Neighborhood Area Networks? 280
Posted
by
michael
from the flying-cars dept.
from the flying-cars dept.
schmaltz writes: "Recent discussions about long-haul wireless on Slashdot seem geared mostly to benefit institutions, really, until this post on the peer-to-peer-oriented Decentralized list opened my eyes: "What will society do, when there are kits in every computer store and mall, for 802.11a neighborhood routers? What if you could buy a kit with four pole-mounting 15DB directional antennas, and a router in a sealed case that maintains mesh networks? ... There will be a great blooming of local gaming, IM, and voice/video telephony ... a lot of sharing of music and video on these NANs (neighborhood area networks) ... share a 2nd phone line ... we will all realize pretty quickly this is NOT the Internet ..." Maybe NANs could put the telephone company out of business. Seems like the equipment and software are either available or nearly so -can this be done today? I want to build the first NAN AP on my block!!"
sounds good to me (Score:3, Insightful)
A Sense of Community (Score:5, Insightful)
"He was so nice when I couldn't get xyz on the NAN all I had to do was message him and he solved my problem..." : Common comment by Annyonomous Grandma in the NAN era?
Or will this just pull the geeks out of their comfortable corners into social realms they don't want to be in? Will it force the geeks of the world to be more social?
What I'd love to see though... is Annyonomous Grandma taking a hand to the backside of the neightbor hood Script Kiddies... or better yet, DoSing them of the NAN herself!
The only real barrier... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:FCC (Score:2, Insightful)
Now if the NAN could hook up to their own T1 or a piece of one (using membership fees to pay for the cost), I could see it happening. But don't think for one minute the broadband companies would let something like this cut into their profit margins.
How Wonderfully Idealistic! ;) (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimately, while playing with the technology and the design of your "NaN" would be fun, we live in a world where bandwidth providers will not accept make-believe money for the pipe(s) to your "NaN" router(s). The issue would quickly become:
1. Who among your neighbors would be willing to shoulder the cost of the bandwidth, AP's, router(s), switch(es), and lend the time and expertise in the installation and configuration of same, and
2. Who is willing to face the inevitable slew of legal and/or licensing challenges in reselling or providing bandwidth for free to the neighbors on your "NaN". Are you willing to pay for a T1 out of your own pocket to feed the bandwidth need? If not, and your neighbors throw monthly contributions into the hat, you face a host of very real-world, non technical legal, tax and business issues.
Please don't misinterpret these points! I think it's a neat idea. However we must remember, regardless of the technology available, ultimately the twin evils of Money and Regulations drive the market; free or otherwise.
If an "Internet Bandwidth Commune" is your goal, don't lose sight of the inescapable truth that somewhere, sometime, eventually SOMEONE will have to pay for it.
Scot
xAN vs. High Speed Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
Obligatory analogy : If when phone service was new, people had neighborhood-closed-circuit phone lines, those wouldn't have been a very good idea for long, as the entire world is now connected via interconnecting phone lines that are just as reliable and fast for voice communications as anyone could really hope for. How long before internet connections reach the same level of maturity for their medium as the phone lines have for theirs?
Shared Internet Connection. (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, fine, it either gets routed through an ADSL, cable or wireless broadband connection, which works great... until the provider figures out that behind their ONE, $50/month connection lurks 5-10 households. I think they (AT&T, LEC's or Sprint Broadband, etc.) will react negativly to this; it violates the Terms of Use agreements I have seen for any of these services, plus they will be losing upwards of $500+/month in revenue.
Boom, the connection is turned down, and/or several nasty letters threating legal action are sent out. Maybe they insist on an upgrade to a costlier business class service, for a significantly higher rate (around $250/month minimum).
Never mind that one person is responsible for the connection to the Internet may move, or have a disagreement with another neighbor, and pull the plug. One could go on about the multitude of non-technical problems that could occur with this type of setup for days.
It would be interesting to see how all this will pan out. But, I do not think it will be more than a niche product until the bigger aspects of this (connection to the Internet, or other NAN's, can be worked out).
wireless neighborhoods (Score:5, Insightful)
The antenna we decided on was the SMCANT-DI135 [smc.com] (warning PDF). It has a 4.5 mile signal thru a 45 degree arc, 7 mile point to point, is 10 inches long, and weighs less than 20oz. We figured it could be put on the side of a house and hidden from view fairly easily, and with 3 of them, we could have wireless access throughout most of our city (it wasn't that big)
Course we never did it, i moved to college, and we're lacking money, but...
