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The Ambitions and Challenges of Mesh Networks and the Local Internet Movement
Lashdots writes: Two artists in New York are hatching a plan to teach kids about the internet by building their own. They'll be creating a small, decentralized network, similar to a mesh network, to access other computers, and they'll be developing their own simple social network to communicate with other people. It's part of a growing movement to supplement the Internet with resilient, local alternatives. "And yet, while the decentralized, ad hoc network architecture appeals philosophically to tech-savvy users fed up with monopolistic ISPs, nobody’s found a way to make mesh networks work easily and efficiently enough to replace home Internet connections. Built more for resiliency than for speed, each participating router must continuously search for the best paths to far-flung machines. For now, that makes them of limited interest to many ordinary consumers who simply want to check their email and watch movies."
That is seriously one of the worst hipster 'startup style' sites I've seen. The background video is fucking distracting. Also the links in the menus don't seem to do anything.
Ouch. Now that's cruel and unusual punishment...
Ya, the ISPs are the problem, not the NSA.
Nobody said that was the issue.
Skimming the article, I didn't see the NSA mentioned once.
Thanks for playing, though!
The most intractable issue, even once the routing problem is solved, is that huge amounts of traffic are all going to a few places, and those places require a lot of bandwidth. For example, it would really suck to live next to Google's data centers, or even Slashdot's data centers, because a lot of traffic would be going through your wifi to get to Google.
IF traffic were spread evenly across the network, there wouldn't be a problem, but it's not. So you kind of need a backbone of some sort. (maybe someone solved this? Solution is unknown to me, though)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
IPv6 seems like it would be the ideal solution in this case. No NAT trickery needed.
Of course, it would be wise to have firewalls in place. Even with a mesh, there needs to be a boundary with firewalls in place, maybe even thought for core/edge fabric design as well.
Of the just over 1 billion web sites currently online, fewer than 0.000001% have more than 3 servers per CONTINENT. To have a server in each province / state would increase the costs several thousandfold.
There are about ten web sites in the world that could actually have servers in thousands of locations without going bankrupt.
There is a reason your neighborhood street that you live on isn't 2,000 miles long. It connects to a minor collector (street with several stop signs), which then connects to a major collector (street with a few stop signs), which then connects to an arterial (street with stop lights), which connects to a major arterial (three or more lanes each way), which then connects to a freeway, which then connects to an interstate. Streets are laid out like that because a hierarchy of larger and larger paths is the only halfway efficient way to move stuff from any house in the country to any other house. That's just as true with digital stuff - it only works when you put fat fiber under the rivers, through the deserts, and over the mountains.
Which means someone has to decide where to spend $20 million on the next chunk of backbone, and someone has to fork over $20 million and hope that it's the right technology, in the right place, at the right time, and implemented properly.
the point of the article that this "newly unlicensed whitespace spectrum will be deployed across San Francisco and Seattle supplying high speed network access at no cost whatsoever to end users." etc mesh mesh stuff has been touted over and over again now for 15 years. OVER FIFTEEN YEARS.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So you're saying that come the Zombie Apocalypse I won't be able to order kitty litter from Amazon?
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
totes congrats for using - with "socjus" - an even more annoying alternative to "SJW " you utter plank
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
...of which USENET was a distributed component?
I sometimes wonder if/when it will get sort of re-deployed with a focus on secure communication and secure content distribution.
There are about ten web sites in the world that could actually have servers in thousands of locations without going bankrupt.
You're hilarious. You don't even get how this works. You just use data centers located in population centers like always. In those population centers, there are more subscribers, so there is more available bandwidth.
We may need formal links between population centers. Just like roads, these would reasonably be public infrastructure.
Meanwhile, only CDNs really need to be hosted in these locations, so some websites' architectures will change slightly with the heavy content hosted by third parties and the rest not, but so what? That trend is proceeding apace anyhow.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's pretty obvious you've never so much as been in a datacenter, not have any idea how CDNs work (or more _fail_ to work, because few pay any attention to the http spec on proxies).
Some of us actually build this shit and know how it works.
