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Open Spectrum Does Not Mean Free Internet
CowboyRobot writes "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski recently proposed making RF spectrum publicly available, and many in the media (including the Washington Post) have been mistakenly conflating open access to WiFi signal with free Internet access; anyone can put up a wireless access point but that doesn't give them access to the Internet. The proposal will probably mean more attempts at providing free Internet access to specific neighborhoods or municipalities, but as Larry Seltzer at NetworkComputing points out, these programs also usually forget that access to signal is not the same as access to the Internet. After getting the funding to wire a city, these isn't money left to pay for the actual bandwidth usage."
I suppose we nerds need to step up and take some of the blame:
We've been so industrious about our networking duties that when the noobs see an ethernet jack or an SSID they just go and assume that it will lead them to the bounteous lolcats and porn of the internet...
All jokes(but not all jokers, alas) aside, WTF is wrong with these 'journalists'? Reporting 'FCC proposes additional wifi spectrum' as 'FCC proposes free internets for the masses!' is about as conceptually confused as reporting 'Staples offers 2-for-the-price-of-1 sale on copier paper' as 'Staples, Amazon, New York Times take sides over plan to slash print media prices by half!'.
Seriously, I'm not expecting these guys to not fuck up something actually tricky, just to make the basic conceptual distinction between the price and availability of a transmission channel and the price and availability of what is transmitted over the channel...
Used to live in a city with "free wifi". It was horrendously slow because everybody used it and most still paid a normal provider.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's sad that no one seems to know the difference. Wifi operates on a subset of frequencies within the RF spectrum, knowing that, how can anyone confuse Open RF with Free Internet? That would be like saying "Were opening part of the energy spectrum" and then telling people "That means we now get free TV", it's not true.
If you make a public resource, you have what economists call a "free rider" problem: most people aren't obligated to pay in to it, so they simply take advantage of it without paying in.
This causes the quality of service to decline. It is related to the "Tragedy of the Commons" where overconsumption of a public resource results in its depletion.
A better option to "free" internet might be aiming to lower costs and improve performance, and then allow local residents to use additional bandwidth to provide free local hotspots.
Futurist Traditionalism
So... what's the point? You're either limited to a LAN-sized network within a building or campus, or you're laying fiber yourself to create a WAN and you'll end up spending more than the bandwidth they can't afford anyway. At any rate, the point is people want access to Internet resources, which requires connection to an ISP at some point in the chain and therefore bandwidth charges.
If the goal is to connect together people then access to "the Internet" is not necessary. Communities could roll their own network, their own servers and address space. All you need is a DNS server to bind it all together (or a P2P system). There would be many benefits to this. However it would not be the same as accessing the Internet.
OTOH a few communities could peer up, then a few more, etc etc. until everyone was connected. The problem would be interconnects. It would be slow without dedicated fibre and switches to route traffic from eg Atlanta to LA. So you end up needing the same infrastructure we have today. May as well just nationalize it all at that point (would amount to the same thing).
A hybrid approach could work. Community MLANs for local stuff, local caches of a ton of content and individual access plans to get out of the MLAN. ISPs go away but the big pipes are still private utilities. Content cartels would still be in power but would only control access to their content rather than everything. People and businesses could host their own content/services or collocate at the local cacheing data center. The cacheing (a la Akamai) would allow the self hosting to work (make it fast even if the origin is a desktop PC) and would be peered, so synced with other community caches. This all would require a lot of work. Could take a decade to reach critical mass (or could only take a few years if adoption was coordinated and fully budgeted).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
So why couldn't an ISP set up a tower with a GigE connection and tell customers they have to set up a directional antenna pointed to my tower, but my prices are a fraction of what a wired or totally managed (cellular provider) ISP would have to charge. After all, we keep hearing that the reason we don't have a massive buildout of fiber to the home is because the last mile is extremely expensive. If the customer is paying for the equipment to connect, along with open white space spectrum (or whatever is being proposed), someone could actually break the duopoly. It actually follows the retail model instead of the utility model, where a business has you come to their retail outlet, instead of delivering to your driveway.
If they see success the ISP would have to build more towers, but it's much easier to expand and grow incrementally than it is to have to build out all the infrastructure at once, which is what happens with low power/low range wifi. Ideally, spectrum users would have to be licensed (and possibly tested, similar to a drivers test to legally use pubic roads), to monitor congestion and allow for more transmitter power.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
yeah! AND LET'S TIE THOSE NETWORKS TOGETHE VIA INTERNET!!!
oh wait....................
and if you really want access to such a "local net", just go to some parts of russia or just about any reasonable large university housing project anywhere.
however the article is a bit bullshit since bandwidth isn't _that_ expensive. you can buy 100mbit connections that you can pretty much rape with torrents if you want pretty cheaply. but it's the fcc guy so he's shelling for couple of big telecoms which like to create an artificial advantage for their own streaming etc services.. and bandwidth limiting is one way to do it(and a way to save a few pennies.. but most importantly a way to gouge more money - overage charges are pure bonus profit).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
well, I was suggesting that people could just put servers that are only available on those "offline" locations, then people within that network can access it, then perhaps networks will overlap and be connectable then you can attach them together into a single larger network, an internet based entirely on wifi, completely controlled by people, not huge telecoms. one less reason to be bent over the barrel and asked by the telecom companies to like it.