~z
Forget the Internet. Time to make a new network. (Score:5, Insightful)
For peanuts, we can set up a NAN on our own block. We could link these NANs gradually, using directional 80211.x (Pringlenet), or even ruby lasers on rooftops.
Why hook this up to the Internet at all?
The Internet is going to be regulated and policed. Hysteria and business interests are gutting the thing 'til it dies and is reborn as a fancier cable TV network.
Build a new network on poles on rooftops. It's cheap, it's fun, it's not subject to regulation (YET).
Eventually repeaters are going to be tiny things you plug into wall outlets, so relaying the signals into the house past the chickenwire/plaster barrier is not a prolem.
Bandwidth? 802.11a has plenty for our needs at the moment, and higher frequencies will give even more capacity. Latency? Well. that's important for web sites and gaming, but guerilla Pringlenets really should be used as a simpler WWW (Neighborhood Wide Web? NNW?) or even a BBS and newsgroup connection.
Why in the world do this? Because newsgroups and web sites are getting censored preemptively by threatened lawsuits; anonymous posting is becoming impossible; EVERYone seems to want to know what we're doing and who we are.
Don't connect your NAN to the Internet. Connect to other NANs... they'll connect to others... and freedom comes back, at least until the FCC and DOJ enforcers come tearing the poles down.
But the DOJ and the various IP owners have already "torn down the poles" on the Internet as it is, so the Pringlenets give a little more time to think of something else (lasers? power lines? quantum encryption over the regular net?).
Someone here mentioned that someone has to pay for all of this, and I say: why? It costs money for the PC cards and for the wireless routers, but not much. And when you buy a can of Pringles, you get not only a directional focus for 802.11, but also yummy remanufactured potato chips.
Eventually the hardware itself will be regulated, maybe, but we get years of grace from the jackboots, and get to have fun at the same time.
Re:A Sense of Community (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing like people coming over at all hours because of some lame ass computer problem. The only thing that make this nicer is when they get uppity when you ask basic trouble shooting questions.
If I had someone who could return services(plumbing, auto repair, oral pleasure, etc...) then I might consider letting people in my neighborhood know that I know computers.
If things go right (Score:5, Insightful)
As things have gone right for the open source free software community,the free net community should be just fine.
Things have to be setup in a way which promotes freedom, which does NOT allow a company to monopolize, and keeps the power in the hands of US and not companies.
Meaning we must keep this seperate from the internet, and keep it from becomming comercial.
I think its a good idea.
When things become comercial, then all the benifits of this community based shared internet access go down the drain.
I believe if this thing ran via the freenet protocal, it would be revolutionary for communications purposes,
or maybe not the freenet protocal, but it needs a protcal which cannot be censored or stopped by big business in the same way the GPL cannot be stopped by microsoft.
Because believe me, ISPs will fight this. be prepared to face AOL.
Re:A Sense of Community (Score:3, Insightful)
I work 40 + hrs a week on computers + another 20 odd on the damn things around the house.
I love them sure, but i do not want to be spending time with nextdoor, becasue he desides he wants to add Yet-Antother-Piece-Of-Fad-Hardware. (The man bought two (2) web-cams yesterday. He already had one. What on earth do you need three web cams for.... Do not say porn, I have seen his wife... F.U.B.)
Or how about clueless down the street who deleted her windows Dir not once but TWICE in the same year (with 3 months to go she may make it three yet).
Maybe your street is not as clueless as mine. (I tell people I am in marketing so know one knows what I do. Nobody has marketing problems @ home.) But I would lay money that they are.
If You really want a life, I suggest 1) get a puppy next spring and two 2) take it for walks on a Sat. All day. trust me you will be happier.
Re:Ping times? Multiple routers? (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the projects I've worked on in the distant past that directly addresses wireless networking is RSPF (radio SPF). This is a route-determination ("interior gateway") protocol designed for heterogeneous radio links. Originally just for ham radio AX.25, and very compact compared to OSPF or BGP, it could be adapted for other things like this. RSPF code, albeit experimental, is included in debian and SuSe distros. It adds a routing layer within the "subnet", so it doesn't have to look like a reliable fully-connected LAN.
