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MIT Roofnet
prostoalex writes "MIT Technology Review runs a story about MIT Computer science students building their own mesh network for Internet access:
'A few weeks ago, MIT graduate student Shan Sinha canceled his broadband Internet service. Now his Net connection comes through the chimney. From a computer in the living room of his Cambridge, MA, apartment, a few blocks from the MIT campus, a cable goes into the fireplace up to the roof, where it is attached to an antenna. From there, data packets hop to another roof-mounted antenna at a nearby student's apartment. That way, from roof to roof in multiple hops, Sinha's data packets finally reach a gateway--a computer connected to the fixed Internet--at MIT's computer science building.'"
Sadly, Vancouver, BC does not show up on their connectivity map. Anyone wanna trade karma for an MIT scholarship?
Carousel is a lie!
sweet@!!! so own.
>
Hmm...what happens when MIT decides to turn off this point, though?
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
they net via Captin Packett.
I guess I can settle for 6'th though
Something distinct that people will remember better than my name
And on the front page, too.g What a sad state of affairs slashdot is.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Will roof-top pigeons be used to rank the packets according to relevance ?
getSexySig();
oh, thanks... (actually I was gonna go read the article & log in again & answer my own question so I could look smart but you beat me too it :-( . But that's ok)
Something distinct that people will remember better than my name
Is anyone expecting regular people to put up antennas before there's access? Who goes first? Even if many do, unless there's a critical number in a given area they'll be useless. There's not enough early adopters out there to make this work. And where are most people going to get a static access point in less than 300 hops?
It's cool, but I don't see what else can be done with it than make it a college toy.
But I am concerned as to the Santa friendliness of this chimney internet access. Will I still be able to get my presents if I access the internet this way.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
just by tossing a handful of bread crumbs at the MIT gateway's roof antenna?
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
How could the RIAA figure out who is who, and from what computer?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
...and yet I get internet access through an antenna directed at a local school, which in turn hops back to my father's office.
I guess I'm just not cool enough...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I do this in my neighborhood (albeit not on that scale...)
Just another excuse for yet another MIT story I suppose...
Could this be the start of a true nationwide mesh network?
I could imagine this spreading out farther and farther across Boston. The other colleges could add in some of their fat pipes. And with the way the east coast has become some kind of giant megalopolis, it could spread down into Providence, Hartford, New York, Philly, Baltimore, DC.
It'd be interesting to see how far we can grow a wireless grid network. What kind of latency would this kind of network have? Probably too high for gaming..
prolly woulda been cheaper just to string a whole bunch of cat5
Could a wireless mesh network such as this, then allow voice communication?
Say I wanted to call someone across town via a wifi phone, could I connect to the wifi network and have unlimited free phonecalls? I think that would be even more useful than the internet.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Those spunky MIT kids! They got moxy, I tell ya!
They should adapt the routing algorithm of this protocol.
A similar system could be used to extend the range of cellphone services. You wouldn't have to be near an actual tower, just near a wireless node that is near a tower. In fact, cellphones themselves could possibly be used as nodes in a computer system, communicating to the computers via bluetooth or a similar wireless standard.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
I like the idea of mesh networks. Its like GPL, only for your data.
I think the future of the net is like this: when every wireless device is a router - so you're almost never out of range, no matter where you are - simply the signal is sent to the nearest neighbour and then relayed to the next etc, till it reaches some fixed broadband access point, and then again "hops" over several people's cellphones, webpads, home PCs, car computers etc, till it reaches its destination.
:)
It's the future... but it's a far future
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Reminds me of a story from about 9 months back or so. A local University noticed strange power usage from one of their lines, and after tracing it down for awhile noticed that a house next to campus had somehow hooked up to the university power grid.... basically "free" power for the last twenty years or so. The beauty of it was that they denied knowing about as the house had changed owners and attributed not seeing a power bill to some strange reason... And along those same lines, my wife's grandparents live right next to a gold course and one of their neighbors got busted a few years back for tapping into their water lines and using them for their lawn. Can you really blame them on this one? one lawn is a drop in the bucket compared to a full golf course.... Internet, power, water... it is all good
So waht happens when the parents light a nice warm fire? Hehe, it's fiewire then.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
There has GOT to be enough geeks around the Lower Mainland to do this.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
The weather forecast for the area [ http://ma.weather-forecast.ws/cambridge ] predicts thunderstorms. I guess wireing the chimneys will make this project serve as a physics lesson as well as a Internet connection.
