Slashdot Mirror
Wireless Neighborhood Networks in Canada
Anonymous the younger writes "Cringely once again has another column, this time with a company in Canada that does neato stuff with Open Source."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
At this point, intellectual property lawyers are supposed to start reaching for their telephones to call Canada, but it won't do any good because all this content is perfectly legal and here's how. With the exception of local channels, which come from an antenna, all of Andrew's video content comes from a C-band (big dish) satellite receiver (receivers, actually), and is fully paid for. "I buy the channels just like a cable system does or a motel that wants to offer HBO, from the National Programming Service," says Andrew. "And as a result I pay wholesale prices. People don't realize how much of a markup there in is the cable business. The Discovery Networks, for example, cost me $0.26 per customer per month. The IP laws in both the U.S. and Canada say that if I have legal access to this content I can store and use it. And the over-the-air channels, of course, are free."
.26/mo is possible why aren't more people doing it? Is it because it isn't as easy as Cringley makes it seem? This might be possible now but once entire neighborhoods across the nation (and world) start to do this it might not be quite as easy. Remember, the conglomerates control a lot of things including media channels. You think that they are going to put up with losing the revenue from their residential customers?
Hmm, I wish that everyone could have a large dish in their neighborhood. Hell I had to put up with a ton of shit at my apartment complex to get a small dish ($400 damage deposit -- $300 non-refundable, make sure it wasn't attached to anything, etc). I have to sign a waiver at my house because of the HOA. I thought the FCC mandated that having a small dish was legal and easy? I just can't see anyone having a large dish to bring this in at least in my area.
If getting this stuff for
Bullshit.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
India has a prototype wireless phone system in the Kuppam Wireless Telephone System... I don't know if it's open source or not ... (from what I see, politics drives towards expensive solutions). Has all the stuff WiFi for 3.2 lakh people, VoIP phones , the works ... from HP
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/2f31d8cc49919cc72 84b7d708fe73c52/index.html
:) Nonetheless, we found it to be useful and hope others will too. MirrorDot is currently considered in a "beta" stage, so if you find any broken stuff on this site, please let us know.
From http://www.mirrordot.org/about/
Erik and Jay are the geeks behind this site. MirrorDot started with us simply doing a proof-of-concept project to see if we could create a system to automatically mirror any Slashdot-linked pages and ensure the content would remain available, even if the original site got clobbered - trying to solve the Slashdot Effect. The project worked, so we decided to make it available in September 2004 for anyone to browse and use.
Is MirrorDot perfect? No way - far from it.
The residential customers also cost them a lot of money to support, either directly or indirectly, so what is happening here is that de-centralizing the distribution of media and communications will require the cable companies and telcos to streamline their operations. It will put some cable service guys out of a job - until those service guys become your friendly local content provider. Providing an alternate content path as described (and especially having a roving phone automatically finding a way to connect to the PSTN regarless of where it is) is not "easy" but it's a good example of what someone who understands the infrastructure can do using the available technology today.
Less is more.
Half the people in my building have an SMC wireless router, they haven't changed the SSID, and they haven't put WEP on it. You can connect to the "SMC" network anywhere in the building.
If they connect to the wrong AP, they don't notice because it still "works".
Truly horrifying.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
"Then his neighbors dropped-by, saw what Andrew had done, and they cancelled their telephone and cable TV services, too, many of them without having a wired broadband connection of their own. They get their service from Andrew, who added an inline amplifier and put a better antenna in his attic. Now most of Andrew's neighborhood is watching digital TV with full PVR capability, making unmetered VoIP telephone calls, and downloading data at prodigious rates thanks to shared bandwidth."
Andrew Greig should force his neighbors to contribute to the network by at least sharing their disk space for serving even more tv shows. Perhaps if the neighbors were up to the challenge (and didn't cancel their cable) they could even grab episodes of their favorite shows to share.
I'm not sure how big Andrew's pipe is, but I'm sure he won't be able to support the entire neighborhood.
I would consider setting up something similar but my neighborhood is infested with senior citizens who's VCR's are probably all blinking "12:00 PM".
I'm 2 invites away from my free iPod.
This setup sounds very compelling. I am interested to know what all the drawbacks are as well as what inconveniences the participants experience. I know that when I switched to Voip with Packet8, the price is great but there are some minor inconveniences such as service outages + sometimes bad connections if my girlfriend is accidentally using all our upload bittorrenting TV episodes. Everything cant be only plusses and no minuses. Can any of the participants share their experience?
--------- I have no signature
1)
This Andrew guy is obviously an UberGeek. Congratulations on achiving such notariety.
2)
This system is absolutly amazing. It is an interesting test of the application of exising technology. He didn't create anything new, he just used what was already avaliable.
