a great debate. The more of this the better. I've working in Telecoms for 10 years as a Professional Engineer. As mentioned before wireless for long distance links is probably not the best mechanism as delays are introduced and Satellites are not cheap either. Anyhow this is where the lowest per mile costs and Carriers are regularly selling below cost here.
As most of you probably know its your last mile and intra state costs that are artificially high. Its actually very cheap to install fibre cable in pre ducted areas. The main expense is actually at the property boundary, getting into your house. This is where Wireless could definitely be used. Its probably very practical at the local distribution cabinet near your house.
Why doesnt this happen then? Your local authority probably subsidises the incumbent telco by providing very low cost rent for their cable space in the street verge. Also the authority does not provide a common infrastructure that could be used by all. This results in the spaghetti mess that exists in the larger cities. Your incumbent is desparate to control your access the only way to break this is some form of petition to end their tyranny be separating the local loop from the state wide transmission system. This stops vertical monopolisation and would also allow wireless to take over the last mile while forcing down the state transmission prices to fall into line with the interstate and international prices.
Okay thats it from me. Flame away!
Gotta point out something. Why don't you get your electricity free? Because you're counting on somebody else to provide it. Now, you could have your roof coated with solar panels if you wanted. You'd still pay for the panels and the occational replacement and would be the one to take care of them. But energy itself would be free.
Similiarly, you could simply buy a Wireless Thing(tm) and sit in the atmosphere, transmitting and receiving, and relying on the free routing. Of course it would be slow (at first) and not very good with truly mobile things (for they demand electricity, which is hard to store in a portable form), but with proper self-made antennae 802.11b is already reaching 40kms and over.
How would the routing work? How about every node having a GPS receiver? Maybe the "DNS servers" (or whatever) would be regularly sending packets telling their geographical location (once an hour might be sufficient) and every device keeping track of a couple of the closest ones. The devices without "DNS server coverage" would simply ask the devices around it. With enough devices and decent range, everybody would get the coordinates at powerup. These "DNS servers" or "directory servers" would keep track of the geographical location of Big Stationary Server Machines like www.microsoft.com, which could be keeping track of mobile user devices the way NetMeeting or ICQ or whatever works (mapping user to changing IP address).
Now, what do I do when I send a packet? "Hey, this packet'd go to www.myserv.com at (56.26996N, 18.4537E)! That's east from me, so you there, east from me, route!"
Surely, with most houses networked (with stationary devices with 5km range and 100Mbps) would, well, ROCK. But, this is a simple scheme and some of you will do better.
Now for the wild part. How about throwing away the thick Atlantic cable and, sitting on the coast, simply SHOUT into the water in the US? A good microphone will still hear the sound on the European coast. Now, sound waves, even though they travel huge distances underwater, are not too effective at all, but, a possibility. Imagine a small lake with ppl sitting around it with their modems in the water.
Actually, this kind of thing is happening in the developing countries. They are networking rural areas with 802.11b tech, paying for the link to the Internet and the devices, of course, but, getting communication inside the rural networks for free (sometimes even with electricity coming from their local solar/wind/water generators).
This kind of thing will probably have its place. The REAL question is, do you want to pay someone for providing a steady link or do you want to do-it-yourself? The western economy is pro-paying-someone-else, in many things, but it doesn't have to be so. Think of radio amateurs, who do "free communications", although on a very small scale. But, their equipment is constantly getting better.
However...
Hail the visioneers!
Caveat Emptor: this message won't selfdestruct if you memorize it!
Unless someone gets me an 802.11 wifi card that can do peer-to-peer between Hawaii and the mainland.
On a second thought, if I get such a card, I can start my own telco business...
Amuter (packet)radio allows people to communicate long distances free of telecoms charges (ok there are licensing charges). However so few people actually know enough about it to get it going that its hardly the most popular (or easiest) way of communicating.
If such a system where built I could see it becoming similar, a handful of ethusiastic geeks might use it, however this isn't enough critical mass to even form cross county/region/state networks given the limited range of wireless LANs. This sort of thing already happens on a short range basis (although not many people seem to be using mesh networks yet) but its just impractical to be a general purprose internet system.
