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MIT Roofnet

Posted by michael on from the can't-use-the-fireplace dept.

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.'"

10 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. More links, and a serious offer by Saint+Aardvark · · Score: 4, Informative
    More information can be found at the MIT Roofnet homepage, and The Grid Ad Hoc Networking Project homepage. Directions on how to get the software can be found here; looks like the software is being released under the MIT license (like the BSD license, but :%s/BSD/MIT/g).

    Sadly, Vancouver, BC does not show up on their connectivity map. Anyone wanna trade karma for an MIT scholarship?

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    1. Re:More links, and a serious offer by grub · · Score: 5, Informative


      Sadly, Vancouver, BC does not show up on their connectivity map.

      If you're at a university in Canada then you are likely running through CA*net4 anyhow. Think of "Internet2" in the US but fully optical with OC-192 speeds (10 Gb/sec) across most of Canada. (NB: We connect to it through work at Canada's National Research Council

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    2. Re:More links, and a serious offer by Captain+BooBoo · · Score: 3, Informative

      Very informative post. I have for a while considered opening my wireless network up to anyone who was in range to connect. This is a nice page listing all the free access points in and around Austin Texas

  2. Curious by egg+troll · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hmm...what happens when MIT decides to turn off this point, though?

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  3. I've used the system, and it works great by fname · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:The beginning of a true Mesh network? by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 2, Informative
    Linksys WAP11's and similar point-to-point wireless devices have latency up into 30-100 ms I think...

    Whenever I've measured latency in WiFi it has typically been under 0.5ms; latency can be much worse with poor reception due to retries. I can't comment on that particularly product since I haven't used it but I would be very surprised if it was that high.

    I don't have experience with this

    So where did you get the numbers from?

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  5. Consume the Net by BlackHawk-666 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Something like this has been going on in London for absulutely ages. Check out the link Consume The Net

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  6. Don't know about you guys... by sw155kn1f3 · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... 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.

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  7. Re:Scalability? by geekee · · Score: 2, Informative

    I believe companies are looking at similar strategies to provide internet access to those not covered by cable or DSL. I think they want to use 802.16, however. See an Intel white paper for more info. The routing stregies developed at MIT may be very applicable to this technology.

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  8. Re:Internet, power, water... it is all good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I think it was actually his wife's grandparents' neighbour.