Still, it's not clear how well a neighborhood network would work in practice. 802.11a, for instance, is limited to indoor use -- it's down in the 5.2 GHz low-power end of the UNII band, which is shared with satellites. The 5.7 GHz end allows outdoor use and more power, but cheap radios are still elusive. And it's sensitive to foliage fade. That's probably where NANs would make the most sense though. 802.11{b}, at 2.4 GHz, is cheap and has some passable range, especially the lower non-b speed. But 2.4 GHz is shared with microwave ovens, cordless phones, and other junque, which makes it tricky to use in urban areas.
Why stop at only a few miles? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, for those looking to do one or more of the above, this probably isn't the route to go. Also, remember Shannon's law -- the smaller the bandwidth, the less the data-carrying capacity of the data channel. So for those frequencies capable of spanning long distances (through skip, moonbounce, or whatever), the data capacity won't come close to what can be had with an 802.11b network.
Still, as strictly a communications medium, data over amateur radio frequencies is more than sufficient. What needs to be done is to discover methods to increase capacity on the available bandwiths by (1) increasing S/N ratios and (2) devising modulation schemes which transmit more than 0 or 1 per frequency cycle. Some of these schemes are very popular, but there's still a lot of work to be done, and a lot of improvements to be made.
Many comments here suggest wireless digital communications over many miles at low cost simply doesn't exist. It does exist, but with restriction. If you can live within the restrictions (and a little imagination might even provide solutions to work around those restrictions), then the low-cost solution is already here. There's no need to simply talk about it as if it doesn't exist.
Re:Unlicensed wireless networks are fragile (Score:2, Insightful)
All of your arguments are great, for a corporate presentation. This is talking about average personal use to get a bunch of friends in the neighborhood to have some low-latency quake3 games without having a LAN party at one person's house, or sharing a cable modem, etc.
For personal use, the "fragil[ity]" is acceptable.
Re:Great idea... (Score:2, Insightful)
I presumed that this was all about setting up a local network *IN PARALLEL* to the internet. Some discussion was on sharing cable modems and the like. (at which point someone becomes responsible for traffic that bridges.)
I get the impression that this is about setting networks up INDEPENDENT of the internet.
I question exactly how functional this is. So I can Quake with 4 other kids in my block? So I can swap mp3's with every other house in my neighborhood? This kind of stuff only gets you so far, and once I have grabbed the mp3's that A) don't replicate my existing collection, and B) that I would want in the first place, the system becomes a lot less useful.
Sure, you can hook up your neighborhood LAN to the next neighborhood to the next (if they even are interested) but you have such a limited scope of interaction. You are still only dealing with a few people.
One of the things that made the internet so interesting (for all of its flaws) was that you could interact with so many different people and ideas. Any network like this, and you are limited to a very very small population (0.000000001%) but due to a mainly geographical distribution, they wind up being most of the people you were bound to interact with anyway.
Ideas like this may take off in areas of A) high density and B) high technology, but these are few and isolated spots (big cities mainly).
And don't forget the path of least resistance.
There already is a solution that allows most people to network. A system like this NAN would have to offer something absolutely unique to provided incentive for people to participate.
(And I discount internet access sharing as people have pointed out this is about being INDEPENDENT of the internet.)
Well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't about Internet. You missed the point.
It's about setting up neighborhood networks, so neighbors can communicate without paying anyone.
At some point, this can grow so different neighborhoods can talk to each other, over whatever means are available.
At some point, this can turn into an internet. In fact, tha'ts how the interent worked in the first place....
non-connected sites still used IP addresses, assigned to them to be unique to their organization, so they could someday hook up to others.
Block Parties and Cook-Outs? (Score:2, Insightful)
All this talk of antennae and cabling and routers has me a bit perplexed -
What ever happened to the block party and the neighborhood cook-out? Do people ever talk face-to-face anymore, leaning across the fence and sharing stories, or is all of our inter-personal communication limited to IMs, MP3s and frags? Don't get me wrong - all of these beautiful technologies are wonderful for helping us to stay connected, but they can also cause us to get more dis-connected.
All that said, I completely understand the usefulness of a NAN to share an Internet connection - I've had a VERY hard time trying to get DSL for the last month - and if there's anyone in Normal, IL who wants to help out a guy who's stuck with dial-up, I'm all ears. ;-)
consume.net is doing something like this (Score:1, Insightful)