3)
Everything seems perfectly legal, but some big companies are loosing money on the setup. Will Andrew's work lead to harsher laws in Canada? Once this type of setup is common place, I think that the non-communist values that some law making Canadians have may be overpowered.
4)
Another great article Cringely!
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
The residential customers also cost them a lot of money to support, either directly or indirectly, so what is happening here is that de-centralizing the distribution of media and communications will require the cable companies and telcos to streamline their operations.
So what you are saying is that they make no money on their residential customers and they only promote the service out of the goodness of their hearts right? They have no interest in spreading their power across the country and buying up every little company out there to take under their wing right?
This is America and we work under the Capitalist system. If something isn't profitable it is either done away with completely or bought up by the government. Comcast wouldn't be buying up every cable company in the country to spread their influences if it wasn't profitable.
Believe me. The conglomorates will not appreciate losing customers to this sort of operation. Luckily for them they can control the content that these neighborhood groups can receive and at what cost.
Either way we'll lose.
Remember how in the go-go Internet days of three to four years ago, we used to talk about "disintermediation?" That was using technology to remove middle men from transactions. Well, what Andrew Greig is doing is dis-intermediating both the telephone and TV cable companies. And he'd like to dis-intermediate the Internet Service Providers, too.
Wrong: Andrew Greig isn't "disintermediating" anybody, he's "alter-mediating", meaning in plain english that he's cutting the grass under some other middlemen's feet and setting himself up as the sole replacement middleman for all the people he serves. Likewise, if he wanted to get rid of the internet providers, he's go into the business himself.
His business is that of a concentrator of services, no more no less. Cheaper, more friendly perhaps, but nothing so glamorous as what Cringely portrays him to be. If he's clever and maintains his services, he should make money out of it too.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I think that this Starnix company is in a prime spot to be bought out. I could see the features that they are working on being a powerfull addition to products from big companies such as Sony, Dell, even the evil Microsoft XP media edition.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
At least as far as the neighbors are concerned. If this guy moves, or gets hit by a bus or his house burns down, there goes their TVs, phones and internet.
Sure, bad things can happen to my cable company, but I'll still have my phone service. Someone blows up the phone company, I still can watch TV.
Something about eggs and baskets...
If I pulled something like hook a piece of hardware from work to an external network (or vice-versa). I would be turfed. What is with these places that allow it?
We have a strict "no external hardware" policy on the network and we are not allowed to connect to other networks with our hardware. Seems like common sense yet this is not the first time I have heard of this happening.
I didn't say they make no money on residential customers. Just that by the time you factor in the number of cable guys with vans and equipment that a service provider needs to keep the residential customers happy and connected, the net profits realized by the cable company from wholesale customers vs. residential customers is probably close to equal.
The reason why wholesale customers get wholesale rates is that they don't require nearly as much of the service provider's support. If the cable companies found themselves supporting less and less of the residential networks, they would lose out on the service revenue, but they would also be able to cut out the disproportionately larger support infrastructure that the residential networks require. Smaller organizations generally work more efficiently.
Less is more.
you know NOTHING about the Cable Tv biz.
Residential customers. the BASIC subscribers who get the least channels are our Largest Subscriber revinue generator. The only thing higher than that is the Porn revinue.
it does NOT cost a lot of money to support the customers, and with the advent of FORCED digital boxes it will drop down to almost nothing, just like how the Telephone companies have it.
"This is America and we work under the Capitalist system. If something isn't profitable it is either done away with completely or bought up by the government"
Or subsidized by the government (the airline industry for example) so there can be a greater transfer of wealth from poor to rich.
heres a working link... http://protoculture.com/t0010.html
Just because this guy can hook himself and a few of his geeky neighbours up on this system, there is no way this going to be able to grow.
Look at the cable company for example. The monthly fee you pay covers not the content, but the whole infrastructure. What is this guy going to do when something as simple as an access point stops working. Who is going to be able to physically go replace it. We pay the cable company because they have the resources ready to fix all these types of problems. The same is true for the phone company. How pleased with this "service" would you be when you run into an emergency and the phone isnt working. Mabye people should think of the markup on cable and telephone as an insurance cost.
No one can watch every episode of the original Star Trek series in the order in which they were broadcast in one weekend, it's a temporal impossibility. Even if you say each episode was only 40 minutes long, 80 episodes @ 40 minutes each is 3,200 minutes, compared to 2,880 minutes in two days. (Although I'll shoot myself in the foot and say that if you consider the weekend to start at 5pm on Friday, that adds another 420 minutes, giving you time enough to watch all the episodes with 100 minutes for bathroom breaks and such. But still. :-P)
Also, anyone else notice that IE has trouble selecting text on that page? It always selects, for me, everything from the top of the page down to where the cursor is. Annoying. (And yes, Firefox does just fine. Unfortunately I have to use IE at work.)
