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

Re:Scalability?

[quandrum]

Hmm... where have I heard this before?

Oh yeah, the internet

Cute, but is it secure?

[GrnArmadillo]

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....

Re:Sounds like a NYC black out waiting to happen

[cfallin]

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.