I already know it's possible and I already know people have done it, I'm calling for that to be expanded.
with wifi, it's now possible to string together multiple locations into a larger darknet without touching the internet, it could be very interesting to put the internet back in the hands of the people instead of large companies cause it's almost a daily occurance to find an article somewhere which says that the internet is a controlled medium, well this way, it's not, at least without jamming the wifi.
We want free, unfettered, networking ability. The internets dieing a slow death of a thousand DMCA request paper cuts. Give me a free alternative any day. If my local municipality setup their own local network, I'd hook up. We've all got this idea that "The Internet" is the only network to connect to, but I think an alternative is the only solution to the corporate nonsense that's been going on over the past 10 years. Maybe this time we can build it smarter, knowing ahead of time what these jerks are going to try and do.
You're an idiot. What ISP? The idea seems to be to make a full AS and THEN interface it with the other AS that make up Internet. Nothing is that has anything to do with the ludicrous scam that is the public-facing Internet access industry.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
IF local businesses used it to advertise and sell directly to consurmers through it. This would basically allow the traditional (city net) we used to see in matrix style hacking videos / books in the eighties and early nineties. If there is a critical mass of businesses offering services over a local wireless mesh network then the 'internet' will want to access that market. Make a peering deal and you could enable internet access to / between these citywide wireless nodes. The main issue at this point is making sure everyone has access to personal ipv6 addresses. It is possible, but not likely, as the general public has no knowledge of the benefits of having a free access local mesh network.
You have fun with that. Those SSL/TLS packets (that you don't have keys for) will be very informative. Very.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
So you'd have a bunch over local wifi networks, interconnected to make one large network? Someone in one city could access something in another city by these "inter-network" links, right? That network of inter-network links could be called the "internetwork". Maybe shorten that to "internet". Seriously, you're proposing nothing more or less than rebuilding the internet over again. The only change you're really suggesting is to use wifi rather than fiber to connect between cities. There's actually a reason we use fiber, not wifi, to connect between cities, and between campae. Fiber is a lot better for that purpose than wifi is. Wifi is designed for, and good at, letting you walk around your house with a tablet. It's not designed for, and not good at, links more than 30-100 feet.
The internet is a tool for moving information around. Keeping the internet functional means that all information riding around on it has to be treated the same way; that is the nature of a packet-switched protocol. The protocol has to be pretty much blind to the constraints imposed on the information. The net neutrality problem is that information with a value (for what ever definition of value that you want to use) riding on the internet means content providers have to armor their information to keep that value from leaking away as it transits the internet -- that armor invalidates the idea of the neutral nature of the information, and therefore compromises the usefulness of the internet for the content providers. I'm pretty sure that having open spectrum that content providers can grab up and use as their distribution channel will fix this problem. A distribution channel that they own and control means that they can armor their information in whatever way they want to, and to brick any device on the network (including the end-points) while only minimally compromising their ability to deliver content, which is what their business is supposed to profit by. They cannot control the internet in this way, and that's why I see them grabbing up the spectrum and setting up their own networks. NB: This is not a bad thing for people who value the free flow of information that the internet makes possible.
Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of floppy disks... though I suppose you kidz are too young to understand this thread.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Open Spectrum is required for the dream of unencumbered global networking. The Internet (in the US) doesn't work this way & is primarily a monopoly or oligopoly with all players wanting great controls, user access limits, etc. Mesh networking would overstep the costs & regulations required in laying fiber that currently ensure this monopoly. Spectrum that can travel for miles reduces latency. And everyone would want involvement: If you want mesh network access, you'd need to buy a repeater-type device (or no one would peer with you). Even if a high-powered repeater could increase your electric bill by $50 a month, it's a better deal than the Internet monopoly.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
A city sized network should have no problem getting bandwidth to the internet at <$4/meg with a committed rate. A typical ISP these days might oversell that by a factor of 100, but they could provide excellent service by only overselling by a factor of 10.
That leaves not a free service, but at $4/month for 10Mbps symmetric service, or $40 if it's a 'business class' connection (where you get to run a heavily used server), it would be hard to beat.
ok, so basically we could have edge nodes all paid for by city taxes and available to everybody in the wifi "mesh" in the center.
that would bridge the darknet and internet together, but I still think that the darknet idea is a good one, we all control the hardware and depend on nobody to give those services, but as an addition you can gain access to other locations outside that network through the edge nodes.
Essentially, yes.