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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.'"
Well, since this is an offical project and NOT students just stealing 'net access from the the campus, I think they'll at least give you warning. I mean, the equipment is offical university property. I doubt they'll just cut the cord on unsuspecting users....
Hmm... where have I heard this before?
Oh yeah, the internet
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....
How about smaller college campuses? Apartment buildings, maybe? Neighborhoods?
How about redundant rooftop connections between houses for data transfer? Take some of the existing bandwidth from the fiber running to the integrated SLIC in front of the neighborhood and then pump it out to the rooftops of subscribers
Greg Poirier -- Magic Fairy Bunny Princesses, Inc.
Not really.
Cell phones, for various reasons, are not a good use of this. Partly for security purposes. If your cell phone packets are transmitted (or worse internet packets) to other phones, they can be tapped and utilized. This can be secured, but requires that we implement yet another level of complexity, making it that much harder to secure.
Secondly, as someone else mentioned replying to this idea, battery life is an issue.
Other problems, such as frequency, multiple carriers, and even the tech used to broadcast the signal. If you do wireless, as I am sure many here do more competently than I, you know that there are many methods of dealing with non-line-of-sight situations. While using the phones themselves would be nice, they typically have far less power to transmit than a tower.
In a recent news story I heard from Neal Boortz, he mentioned a guy from France trying to row across the Atlantic. This guy capsized, and used his cell phone to call his mother, who then contacted the coast guard. He was about 100 miles of the coast of New England.
Comparitively, my brother (who actually owns a business installing cell equipment on towers), can hardly get cell service at our mother's place, which is in the boonies, yes, but within about a mile of several towers. The problem is hills, which interfere with you frenel zone.
As for using nodes like you talk about, this is actually true in some cities. If you live in New York, then I doubt you'll see too many "towers", but most cell equipment will be on a building.
Out in the country, the houses are too far apart to be useful (this is why WISPS have trouble out of the city too). Outside of the suburbs, using tech in this manner is not practical, and inside the burbs, towers are tall enough to actually hit most houses.
Great idea, but in the end not very practical or useful. Sorry.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Consequently overloading that node and causing the latter to fall off the mesh as well.
I think you're associating a wireless network a little too much with a power grid. Routing everything through one node won't cause it to "fall off the mesh" - it will just start dropping the excess packets. What do you think happens when you send a 100mbps stream of Ethernet packets to a 256k upload cable modem? Same thing. The connection speed of all nodes funneled through a single bottleneck would merely suffer somewhat.
Starting up the network (after a power outage, say) wouldn't necessarily need a certain order either. It just wouldn't reach full speed until all the critical nodes (ones with lots of links to other nodes) came up.
Sure, he's got net now, but he is effectively out one fireplace.
He could have just drilled a hole and run it up the side of the house. Jeebus.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
" Could this be the start of a true nationwide mesh network? "
Such a network would have horrible latency (just multiply the range of divide the distance by the 802.11 range and multiply this muberof hops by the latency through a node) and possibly bandwidth (depending on the mesh density and usage). It's useful as a last mile solution, but fiber is hard to beat for latency and bandwidth.
Vote for Pedro
>> ...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...
Sure, I can blame them. They stole the water. Morality isn't measured on a sliding scale that gives you a pass if you steal something that is both tempting and available. Your wife's grandparents, I think, displayed a lack of moral character.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Mesh networks aren't a dumb idea. It'd just be a dumb idea to design them to use the same scheme for local routing and distant routing. As long as you have the sense to tie together local meshes by some more effecient means to other local meshes it's a perfectly sensible design. Changing the basic layout of the Net in such a way may require changing some usage habits but it works just fine and with work like this going on will no doubt get better over time. In the future I think people will keep a lot more of their traffic in the local mesh which will help build local communities back up. You'll still use distant resources but you won't use distant resources for local uses nearly as often. Local news, chat, file sharing, etc will be handled within the local mesh. A good caching proxy server between the mesh and the Net will no doubt greatly reduce the wait for web, ftp, and similar resources frequently requested. I use a 1Gb proxy on my LAN and it slashes bandwidth use dramaticlly. I'd probably try something closer to 50-100Gb for a local mesh's proxy server.
The method I was playing with was WiFi for local meshes and microwave wireless for longer haul and finally normal old wired methods for crossing large distances (between cities).
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Ummm...one is about fixed wireless access points that the university installed to give wireless access using wired links and standard routing protocols to connect them all...one is about constantly changing static and (in the future) mobile nodes installed by users off campus whenever they feel like it and the routing protocol they are developing to make it work well.
There's a slight difference.
Well this post is a little old so you probably wont read this but, you are correct that the density of the mesh would severly decrece said issue. However the lightning damage risk will never be prevented. Without divuldging (sp?) into the cahotic flow theories behind electricity I will tell you that some serious testing must be done before I will be willing to attach my 3000 grand to a antenna. This is some rag tag group that is just stringing this equipment up on their roofs with what I am sure is little regard to testing and prevention of a $3000+ accident. It is a good Idea however the saftey of it all may need a little work
If I wanted easy I wouldnt be an engineer or a patriot.