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.'"

Comments

More links, and a serious offer

[Saint Aardvark]

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?

Re:More links, and a serious offer

[grub]

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

I've used the system, and it works great

[fname]

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.