Dan Rutter Suggests Tossing Some Wi-Fi At the Neighbors

A few days ago, Dan Rutter (the Dan in "Dan's Data") published an interesting idea for extending the sort of philanthropic technical pranksterism that spawned throwies by applying the same approach to Wi-Fi. That means, looking what he hopes is not too far down the road, creating Wi-Fi repeaters that are cheap enough to deploy on the sly and frugal enough with power to run on solar power or cheaply replaceable batteries. But as he says, "If you've got a lot of spare money, a ladder and no respect for private property, though, you could already be stealthily deploying Open-Mesh or other such gadgets all over your neighbourhood." In some cities at least, you'd be hard pressed to ever avoid at least one available wireless access point, but that's not the experience for most people, most places -- which bears correction.

Comments

Interesting

[spikedvodka]

It's an interesting idea... but here's the thing I can't see the ISPs letting something like this happening.

Also, what's to prevent somebody from stealing one of the boxes, and causing an outage... or modifying the firmware on one of these boxes to sniff for passwords?

Re:Interesting

[NeverVotedBush]

Dude, there is nothing magic about an ISP. You could pay for a T1 or so and be your own ISP. You can set up your own hardware. Just be prepared to pay for it - the exact same way your ISP does.

Being an ISP is not anything that special. You just have to be willing to pay the costs, deal with the business aspects, deal with the legal aspects, and if you have employees, deal with income tax, unemployment tax, etc.

It's not like being an ISP is something willed or auctioned like season tickets or anything.

You can be an ISP, or even eliminate needing an ISP. All it takes is money.

You see, that is what ISPs provide - they handle all the business side of things and charge individual subscribers some reasonable amount for access through cable, DSL, digital cell access, etc.

Re:Interesting

[Serious Callers Only]

The problem with visions of mesh based networking taking over the world is that there is no solution to the problems of overload that a full mesh infrastructure brings - you need supernodes which have fast direct connections between them for long-distance traffic, and someone has to pay for those (at present ISPs). While in principle the internet is one big mesh and you can route around problems (a great design), in practice it works because most packets take a very direct route to another computer, say through 10 hops or so. If they went through 60-100 hops, you'd be looking at a massively slower internet. At the end of those fat pipes are modems and servers which let you talk to the internet, and someone has to pay for those (at present it's not the gov).

I think ISPs will eventually be the answer to this problem, not an obstacle. Ultimately they stand to gain from distributing routers that share the service with passing users from any other ISP (peering agreements could make it universal). Eventually we'll all live in an inter-connected cloud, and perhaps eventually the role of ISPs will change to a utility or a public monopoly, but at present they're the best hope we have for instigating something like this.

You can already see this happening with initiatives like fon and wifi networks like The Cloud. Hopefully ISPs will wise up sooner rather than later to the massive income they could achieve by micro-billing everyone instead of trying to charge loads for fixed connections.

When I walk down the streets of the city I live in, there are no less than 10 wireless access points visible almost everywhere - we already have a mesh, it's just not connected yet.

ISPs

[DaveGod]

I still wonder if it would be workable for an ISP to supply a router which gives the owner priority over the bandwidth but allows any subscriber to connect (only) to the internet.

For the consumer it's a mutual benefit, I make my bandwidth open to fellow customers and they do the same for me. The ISP wins from having a better service to attract customers, and also from wifi-only subscribers. The latter may also make for cost/price competitiveness, since you have more subscribers per physical connection.

Re:I like it

[WK2]

Service is intended for one household only.

The ISP sells me bandwidth, not service for a household. Also, people don't use Wi-Fi as a substitute for cable. It's much too slow and inconvenient, and service is somewhat sporadic. People use Wi-Fi temporarily, such as when they are at a friend's house, or a coffee shop, or their home modem is malfunctioning. If someone wants and can afford high speed internet access in their home, they will pay for cable or DSL.

I live in a large apartment building, and share my cable service via Wi-Fi. It gets used, but hardly. The amount of bandwidth strangers use on my network is a drop in the bucket compared to what I use.

Re:I like it

[vertinox]

Service is intended for one household only. And you're going "OMG GREEDY ISPS!!!" because they want to make money? It's their service! The greedy bastard here, is you. Newsflash: It's not your service.

What about people who lease business SDSL and/or T1s?

It's NO DIFFERENT THAN COMMON CABLE THEFT. Oh, do you support stealing that, too?

So is Comcast/Timewarner stealing bandwidth of the websites you visit? Cable service is a one way street. Internet connections are not. It is not actually illegal to share your bandwidth with you neighbor whereas stealing cable is. Yes, it breaks the EULAs but they aren't law and all the ISP can do is terminate your service.

And on a side note... How can they tell if you are sharing on purpose it or your just another one of the many average joe's who don't know how to secure their routers.

Or how can you tell if its your one of your 5 room mates (in the same house) sharing the same connection or the neighbor next door? Does each room mate have to buy their own Comcast connection in that case?

And also... Which is worse for the ISP... Sharing your bandwidth with a neighbor who never would have bought their service and only browses a few web pages just like you or a person who buys their service and maxes out their bandwidth 24/7 with legal Torrents and download services such as Steam and iTunes.

Of course this is the whole argument of Network Neutrality.

There is no simple answer and an analogy to cable stealing doesn't work because bandwidth sharing is not illegal.

until someone loads questionable content

[petes_PoV]

that the police trace back to your ISP connection. They won't care that you had an open WiFi, all they'll know is that some pr0n, bomb-making literature, racist/hate traffic appeared on the internet and it was your IP address that was the source. You thought the RIAA was bad, wait until DHS gets on your case.