You can already download a Linux distro which does Mesh networking from www.locustworld.com
The guy developing it will soon be or already has implemented tunneling so you can contact another mesh network by tunneling through the Internet.
The system has been used by quite a few community projects to provide broadband.
What you're suggesting might work OK for e-mail or text messaging but it seems to me that most of the information people would want to access using this network would not be distributed.
Currently I think that most of the data most people want to access is held in large datacenters with very big connections to the world at large. I don't see how companies, individuals would be able to distribute this data evenly throughout the network which would either require a far greater number of wireless equipped 'nodes' to be camped on their doorstep to handle the large volume of traffic to the site or some kind of dedicated ( costing the company money ) route to get their data out to the world. If the company has to pay to for this it will be the users who end up picking up the cost and things will not be free for very long.
The technical problem however how to make this happen has not matured at all. Sure quite a few ideas have been implemented, but none of them work that good that they have found universal acceptance. The MeshAp network for instance, though quite mature, can not do hops of more than a few nodes, let alone span the whole island, continent or world. It just has not happened.
There is are only a few networks that are similar to this, ie no subscription costs, ad hoc etc, and that's word of mouth and infectious diseases. Word of mouth routing is horrible and has a very low propagation speed and reliability. Infectious diseases are even slower, but have a higher message reliability if you encode your message in the virus.
just my 0.02 EUR
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
We could all just shout our messages, everyone within hearing would shout any messages they heard. If there was no-one within hearing range - i.e. you couldn't hear your message being shouted back at you you would simply continue shouting all your messages until such a time as you did get a response. Also you wouldn't reply to any messages you had shouted so this would result in a situation on plane journeys etc where a few people would spend the entire flight shouting messages. Of course for digital messages you'd need to shout out a string of 0's and 1's and develop some kind of voice to digital convertor ( and vice a versa ) to get them back into the computer Can anyone see any reasons why this wouldn't be brilliant and work brilliantly?
Due to service gaps isolating cities from the uber-network this will just not work.
It could be a good idea for 'last mile' though. Telcos and ISPs could charge less because they don't need to pay for the last mile infrastructure.
Hard to believe that a question devoid of basic Economics 101 would appear on Slashdot.
You're new here, aren't you?
Black holes are where God divided by zero
From the average user's point of view, telcos might look not-so-useful. This view can only be explained by the user's total ignorance of what happens behind the scenes.
What you are suggesting sounds good for a small community of users, and then again there would be plenty of restrictions that would make it not practical at all.
You pay your communications because there are costs associated with it. It's the same way with other utilities. Why would it be different?
May I suggest that you visit the local operations of a telco. You will notice the hundres of people working there, the terabyte of storage, the hundreds of UNIX servers running at high load, the thousands of transmissions links, fiberoptics, radios, etc. The rooms filled with batteries for backup power. The vast rooms filled with gear you don't even know exist.
Nice idea, good utopia, but not likely soon.
Just my opinion after 10 years of working for telcos.
Wireless self configuring networks might work in NYC or LA but the rest of flyover USA would require brain melting signal from lots of nodes. Where are the nodes to hop across the oceans for that world wide connection. Perhaps he would use Ariel's Blackberry? Bad karma is better than none.
WTF? is that a troll? I usually don't feed the trolls, but here goes. The usps is the least expensive delivery service in the world. $0.37 to take a letter accross the damn continent? You call that expensive? What kind of republican crack are you smoking? to Hawaii? Alaska? $0.37!
A monopoly? What country are you livin' in? Youve never used FedEx? You've never sent something by UPS? AirbornExpress? Quit shootin' that smack, you little fascist wh*re, and choose your fights more carefully.
Hell, it cost more than twice that in little countries like France and Germany.
Get off your "Privatize Everything" kick and use reason. Even if the cost of first class pstage went up to $0.50 for a standard letter, the USPS would still be less expensive than the competition.
Read, L
ha! i got it ! ;) global data transmission through the ionosphere!
...
we can use ExtremeLowFrequency transmitters for 100%
free and really not dangerous
ha - what about that one..
i believe that there exist plans for such devices in
the notes of nicola tesla
could someone hack the fbi san and get them please?
The Ansible!
I wonder what's next... free porn?
