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."

Comments

Re:Please.

[TheLogster]

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.

I have a neighborhood wireless network...

[ArbitraryConstant]

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.

Observations

[tyrani]

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!

Re:The conglomorates will put and end to this...

[stratjakt]

Blah whine "conglomerates".

He buys the shows from the conglomorates, the only people he's competing with are the service side of the industry.

His solution scales until there's an old dipshit on his cul-de-sac waking him up at 3 AM screaming because something went wrong and today's Oprah got cut off.

The content is really cheap, (another argument against "broadcast flags" and DRM). But the larger your customer base, the more they'll expect from you, and the stupider they'll be.

Comcast charges 40 bucks a month markup because people keep digging through the cables, can't get their cablemodem working, etc.. (Comcast sucks and is a ripoff)

One problem with this

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:What about the bugs?

[Mysticalfruit]

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...