Bleat all you like about "helping the community" or philanthropy or whatever you like. This is a naive attitude - similar to leaving your garage door open and then claiming "it's not mine" when stolen goods are found inside.

Anyway, if these devices are so cheap that you can afford to leave them out in the open (until they die, suddenly the firt time it rains), then your neighbours can afford to by one themselves.

Re:Cool

[klapaucjusz]

I've been wanting to try doing something like this, to make a large, community intranet.

...

Personally, I'd be willing to buy a router that relays for this purpose only to extend the mesh but not actually volunteer my paid ISP bandwidth or actually hook up any computers to bridge the two networks.

We, in Paris, have been experimenting with just such a network, based on a dynamic mesh routing protocol (Babel) and an autoconfiguration protocol similar to DHCP (AHCP).

The results are mixed. On the one hand, a lot of geeky types turn out to be willing to volunteer their (paid-for) ADSL line and even to buy a router with their own pennies. On the other hand, normal users are not willing to install software they don't understand -- they just want to use a normal AP, and don't understand why they need to install extra software just to use the Internet.

some people will have to set up tunnels to bridge the gaps between the mesh areas.

Yes, that's exactly what we are doing. Unfortunately, setting up tunnels (VPNs) is complicated and error-prone, and existing VPN software are designed with static routing in mind. We're actually thinking of designing our own VPN implementation that is convenient to use with dynamic routing protocols.

Re:I like it

[Anonymous Coward]

If there was a way to get internet access that didn't involve the local ISP, an expensive cell phone data plan, or a billion dollars to roll out my own personal fiber, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

As a customer, I want the ability to go away from my house and still be able to connect to the Internet. We have cell phones, gaming devices, laptops, and all kinds of toys designed to connect to the internet without being at a PC. Having to be within 30 feet of one defeats the purpose, and there are other places I'd like to go besides coffee shops and fast food places that have Wifi to attract customers.

The service that customers are paying for should tailor to their needs and wants. You might say "vote with your dollar!" But how? Neither the cable company nor the DSL company will do this. Hell, the dialup companies don't either. It's expensive to set up a mesh network, but the ISPs should be able to do something about it. Every so often they like to inch the cost of my service up, what else do they spend that money on?

Re:I like it

[westlake]

So? Years back, "service" was intended for one computer. We got ourselves routers because it was quite silly that providers were charging on a per computer basis. It just didn't make sense

So they go back to charging you by the megabyte. Full commercial rates for the five to fifteen households you are now servicing.

Private Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but if this was done in large enough numbers, then the need to leave the mesh network for the Internet may not be that often. The end result would be a private Internet built and maintained by the users, not telcos - then we could really go tell the ISPs to get lost.

Re:I like it

[NeverVotedBush]

"It is not actually illegal to share your bandwidth with you neighbor whereas stealing cable is. Yes, it breaks the EULAs but they aren't law and all the ISP can do is terminate your service."

And it is OK for people to just decide that contracts they sign and agree to are no longer valid because???

It really is stealing, moron, and you know it. All you are doing is trying to justify it and find some way to appease what little conscience you might still have.

What is worse for your ISP is that you are depriving it, and its employees, of revenue that could be used to make your own service better, feed their families, etc. It isn't up to you to subvert and deny their legitimate business.

There is a simple answer. What you are doing is wrong. It really is that simple. And your ISP could disconnect your service or even take you to court and sue for lost revenue and damages.

Why is that so hard for people like you to understand? Are you retarded or just stupid?

It's a Billing Issue

[scrib]

An unpopular solution would be for ISPs to charge for actual internet usage. Heavy users pay the same amount as people who only check their email every couple days.

If ISPs charged per GB up and down, they'd quickly lose interest in people who shared with a neighbor. It would also discourage use of Sandvine to disrupt file sharing (Linux distros only, of course) because throttling bandwidth would throttle their profits. The marginal cost of bandwidth (for a subscriber) is Zero, so consumption is unrestrained.

People would have to be more careful securing their wireless, but they would also recognize that bandwidth is a commodity that costs money to provide. If you want to be a philanthropist under those conditions, go ahead! As it is, sharing a connection forces the ISP to be the philanthropist. (I'm not saying that's bad, mind you.)

Power issues

[klapaucjusz]

I would think that the batteries and solar cells would be the more attractive things to steal, and if you can make them as cheap as plastic bags from a supermarket then you've solved a whole load more problems than community wireless :)

That's a very good point.

I don't think that using solar-powered devices is economically feasible; you really need access to external power.

In cities, there's power in every streetlamp, and we need to find ways to get the municipal authorities to give us access to that, and in every café or restaurant, and we need to explain to café owners that it's just a few watts. In the countryside, there's church towers (at least in Europe), so be nice to your local priest.

Re:I like it

[NeverVotedBush]

You should think about these questions:

Why not ask your ISP if it is legal to "sublet" your connection and thereby deprive them of a revenue stream? Even if the people you provide service to would not buy it otherwise, is it OK to add the burden of extra bandwidth to your ISP when your ISP has to pay for that bandwidth on their own backbone connection? Who cares how many people use it or about your altruistic beliefs that you should be able to do it?

Call your ISP and ask them. If they say it's ok, then you are done. If they can provide legal reason why you cannot give free service using their equipment (even if it is further upstream), then that is your answer, isn't it?

And why should the ability to discover or enforce matter when talking about right and wrong?

With such a flexible interpretation of right and wrong, maybe you should consider a career in politics...