What you said might be true, but then again, that software could be run on a more powerful server.
...maybe on the slashdot-server itself. Of couse that would be a whole lot of additional traffic to handle and I don't know if that would be feasible.
Hmmm, I can see this developing even more accross hundreds, nee thousands of networks across america. Then there will be hundreds of small independantly owned networks, maybe even providing tailored real local content.
Big business will then see this as a great opportunity for profit and gobble them all up and we will be back to square one. What a great future >:}
The Pen is mighter then the sword (Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1831 - 1873)
Which means posters have no choice but to actually RTFA before they can comment. Well done! :)
From the original story:
"...Open Source software is leading to digital devices being used in large volumes in ways their designers never envisioned. This takes control of the network out of the hands of the providers and into the hands of the users."
I believe, the next step is to free the users from providers whom store their personal data and even serve their e-mail and that's already happening. With products like The Net-Box it is now possible to have your own email,file,calendar,bookmark server in your own home without worrying about free-service policies changing that will restrict the way you access your own data.As a matter of fact Axentra the creator of the Net-Box is in Canada and uses Open Source as well!
"This is America and we work under the Capitalist system. If something isn't profitable it is either done away with completely or bought up by the government. Comcast wouldn't be buying up every cable company in the country to spread their influences if it wasn't profitable."
The Capitalist system is NOT the free market system. It consists of getting the MOST money for your investment.
When there is competition, prices don't necessarily drop either. It doesn't have to be collusion or price fixing either but just an assumption that the price currently charged is what can be borne by the buyers.
The profits may have been small when the infrastructure was being created but become larger and larger as time passes as the infrastructure becomes wide-spread and comoditized.
Almost everything wired will become wireless as the infrastructure becomes wide-spread. Its more convenient NOT to run miles and miles of wires when you can use "nothing" to carry the signal. ("Nothing" is FREE! It costs zero capital expenditure.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Was this ever in doubt?
he runs a Linux thin client on a Sharp Zaurus SL-6000 Linux PDA. Sitting in its cradle on Andrew's desk at home, the Zaurus (running a special copy of Debian Linux, NOT as shipped by Sharp) I want to know how to get my hands on that distro!
I would be far more impressed by a anti-slashdotting system where either:
a) A package is put together that volunteers can run on their servers to create a distributed pool of mirrors.
b) A P2P mechanism is leveraged. Imagine a firefox extension that can grab a torrent off mirrordot and download the page seamlessly, with a preset ratio/time limit before it quits.
My family was actually thinking about building some windmills to supply at least part of our own power, this should decrease or eliminate our power bill, if we could get a good enough system, we could let a neighbour or two use it (neighbours who are close friends of course)
The seekers do no need truth, the seekers do find truth and the finding do be painful
Man, lots of people who think this won't work... 1) System stability. He's probably got APs (and you-name it) on standby. Nobody (let alone a high quality geek of this calibre!) ever designs a network without minimal failovers at least. Hell - he's probably doing some AP meshing or something. 2) Cash is king. Want failover 911 service in case your neighbour's house gets hit by a meteor? Okay... keep your basic phone service. You're still way under what you were paying for phone + cable. (Oh, by the way - in Canada (Ontario at least), any company who wants to resell phone services CAN - they wholesale it out from Bell Canada. What's to stop him from doing that?) 3) Yes, you can definitely store hundreds and hundreds of 30 minute shows on hard disk. He'll be using TV-quality, not the super-extreme-videophile quality that people mindlessly use for their old Tick reruns (yes, I like Tick). Ease up on the "big corporations will never allow this", by the way. To be so defeatist is to withdraw any claim to the title of "Geek" - and, as such, you should not be reading Slashdot.
Hasn't he read any of the independent studies? Surely he must realize that the TCO would be 60% less if he used MS Windows, not to mention the vastly improved security that would give him.
The fact that his PDA is doing work of so many things is a good start. I wouldn't mind have one thing to worry about instead of 6 and also paying six bills
Is there any kind of neighbourhood-net howto? I'm trying to create a very, very basic WIFI service for my neighbourhood and already learned, that you lose a lot of time searching for the right hard- and software. What APs to use? How to configure my linux router? And much more details. Would be great to have a forum, where admins of such networks could discuss all those issues.
So what's to stop someone in the States from doing this at their house?
Why is it I can't pretend that I'm in Canada, sign up, and then hook up a big dish in my backyard?
Pardon my ignorance here. But I really don't see anything that can stop me, except for a Canadian billing address - and those are easy to get.
Canada, here I come!
Could anyone shine some light on this, please? Thanks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
did anyone else get that andrew's server holds about 11terabytes? min 9.6TB max 12.87TB wow can we get specs on that thing?
Comment removed based on user account deletion