Heck, I'd like free service too. Can I have free electric, water, and natural gas as well? How about free gasoline for my car -- let's not stop there, how about a free car -- of my choice, of course.
The problem is that somewhere, somebody's got to pay for the equipment and the upkeep. Right now, that's covered by the fees we pay to our internet, cell, and land-line providers. When we quit paying, they no longer have any incentive to continue our service.
Sean.
An interesting analogy that might be usefull would be to apply an on-line learning method, specifically say, Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO), this could be tweaked to give a low reinforcement to those that don't share, and a high reinforcement to those nodes that have a fast through-put.
For example, give priority to those messages that come from nodes with a high reinforcement (ie that share and are fast), as compared to those that don't, like spamers.
It's copyright infringement, not stealing.
And it isn't always copyright infringement. I just downloaded about 30 live songs by the band Clutch. It was from their website. They encourage tape-trading, and let people tape their live shows. I also download music from other artists who don't live under the RIAA house-of-rules. You need to realize that "downloading music" isn't always copyright infringement.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
and have EVERYONE leave their computers on 24/7. MOST people turn off the computer when they are done using it, and rightly so. To leave it running is waste of electricity. For a wireless, always on, network to work in the way described, people would, by and large, need to leave their system up and running all the time.
SOME of us do this, particularly a SUBSET of broadband users. In any case, to ignore the power consumption issue required on an individual level, there would have to be some encryption used - otherwise, I am not interested in passing my phone and computer traffic through everyone else's computer for them to sniff. My phonecalls are MY phonecalls (private). My email and web serfing is private (to a certain extent...particularly if I am using an anonymizer or JAP (java anonymous proxy)). I most assuredly do NOT want EVERY clown with a computer to have access to my data traffic.
Give me a set of nice, centralized points of access across the country, on microwave towers, with the mesh network stuff in areas where the tower APs can't reach and I could see that. You would STILL need someone to pay somewhere for access to the internet on wire because you are not going to be browsing overseas websites on a mesh network. There's that pesky Atlantic and Pacific ocean to contend with.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
This is the most ontopic post yet, explaining why this is not really a viable option for the next however long. Not until we have WiFi that can be used from great distances allowing everyone to commit to a central hub as it were. P2P really is too unstable to be used as a sole means of connectivity.
So as I say, maybe it wasn't a totally dumb question, but in there is the best answer seen.
If everything was run commie-style, then we'd all go back on low-bandwidth. All of us.
Post a link on Slashdot, kill the System.
See what kind of ideas fester when you suggested that one could use Pringles cans for Yagi's...?
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Calm down.
inhale, exhale. now look at the data:
The proper comparison for prices is not other goverment run post offices - goverments are famous for transferring costs and fuzzy numbers.
The proper basis for comparison is companies operating under the same conditions:
The American Letter Mail Company, founded by Lysander Spooner, undercut the USPS prices. Their response was to make it a crime to compete with them. In 1845 the USPS was granted a monopoly on the delivery of mail.
More recently, 1976, an employee of the PO realized that dated financial research papers are periodicals, and exempt from the monopoly - that part of the business has abandoned the USPS like rats on a sinking ship.
(http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=598)
Would privitization improve postal service? well, what do you think they are so afraid of?
Honestly, people here need to chill out on this one. The guy wasn't asking "I want what I've got now, but for free!! How can we do that?" He was thinking a ways into the future of wireless, and wondering what challenges we would face with an ad-hoc pervasive wireless mesh network model.
The concept is very interesting, and the questions he asked were reasonable. What would we come up against, and how might be solve it? What would such a network look like? And instead of switching into "long term what-if" mode, you all just told him he was a 13-year-old kid who wants everything for free, and he's a moron.
If the concept is so stupid, why are there mesh network projects right now? People are actually out there designing the first steps of what this guy is asking, and when we see stories about them, the community here thinks it's the coolest thing ever. But when then guy basically asks about a future in that direction, you rip into him.
So... geez, chill out. Open the mind a little, spend some time thinking about things that may seem absurd at first glance. Even after hashing through it a little in your head, it may STILL be absurd, but there may be some nifty concepts related to it, or some interesting ideas that might give insight to one of today's problems.
Blasting the dude and the question as a knee-jerk reaction doesn't get anybody anywhere, and only shows your own small-mindedness.
