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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.'"
Sadly, Vancouver, BC does not show up on their connectivity map. Anyone wanna trade karma for an MIT scholarship?
Carousel is a lie!
Hmm...what happens when MIT decides to turn off this point, though?
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
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.
But I am concerned as to the Santa friendliness of this chimney internet access. Will I still be able to get my presents if I access the internet this way.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
just by tossing a handful of bread crumbs at the MIT gateway's roof antenna?
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
How could the RIAA figure out who is who, and from what computer?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
...and yet I get internet access through an antenna directed at a local school, which in turn hops back to my father's office.
I guess I'm just not cool enough...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
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..
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.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
I like the idea of mesh networks. Its like GPL, only for your data.
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
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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
So waht happens when the parents light a nice warm fire? Hehe, it's fiewire then.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
The weather forecast for the area [ http://ma.weather-forecast.ws/cambridge ] predicts thunderstorms. I guess wireing the chimneys will make this project serve as a physics lesson as well as a Internet connection.
Zap!
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
My friends and I always joked about doing something like this when we were in college. Of course we were brainstorming before wireless networking really emerged so we came up with some interesting ideas. Like stringing an Ethernet cable across the street, using power from a lamp post to power a repeater. Or a really expensive satellite hop to make it a few blocks away. Or maybe something with lasers...
We never actually tried anything since we figured the school wouldn't appreciate it. Just goes to show the benefits of going to a school like MIT instead of a liberal arts school.
The opinions expressed above are those off one side of my brain, the other side and my employer may not agree.
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.
in other news, SCO articles are no longer the most popular articles on Slashdot for the first time in history. MIT articles now outnumber SCO 1337 to 1336
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.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
Something like this has been going on in London for absulutely ages. Check out the link Consume The Net
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
... 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.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
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.
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.