Zap!
Just in case anyone's wondering, yes, the professor Robert Morris mentioned in the article is in fact the same Robert Morris who wrote the 1988 Internet Worm.
The only thing I'd worry about here is whether or not you'd be opening yourself up to man in the middle attacks. I mean, WEP isn't THAT secure, and if you could get yourself between the last antenna and the computer center, you could conceivably get your hands on a lot of data....
Well what if there is a storm and a few of these nodes fall out. Then all the other nodes that hopped off that node will either fall off to or find another node to hop off. Consequently overloading that node and causing the latter to fall off the mesh as well. And so on and so on until the entire network cascades back to MIT. Then getting it back up will be a real pain because you cant all just fire your comps back up. It has to be done in some order so that you dont loose the whole thing again.
If I wanted easy I wouldnt be an engineer or a patriot.
My friend is a post-doc at MIT, and he installed Roofnet. Previously, he had been using a Wi-Fi connection that a neighbor was "sharing." The problem was that the signal was not very strong. Now, it's great! I used it to stream my iTunes collection from my PowerMac G4 in California, all the way to MIT, across Roofnet (via probably 3-4 jumps), to the roofnet router, which was connected to his G4 laptop; the laptop was set up as a wireless access point, and everything worked fine! The limiting factor was actually the upload speed of my DSL.
Anyways, it's a real-world technology that really works. It's still in it's infancy, and I'm sure it will move forward in fits (crackers & bandwidth hogs) and bursts (multiple, independent gateways to the internet). If this becomes easy to use & seamless, this could be technology that finally brings broadband to the masses, cheaply.
while it's a neat way to provide access to the internet, the most interesting part of it to me would be how you could use a network such as this to provide access to servers/services running on the local mesh. community broadcasting using streaming servers or local interest web pages and the like.
donno if anyone is thinking about it as yet, but wont this finally lead to users bypassing ISPs and Telcos ? if they start voice communication on such networks, will the comm industry sit back and watch? or is there something i am not getting here?
Apparently you've never worked for an institution.
Insititutions routinely cut something off and wait for the users to complain before finding another solution, if any at all, for them. Where I work at, we've been changing our IP address scheme from an older public IP scheme to a ten-net, and once we felt that we had sufficiently changed enough systems, we turned off the ability to route the old public ones through our WAN. We then waited for the users to call to complain about not getting internet access, fileserver access, or email, and then we would send someone out to fix it. Some of our older systems, Macintoshes running 7.5 or 7.6, required us to reinstall them with 9 in order to make stuff work right, and the users often lost data because they couldn't reach their network share to back up. It wasn't considered a big deal by administration.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
My friends and I always joked about doing something like this when we were in college. Of course we were brainstorming before wireless networking really emerged so we came up with some interesting ideas. Like stringing an Ethernet cable across the street, using power from a lamp post to power a repeater. Or a really expensive satellite hop to make it a few blocks away. Or maybe something with lasers...
We never actually tried anything since we figured the school wouldn't appreciate it. Just goes to show the benefits of going to a school like MIT instead of a liberal arts school.
The opinions expressed above are those off one side of my brain, the other side and my employer may not agree.
in other news, SCO articles are no longer the most popular articles on Slashdot for the first time in history. MIT articles now outnumber SCO 1337 to 1336
The professor in charge of the Roofnet project is Robert Morris. The article mentions that congestion on the mesh network is one thing they're working on. For some reason Professor Morris doesn't mention on his web page that he created the 1988 internet worm that brought the then (relatively) small internet to a near standstill, so he certainly knows something about network congestion.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
MIT k1d5 \/\/i11 r0x0r j00 80x0r
Something like this has been going on in London for absulutely ages. Check out the link Consume The Net
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
... but I live in Russia, Siberia (that's not MIT :)!!!) and we have all the city covered with radio ethernet so I don't exactly understand what's new here.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
I've been thinking of this type of network for sometime. However everyone here seems to be missing the whole picture. Each point would server both as an access point and a router for any traffic within it's range. In this type of networks infancy it would indeed need to connect to "the internet" but could do so not to only one point but many, each sharing it's bandwidth, however once you get enough of these points across a city, state, county and guess what! You ARE the internet. No longer would be the need for "cabled" internet access. And if you believe that radio transmissions have no limitation of bandwidth as outlined by David Reed (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/12/13202 11&mode=thread&tid=193) The internet wouldn't be something that you need to pay to jump on. It would be FREE access to anyone with the right hardware. Also, the implications of such a network would be very broad, including phone service (both traditional and Cell), Television radio etc. Since in the future every home and business would be an access point you would never be out of your cell phone coverage and your laptop would never be "disconnected" when leaving the office or home. Information access would be free and limited bandwidth for $50.00 a month would be something that future generations would find as alien as we do about not having indoor bathrooms.