Doug
Please don't be discouraged by idiotic replies.
The basic idea of a short-hop forwarded wireless network is excellent, and arguably even essential for the continued health of the Internet. It calls for peer co-operation by individuals of the same sort that was applied by universities and research institutions when the Internet broke loose from ARPANet.
Everyone interested in this topic should read Kevin Werbach's Open Spectrum proposal, which has already been posted on Slashdot.
The network design and implementation problems are surely soluble, but haven't been thoroughly addressed yet. The key problem is how to start a deployment. It requires some critical mass of users to create a local system that provides a model for further deployment. Here's a possible scenario:
- A volunteer local wireless network using fixed-station point-to-point communications implements a more general protocol suitable for mobile stations.
- A few public-minded geeks slip an implementation of the protocol into the system for a hand-held computer. It doesn't need to be the most popular hand-held, it just needs to have a sufficient following to get noticed.
- Other local wireless network organizations copy the method, including amateur groups, universities, and businesses that use it to attract customers to buy other goods and services.
It doesn't matter how fast such a thing spreads, and it can be very valuable even if it doesn't completetly replace more concentrated connections.Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
You really think society can work without money? Then why the hell was it even invented 3000+ years ago?
I don't know what the hell you do, but I go to work each day because my paychecks keep clearing. That's good for me because it lets me get a place to live and food to eat in exchange for my having worked for a company that doesn't give me either. In fact, a company that makes stuff that only other companies want to have. My landlord doesn't want what I produce. Neither does the grocery store. But someone does, and they give my company money for it, and my company gives money to me, and I give money to everyone else who has stuff that I need.
You think there's going to be some kind of utopia where I go to the grocery store, and they just give me food because I "deserve" it, and the farmers and crop pickers keep busting their ass and gave their food to the grocery store because they felt like it? Hell no.
This idea of public right-of-way on the Net is so compelling and obvious to SBC that their paid lobbyists convinced Texas legislators to make it illegal. It is now against state law for any village, town or city in Texas to participate in such a plan to provide publicly supported access regardless of what the local voters want and are willing to pay for. I've read this has happened in some other states as well. If it's such an impossible pie-in-the-sky idea, why are the dinosaur telcos already paying legislators to kill the possibility?
I found this question very interesting and I've been dismayed by all the naysaying. To be fair, though, there are serious objection to this proposal. One of the big objections is the problem of routing. Let me think out loud for a minute about geographic based routing.
Let me start by saying I want to figure out an ad hoc p2p routing protocol for use in the lower 48 contiguous United States. We can think about the rest of the world later. For starters, let's use zip codes. I'm thinking of a routing protocol that is extremely easy to configure. All you do is enter your zip code.
Each nodes within a zip code area has a routing table to all other nodes in within that zip code (ouch, we may need to break that up a bit, maybe use Long and Lat instead?). Each node also maintains a list of available nodes in adjacent zip code areas. This routing within a zip code could be done with standard OSPF.
The routing protocol would be geographically-aware. If I need to send packets to the other side of the States, the routing protocol would be smart enough to send the packets in a beeline from my zip code to the destination zip code. Once the packets arrive anywhere within that zip code, that node can forward them on to the destination node.
Something along those lines seems to solve the routing problem and also help the latency problem. Another thing that can be done to help latency is to have every node also be a caching proxy. Ah, but this doesn't do anything for real-time latency problems like you would have with VoIP. Perhaps for VoIP the solution would be to build in virtual circuit support into the routing protocol.
Are we so far away from this being possible? All that would be needed is long range, high speed wireless. I'm looking to buy a new computer that will probably end up having an average CPU utilitization of less than 5%, leaving plenty there for spanning tree algorithms, routing, etc. It will probably have something like a 120GB hard drive, 100GB of which I would gladly offer up for use as a cache.
Another point about financial feasibility. Since we're daydreaming here, why not combine this idea with the idea of Grid Computing. The point being that a company might buy you the wireless transmitter and any specialized equipment you might need to use for your computer in order to set up a decentralized grid to do high performance computing. In turn, you let them use a fraction of your CPU time. There might even be a business model where you get paid to turn your computer into a wireless router in this scenario. If enough people bite to reach a critical mass, you could have your wireless dream. Then people might be willing to buy the equipment themselves because they hear from their "connected" friends that they have essentially unlimited bandwidth and free long distance, etc.
