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.

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

[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.

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.