This is just my 2 cents however... which means little or nothing.. And if you got this far, you must be really bored.
I am getting tired of this blatant advertising for MIT.
Please create a mit.slashdot.org section so I can filter this useless crap out.
The last paragraph raises the business issue that will inevitably try to stand in the way of this technology. "Most Internet service providers don't want their users sharing their bandwidth." No more than RIAA companies want you to hear any sound you haven't paid them for. The business mentality of getting everybody to buy their own everything is deeply entrenched in our economy. There is little incentive for business people to interest the public in sharing anything.
There used to be a TV commercial showing a guy effortlessly breezing through all his home painting chores with his new Wagner Power Painter. As he puts the thing away in his garage he yells at his forlorn, brush-wielding neighbor, "Get a Wagner!" I remember thinking, "You asshole. Let the poor guy borrow your freakin' spray painter." But that kind of behavior would be bad for business. A large chunk of our economy is based on unused Power Painters hanging on their hooks in the garage.
For community networks to catch on, someone is going to have to do some seed projects like Roofnet, that not only work technically in the real world but work business-ly in the REAL real world. I mean the world where somebody is formally, legally responsible for maintaining the Big Pipe between your local net and the Internet. The world of people who yell for lawyers because their service goes down, or is slow, or their specific oddball problem doesn't get fixed Right Now! The world of insurance issues, fee collection issues, disconnection and banning issues, tax issues, responsibilities, liabilities and so forth. In other words, it has to work in the steaming shitpile that the world outside of college often turns out to be.
Anyone want to scan the airwaves now for all the students passwords? Sounds like the perfect way to make it incredibly easy to hack everyone if you ask me.
requim
Who pays for the upstream connection?
:-(
It's all good and well if you can freeload off MIT's connection - kudos to the lads, neat idea, but what happens when MIT gets wise to the fact that their upstream is congested by "non-academic" traffic? Great while it's tolerated but...
Same situation if I decided to do a backhaul wi-fi mesh between myself and some colleagues - we live in line of sight of each other and one of the dudes has line of sight to the office. Supercool, let's shove an access point on the corporate network. all is great until someone notices that the upstream connection to the Net is hosed - thanks to the 37337 service I'm running from home... ass in a sling time again
trolling the first world...
Most people in farm country are at least half a mile from their nearest neighbor, averaging more like a mile between. Even if you can find a way to daisy chain the nodes with directional amplifiers, if a single node goes down, then everyone down the line drops off. This is not the kind of redundancy that puts the 'net in internet.
When the community does something for the benefit of everyone (at the expense of the bandwidth provider (usually a school or buisness)), next stop healthcare , free public transport etc etc
of course capitalism would make you pay for everything
they offer high speed internet. I hear it's coming to a McDonalds near you some time soon, too, possibly gas stations next.
"a cable goes into the fireplace up to the roof, where it is attached to an antenna."
Am I the only one who after reading that immediately thinks "what about lightning"?
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
If you read the link he was fined $10k, and had to do 400 hours community service.
This could be applied to the programable graphing calculators that most high school students (including me) use. Just build a wireless link and code some drivers for it?
this isn't new. jeezus people.
/.ers would be this - should such a technology be released GPL even if it means giving up hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts?
...enquiring minds want to know
stuff like this was out 4 years ago.
am I the only guy who keeps up on wireless technology?
theres ad hoc routing technology out there now thats not only 4 years old, its beyond 2nd and 3rd generation development.
unfortunately there's a problem. Its proprietary right now (read in patent cycle).
My question to
how do you balance those two things anyhow?
-ps- anyone wants to know about the lovely 4yr old technology that MIT is attempting to re-invent (yet again) you know where to find me...