Of course, I've overlooked several things, like trans-oceanic communications, but perhaps those can be overcome as well.
To paraphrase PJ O'Rourke: if you think internet connections are expensive now, wait until you see what they cost when they're free. Reminds me of the debate on socialized medice...
Are you telling me that if I were to offer to pick up a letter at a residence, and deliver it to another residence for a fee, I would be breaking the law?
What law? (statute and title, please.)
AFAIK, if you wanted to deliver letters, parcels, or postcards, you could start tommorrow, even today, depending on the time at your location.
As it stands now, our privacy is quite well protected in the mail, and the Fourth Amendment has been applied to the mails, preventing government officials from inspecting articles of mail without a warrant. There is no such protection applied to private delivery services.
The privatisation lobby is often misled into thinking that private companies are concerned for our rights, and they disregard the fact that the Intellegence Community often uses private companies to snoop, harass, and other dirty work whenever the constitution gets in the way of thier plans. Remember Iran-Contra ? Do alittle googling on the CIA and thier private contractors, you'll be amazed at what you find.
It's not quite so simple as private=good, government=bad.
Read, L
The question "why can't this be done?" was only the last part of the question. It was how can this be done specifically without stealing from and existing service i.e. piggy-backing on someone's paid for DSL. We all know about how business and govt tries to stand in the way of progress if they have an existing cash flow structure. So I find the repetitive naysaying and "you are stupid to even ask" posts to be part of the problem. It's answering the creative difficult side of the question where progress comes from. Speculation even daydreaming about what could be done to make some of these things possible is more productive than just bah humbuging around. How many things have been invented because of someone took somone elses flight of fancy and said "wait a minute that might just work". Sure many of those failed as well but without asking the question you will never find the answer. Now to be part of the solution I'll throw out one suggestion for one of the issues. Someone mentioned everyone would just hack their cell to not recieve routed calls. If we had a standard protocol and an organization to maintain (even an open source project) that portocol. Couldn't part of the protocol be that altered phones wouldn't be able to participate in the network because of some kind of built-in verification system? Not to say this would be easy to implement and I'm sure there are x number of roadblocks to this but in theory it could be done.
FOR WIRELESS FIDONET!
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Ultra Wideband wireless communications is suppose to achieve .
.
2 .p df
:
2 4. html
.
.
:
100 Mbps and up speeds, and use far less power than its
predecessors
Here is one vendor of Ultra Wide band products
http://www.timedomain.com/Files/PDF/news/USNews
A deeper look into how deep the rabbit hoe goes
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200201
I enjoyed this story the most
These systems are already in use, and work well for the military
My favorite excerpt
UWB requires ultra-low power, often one ten thousandth as much as a cellphone, and because of that low power it is undetectable by conventional radios, looking to them just like very quiet noise.
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
the USPS is effectively subsidized, with the fact that they do not pay property taxes on tens of thousands of strategically located properties. In addition, the USPS has it's employees retirement system : FERS. Yeah, that stands for Federal Employee Retirement System. I busted my balls carrying for the USPS for over a year before i decided to do more rewarding work, but I converted my military time over to FERS---5 yrs worth of military time (you need to do 20 for a true military pension). So, I get a small FERS pension when i am an old man. Not subsidized??...you bet the USPS is.
And you call me a troll...
A couple things:
1) I'm not a Republican, Republicans often like regulation that has nothing to do with the legitimate functions of government ie protection of individual rights.
2) fasâcism n.1. (sometimes cap.)
a totalitarian governmental system led by a dictator and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism, militarism, and often racism.
Were this an accurate description of me, I would prefer governmental monopolies. It should be obvious that I don't. None of the other identifiers fit, either.
3) moânopâoâly n., pl. -lies
1. exclusive control of a commodity or service that makes possible the manipulation of prices.
2. the exclusive possession or control of something.
3. something that is the subject of such control, as a commodity or service.
4. a company or group that has such control.
5. the market condition that exists when there is only one seller.
4) US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 7: [The Congress shall have Power] To establish Post Offices and post Roads.
