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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."
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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
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
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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.
Harddisks are cheap these days...
You can build multi terabyte capacity systems for a few thousand bucks...
Storage of video isn't and issue. 500-800KBps WM9 at SIF res is good enough for tv..
So the system that tapes eveything that isn't on disk is not "bullshit". The company that I work for builds hardware for the broadcast industry that is designed to do such things.
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.
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
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...
Yeah, Id be interested to know how many TeraBytes is server has :) I have just under 1/2 TByte raid and already just about filled it with movies and tv and I'm only talking about 15 Movies and a few hundred tv shows
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
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.)
Which means posters have no choice but to actually RTFA before they can comment. Well done! :)
At our company probably 1/3 of the staff take their laptops between home and work (and business travel) all the time. I VPN into our system from home on a regular basis, which effectively exposes both work and home to each other. We have only had one bad episode in the last couple of years, which occurred when the MSBlaster worm got in through an infected laptop and nailed everyone that wasn't running Windoze Update. Educating the staff about spyware removal, antivirus software, and making sure everyone keeps their OS up to date, is actually a lot easier and more productive than just saying "not allowed".
Less is more.
Firstly, I'm not sure how your home network is setup but one solution might be to use a traffic shaper and give your VOIP packets the highest priority.
Secondly, this setup sounds very compelling until you start to read between the lines and realize that this guy's got a whole cellar full of hardware...
1. The C-Band satellite dish in his back yard and probably 10+ receivers.
2. Two or three MythBackend Systems each with multiple hardware mpeg encoding cards. These machines would probably also need at least 2 gigE cards each.
3. A database server running mysql to hold all of the recorded program meta data.
4. A storage system capable of storing 30,000 movies/tv shows/mp3's. This solution should be robust enough to support having multiple streams being written (since you've got those 3 mythbackend boxes constantly writing) plus having any number of reads as any number of Myth Front ends read data from the array. So, this would either be some sorta direct connect SAN or some type of NAS toaster with a shit loads of disk on lots of spindles.
5. A couple good gigE switches/router to connect all of this too. You would probably want to look at switches that are capable of trunking and creating VLANS.
6. WAP equipment. I'd go for something that had some really good management tools that'll allow you todo bandwidth throttling, usage monitoring/logging, traffic shaping, etc.
7. A good omnidirectional wireless Antenna so that everybody can connect.
8. An ISP that's
a) going to be cool with what your doing (such as speakeasy)
b) can provide the bandwidth necessary so that a whole street worth of people can surf the Internet while also chatting on the phone.
Now, there's also some other considerations.
Because of the cost of the equipment, Electricity and bandwidth bills, your going to have to charge for this.
So, unless your going to try to get NPO status, your going to have to get a business license and start keeping track of what you take in for profits so you can pay the tax man. Not to mention that the cost of this equipment means that you'll probably need to take out some loans for the initial acquisitions, so you'd have to figure out your THAC0 so that can hit zero to at least break even. Also, you'll need some infrastructure so that you can keep track of who's paid you and how much and who hasn't paid you, etc.
Beyond all that, we haven't even gotten into the aspects of providing tech support for all the clueless users who'll call up at 3am when they can't make a phone call and the problem isn't at your end, it's at the ISP's
Now, you've got 10 people with these Starnix thin clients in they're house hooked up to their TV's. Who's going to do the initial configuration of these things? I doubt they come pre-configured with the mythfrontend (though it would be nice), so you'll probably need to configure these things to all the settings for your myth back end.
Also, since your now their ISP, you can expect (since they're paying you for network access) that they'll be calling you whenever their completely unpatched, spyware addled Windows ME box shits all over itself... Not to mention that they'll be calling you whenever they want to put another piece of wireless equipment in their house, which means you'll have to start page listing all the gear you know works with your setup...
With all that said, this solution would work, it's just going to require a bit more work then Mr. Cringely makes it sound...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
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.