In 1998, well before WiFi even existed we had a wireless setup in the ACT in Australia, with Antennas on people's roofs. Don't know if it is still running though. Why is it that if something gets done by MIT or Stanford students everyone assumes they're the first to do it? Maybe the quality of their education is so poor they need a little affirmative action.....
Okay - then we read...
To deploy the network quickly, the MIT group distributes free self-installation kits to students who want to participate in the project. For these students, getting the Roofnet node running is part of the fun. "Our antenna was put up by a friend of mine who does rock climbing," says graduate student Roshan Baliga, who lives in a two-story building with no easy roof access. "He scaled the side of the apartment to get to the roof, installed the antenna, and then rappelled down."
Hey, ever think of using a LADDER? And having the guy tack the cable to the side of the building instead, perhaps ALONGSIDE the chimney? Some people can be both clever and dipshitty at the same time.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
... why there seems to be little research on adapting this kind of technique to a new generation of radio transmission? We hear all the time about the shortage of radio frequencies. If such techniques can handle all the varied demands of Internet access, surely it would be possible to develop relay techniques for delivery of radio signals.
Sounds like packet radio, which HAM radio operators have been doing for over 20 years....
http://www.tapr.org/tapr/html/Fpktprm1.html
First they burn books, then they burn people.
This does strike me as a little old, since several campuses in Canada have wireless networks in place (occasionally less then complete). True, this sounds like is more about a mesh network among dorms and related housing projects, but the difference between that and your atypical wifi network among a group of distributed friedns seems, well, non-existant.
If I had my druthers, I'd push for useful wifi access for students in important places, beyond the libraries and study halls so commonly upgraded with such. Like the U of Alberta's SUB building, with wifi in the rooftop pub. Nice view, cheap suds, and thumping the technologically inclined members of the football team at Quake.
It's interesting, but I really have to wonder about the latency. I love my 802.11 link, but it's still slower than pluging in. And if the data has to go through a number of hops, I can't imagine that the latency will be very good. Really, I'd like to see the figures on the latency. It'd be nice to see a few tracert's with hop times at the very least.
I could see this being fine for web-browsing, e-mail etc. but I doubt it would be so nice for chatty protocols that are more sensitive to latency (online games, for example).
do you realize how much a ladder costs? and then theres the pain of hauling it when you move... try fitting it into your dinky 84 honda.
-
You could have four antennas on each farm that point to the nearest two farms in each direction, or you could have Internet connections at both ends of the chain, so that if you can't get it from one direction, you'd just use the second gateway. Or, you could combine both ideas.
If the four-antennas idea would be too costly, you could just install extra antennas wherever you experience frequent disconnects.
at st. mary's university (www.stmarytx.edu)... for all of two days till they told us to take it down. Oh well.
Wow, a MIT CS student reproduced something. This is news.
Dada ended art.
What will stop people from using WiFi for filesharing? WiFi will become its own internet.
And, yes, I know about the students at RIT (or was it RPI?). But that was still a high-profile public network where information was available to the RIAA. Keep it between you and your friends, and you don't have a lot to worry about.
Oh, yeah, and the RIAA doesn't really care, because your friends don't have enough music that they're really bothered. But how is this different than just sharing on a private LAN or using SneakerNet?
Lets say I'm CEO of a technology company and I release a new device that when you plug it into the wall or put a battery in it, suddenly you connect to the grid of WiFi and can download from anyone else connected to the grid. No IP addresses, no way to identify who is who, everything completely annonymous and secure.
This would be the RIAA's worse nightmare, because anyone will be able to buy this device instead of a radio, go on their computer and download this music through THIS device, get free telephone calls through THIS device, etc etc.
I admit, we arent there yet, the technology is still being developed, but once WiFi is wide spread, I'm guessing within 3 years or so, this is going to be an RIAA killer technology.
A private Lan, becomes a WAN, which becomes an internet. Here is how it could work. I could connect my whole apartment building to the grid through one big lan, which connects to the next apartment, and so on and so forth until every apartment is on the grid. People could use something secure like a modified version of waste on the software level, the network could start with thousands of people, which could increase to millions of people as college campuses connect to the grid in mass, each campus will be able to connect to each other, each person will be on the grid, and because its a grid it will know where everyone is via math formula instead of IP address.