5) Section 8 pertains to powers granted specifically and solely to Congress. In other words, nobody but those specified by Congress can engage in postal business. The USPS is the only entity specified by Congress to engage in postal business.
6) The USPS employs inspectors to covertly monitor private parcel companies, fining them when certain classes (mostly letters) of mail are found to be delivered privately.
7) More information from the Government Accounting Office, here, here
8) I don't particularly care how bad other nations are. I'm not going to stop trying to make things better just because there are worse places. That's an attitude for pessimists or people looking for excuses to stick with the status quo.
Perhaps you'd like to ground your reasons in fact as detailed as I've provided, if you wish to defend your claims further, that is. You should try actually looking at the background details, especially the laws that govern mail. Try starting with the United States Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 83. It will provide information that you'll have trouble refuting, unless you happen to be a Senator or Congresscritter with sizable political clout. Well, you could do it if you control a majority of the Postal Commission, or the Justice Department.
18 USC Part I Chapter 83 Section 1696 - Private express for letters and packets
(a) Whoever establishes any private express for the conveyance of letters or packets, or in any manner causes or provides for the conveyance of the same by regular trips or at stated periods over any post route which is or may be established by law, or from any city, town, or place to any other city, town, or place, between which the mail is regularly carried, shall be fined not more than $500 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
This section shall not prohibit any person from receiving and delivering to the nearest post office, postal car, or other authorized depository for mail matter any mail matter properly stamped.
(b) Whoever transmits by private express or other unlawful means, or delivers to any agent thereof, or deposits at any appointed place, for the purpose of being so transmitted any letter or packet, shall be fined under this title.
(c) This chapter shall not prohibit the conveyance or transmission of letters or packets by private hands without compensation, or by special messenger employed for the particular occasion only. Whenever more than twenty-five such letters or packets are conveyed or transmitted by such special messenger, the requirements of section 601 of tit
Thanks for the lesson in humility.
I do like the fourth amendment protections that the USPS must abide by though. (at least they did before the Patriot Act.)
My fear is that privately run postal delivery would not be required to ensure the privacy of the mail, or to protect the delivery of certain mail from interference. A warrant to search the mail is notoriously difficult to come by, as it well should be. Private deliverers are free to inspect and report at will, just as ISPs are under no obligation to apply the Fourth Amendment to your internet communication. (My opinion is that ones internet packets should be afforded the same protections as ones mail.)
And no, I don't always take the "Democrats side" of an issue. I also believe in supporting the Second Amendment as well, although I do not own, or plan to possess, a firearm.
Read, L
Sorry if I got a little testy... :)
I'm not particularly trusting of private companies either, but the nice thing about dealing with private companies is that there is no compulsion to deal with them. Unless you want to go through a lot of hassle, try working without involving the IRS, or exiting or re-entering the country without Customs or the State Department.
Whenever you do things that involve a government entity, you're entering a measure of coercion into the equation. You can't get there from here without jumping through their hoops. You jump improperly, or try to avoid the hoops, you can land in some serious hot water. That's why, even without trusting private entities, I'd much prefer to do business with them. I can choose to walk away and do business with someone else if I don't like the way they deal, or I can start a competing business, and do things completely my way.
That's why privacy policies and independant certifications companies play an important role in a free market environment. If you truly think that a carrier is violating your privacy, move to another carrier. Just like you move your email to a secure provider if their security and privacy policies don't cut it for you. When there is a demand for secure transactions of any sort, there will become available a supply. That's simple economic law.
4th amendment protections do apply, when the person asking is a government official. If the ISP rolls over against their own policy, you use the legal recourse already in place for broken contracts: bring suit. I know that may sound like a cliché in this day and age of frivolous lawsuits, but that is what contract law is all about. The same applies to violations of contract involving purely private parties. But you get what you pay for, or do research for. Those who need or want increased privacy will pay for it with an investment of time and/or money. Now for the real cliché: Don't care, don't get none. But that's as it should be.
I actually wouldn't classify this as either right or left-wing politics. Both tend to support it because it is politically dangerous to oppose the largest semi-private (and yes, the Post Office is semi-private, much like the Federal Reserve Bank and Amtrak) corporation in the country.