I looked into this years ago from the physical layer support for full duplex and half duplex nodes (this was fun since I am a hardware guy) all the way up to designing a node addressing scheme which both helped with routing and allowed dynamic adding and deleting nodes (not so much fun but an interesting problem). The largest problem I found was scaling which would have required tunnels (wormholes) to high traffic endpoints or to shunt traffic around congested areas. Discouraging free riders was handled with public-private key enforced tokens; passing traffic for others (especially through tunnels) earned tokens (reputation) while generating traffic used them and there was a scaling issue there was well; in retrospect that part operated like a modern cryptocurrency. Like the original IPv6, all traffic was encrypted between endpoints by design. CPU and RAM requirements back then were non-trivial but ARM has come a long way.
You don't need a server. You need a COTS router running OpenWRT and OpenVPN (with hardware acceleration), a couple of well-placed antennas, and a commercial- (not carrier-) grade symmetric DSL, cable, or wireless connection.
In other words: You don't need a million spinning-disks server with its own abilities to serve content, you need a a million low-power NAPs with a gateway to your own content.
How much traffic does google.com see from my small Ohio town of ~45k citizens? Answer: Not enough to swamp a well-proportioned 802.11a link. Or a 45Mbps T3. Or a 75Mbps symmetric DOCSIS connection from TWC...all of which are cheaper than hosting actual servers on a mesh.
An existing Internet service that wants to be on a local mesh doesn't need a server, per se, but just a point of access to their existing servers.
And I'm sure I won't be the first to volunteer my resources (land, electricity) in exchange for them to do just this, as long as I get fast Internet and a mesh node in exchange. If I get a fueled and maintained standby generator to use, too, I might even pay them to let them use my resources...but either way, it's win-win.
(What if a node fails because COTS routers are shit, or power is out, or TWC has fucked up that branch? Who cares. There will be other nodes, they'll just be a few more hops away than usual. Yay, redundancy.)
(Oh, you're a small website? Akamai has a theoretical mesh package for you! And I'll gladly use an Akamai mesh node as a warm footstool, after I build the tower, string the cable, and align the antennae while I bask in the warm glow of fast and free Interwebs for myself.)
Kid-proof tablet..
[quote]
You don't need a server. You need a COTS router running OpenWRT and OpenVPN (with hardware acceleration), a couple of well-placed antennas, and a commercial- (not carrier-) grade symmetric DSL, cable, or wireless connection.
In other words: You don't need a million spinning-disks server with its own abilities to serve content, you need a a million low-power NAPs with a gateway to your own content.
How much traffic does google.com see from my small Ohio town of ~45k citizens? Answer: Not enough to swamp a well-proportioned 802.11a link. Or a 45Mbps T3. Or a 75Mbps symmetric DOCSIS connection from TWC...all of which are cheaper than hosting actual servers
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You used Google.com as your example. I want to understand what you're suggesting. Are you saying that your router , which is "cheaper than actual servers" is going to serve Google.com search results? It's going hold and query the database of over 5 billion webpages, while doing all of the calculations to rank them for each search term people type in? That's pretty impressive for a little OpenWRT router. If you find a way to do that you'll get really, really rich because right now companies like Google spend hundreds of millions of dollars putting together racks and racks of equipment to be able to rank sort through billions of pages in under a second.
Perhaps that's not what you're saying. Perhaps you're suggesting that you and your neighbors could use wi-Fi or coax to connect to each other, then the neighborhood would be connected to the backbone as usual. I've seen something like that work with television. The neighborhood had one big antenna tower, then there was coax running to each house from the antenna. It was called Community Antenna TV, or catv. Today it's better known as "cable tv".
You see what happens is that in your neighborhood , one family has two Netflix streams running constantly every evening and another guy just wants to check his email. The neighborhood has a 100 Mbps backbone connection, so when a bunch of people try to watch Netflix and Youtube from 6:00 PM - 9:00PM, it gets bogged down. The people just checking their email don't want to pay $80 / month for the neighborhood to have a true gigabit backbone to the internet. Rather, they think the families with multiple Netflix streams should pay their fair share - since they are using ten times as much, they should pay most of the cost. So you end up having different people paying different rates to get different speeds, and someone has to manage all of that. You can hire a company to manage all that for you, making sure everyone is paying their share for the backbone, the shared equipment, line maintenance, etc. The companies who manage all that stuff for your neighborhood are called "ISPs".