This will be impossible to stop, or at least very difficult, the only thing to stop it could be weather or jamming devices if the RIAA comes up with some technology to do that. IF the data is encrypted there will be no way for anyone ot know whats being transfered.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
dude, chill. Its WATER... you know, that stuff that comes out of the sky... its mostly free anyway...if they didn't tap into the reserves of the golf course they'd have tapped into the reserves of the the planet by putting out a bucket or something...
First of all, some of you are saying "yea, so what, I did this...or consume.net has been around for a long time..." -- you don't get it. It's not a traditional 802.11b network. It's an advanced mesh network, with special routing protocols, etc. The software is available on sourceforge, go look.
What's the scalability of this thing? There are limits. I don't believe there is any way to make a single, nationwide mesh network. However there is nothing saying that you can't have multiple, partially overlapping mesh nets, arranged in cells like the cellular phone network. This is fun if you have more than one 802.11 card.
On latency: The average latency isn't bad. But like many statistics, that is deceiving. The latency is highly variable. Not so bad when you are using ssh as it would be when you are attempting to do telephony. Of course, the cheap-ass compression pushed on us by telcos in an effort to squeeze extra pennies out has made us used to this lag.
On robustness: This technology can tolerate the failure of a large number of nodes. The comment about being similar to NY power grid was very stupid, this isn't similar at all. However the current network architecture is not as robust as it could be, a look at the node map will show that the Internet gateway and most reachable node is located on top of one building, NE43 at MIT. In fact this building is slated for demolition, and the network will be rearranged for that reason. Though this routing technology is robust, the underlying 802.11 layer is not, it is way to easy to jam and otherwise attack. But simulataneously DoSing enough nodes to take down the network would be a difficult task.
Try. If Napster is liable for not taking enough steps to prevent piracy, surely you can be as well?
;-)
IANAL, but the RIAA argued that Napster's primary purpose was to facilitate piracy. The fact that they are probably legally correct, IMO, shows that the law needs to be changed, but I digress....
For them to hold you to the Napster standard, wouldn't they have to argue that the NAT's primary purpose was to facilitate piract rather than allow your five computers and everyone else on the internet access?
IMO, a more likely scenario would be for them to try to get the ISP to cancel your service arguing that you are costing the ISP unreasonable bandwidth costs. Most ISP's would probably do this because they have terms of service which might be able to be interpreted this way....
One more reason to use Speakeasy
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I was brainstorming, and I think the best way would be to strap antennas to the electrical poles every 1000 feet or so. The electrical lines are usually kept clear of brush and trees anyway, and they go to every house. Power is also convienently located. :) The only problems I can see is electrical interference from the power lines, and getting broadband out to the general area in the first place.
A British inventor called Jon Anderson did this in full scale quite some time ago.
/. too.
Have a look at http://www.locustworld.com. The software also can convert an old PC into a mesh-enabled gateway or repeater, as long as you use one of the supported wireless adapters and NIC's.
Yes, it's been mentioned several times on
-- From Denmark
I have speakeasy which encourages bandwidth sharing -- if you involve them on the billing, they will even supply the user with 1 IP and mailbox. The idea is to operate a wireless node and nearby neighbors can tap into near DSL speeds w/o the mondo hookup and per-month charges.
Problem is it's limited to neighbors within 100 or so yards. I keep thinking of how cool a community supported internet would be and the roof-top forwarding idea furthers that. With multiple nodes within range, if one goes down, dynamic routing should (in classic internet behavior) be able to route the packets around a dead node and connections could be fairly resiliant.
However. Even though I live in an area that sees lightning only a few times a year, it occasionally happens. Wouldn't lightning see those antennae as attractive points to strike? The distance in the computer between the antennae and some wire going to ground has to be near millimeters in some places -- i.e. zero, as far as lightning voltages are are concerned. Wouldn't lightening strike be a very real concern of such a system -- especially if you have 1 or more blocks of little lightning rods popping up beside chimneys (or somewhere on the roof).
How would one cost-effectively protect against such? Even if you managed to ground the antenna (which would seem counter productive to signal strength), the tiny gauge wire would seem likely to fry with any strike with a good chance of structural damage to anything in the vicinity. Am I just paranoid or is this something that is more and more likely to occur as #nodes increases -- installing a heavy 2-4 gauge wire next to the antennae that has to run to ground w/o touching a flammable structure (like your house) seems like it would significantly add to the cost of the setup. Any antennae experts out there?