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

Scalability?

[mark_space2001]

This is great for dense concentrations of geeks in places like a college campus. But what kind of applicability does this have elsewhere?

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.

Re:Scalability?

[fermion]

i think it might be economical for series of planned communities or farms in the middle of nowhere. Some thing like this could be set up easily as the houses are being built. No cables between the houses or into the neighborhood. Have redundant connection between several of the nearest houses.

An antennae on each house, a central receiving station in each neighborhood, and peering agreements between the neighborhoods. Maintenance and internet access could be handled through civic association fees. If the association can control paint color to keep property values up, good internet connections can be equally justified.

This could even work for rural folks who always are griping about lack of broadband. I know that when my father had a farm electricity was handled in such a cooperative manner. Line of sight would be an issue, but not an insurmountable one.

So if you run kazaa through something like this

[HanzoSan]

How could the RIAA figure out who is who, and from what computer?

big deal

[erik1474]

I do this in my neighborhood (albeit not on that scale...)

Just another excuse for yet another MIT story I suppose...

The beginning of a true Mesh network?

[quandrum]

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..

Re:The beginning of a true Mesh network?

[BJZQ8]

Linksys WAP11's and similar point-to-point wireless devices have latency up into 30-100 ms I think...because they are sort of a switch, and have to fiddle with identifying MAC addresses and such. I looked at this for a local network of mine...but with three hops, latency probably would near 500 ms. I don't have experience with this, can anyone tell me that has done this?

How about this Idea.

[HanzoSan]

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.

Could be used on cellphones, too.

[immel]

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.

Mesh Networks

[KingDaveRa]

I like the idea of mesh networks. Its like GPL, only for your data.

It's the right way...

[SharpFang]

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 :)

Internet, power, water... it is all good

[Goyuix]

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

Random Trivia Note

[portnoy]

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.

local content

[entartete]

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.

Not quite...

[TWX]

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.

*The* Robert Morris

[imnoteddy]

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.

Sharing is caring

[serutan]

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.