Building a Free Wireless Backbone? 24
DigiWood asks: "Ok. I have been remembering the old days of BBS's. When you sent mail from one system to another it had to dial up and transmit it. Given the ability to wirelessly interconnect nodes in a city why hasn't anyone suggested that wireless server interconnects get put up? I know that people have 802.11b public access points. What I am talking about is aggregating these wireless islands together to form a sort of wireless backbone. A free wireless backbone. The only place you'd need a pop is the downlink into the hardwired internet. There could be multiple downlinks. With the advent of companies like Vonage that supply IP telephony the local telco could be cut out. I am not looking for a debate over which telco is worst. Nor any of the major media provider bashing as of late. Just a discussion of the whys and why nots to putting this together."
Too late, too early (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day, it'd probably have been fairly easy to get people to drop a few hundred bucks on hardware in exchange for free local-area bandwidth.
You'd need only post a message to a local BBS suggesting the idea, debate it for a week or two, round up a couple of capable people willing to help with installations. After that, proceed with the leeching.
First, the sysops would connect to eachother, and by way of their ubiquitous, incessant bragging would encourage others to tie into the network.
If 802.11/a/b had been available back then, at today's prices, such networks would have been plentiful. But it's much too late for that.
The local scene is all-but-nonexistant these days. LUGs and 2600 notwithstanding, there's no way to communicate with a semi-clued cross section of the local populace anymore.
This social problem combined with the fact that there is no percieved advantage to talking to a computer in the same town vs. one is Sydney, Australia makes the prospects of participation look awfully dim.
So. Since there's no local forum by which to arrange such activities, and there's no compelling reason for people to join such a network instead of paying for DSL, good salesmanship is the only way to produce such a beast today.
People will first think you're crazy when you tell them that you want them to buy a few hundred dollars with of cabling, Yagis, and gear, only to talk for free with a half-dozen strange geeks around town. And then they'll question your motives, wondering what your take in it is.
It's a little early for the masses to get ready to participate in something of this scale and organization. In order for people to want to join such a network, a few things need to happen first:
1) Transfer caps, and/or the return of metered dialup access. People, as a rule, are afraid of buying new things, especially when what they have appears to work justfine. It doesn't matter if this seems irrational or not. People who drive Fords generally continue to drive Fords until their Crown Vic explodes one morning on the way to church.
2) Remember that killer app everyone was looking for during the dot.com boom? It remains elusive to this day. If it is ever discovered, and has sufficient local interest for people to justify dropping cash on hardware in order to participate, things might have a chance. And AFAICT, except in new markets, the broadband thing is getting pretty stale. The freenet needs a killer app.
P2P is close, but the potential for such unrefined protocols to spill over from the freenet onto paid internet links makes for some hefty financial baggage for someone to tote. You could charge for internet access, but what would be the point? It's supposed to be free, remember?
3) 802.11 gear needs to come down in price. With Wal-Mart selling new PCs for less than the cost of my first CD player, wireless gear must look quite expensive to Joe Average in comparison to their "free" cable modem.
4) Additionally, we need more spectrum in a band capable of traversing more than a few miles of open terrain, without hanging antennas several hundred feet in the air. Swapping files and playing Unreal with Joe Across Town would be fun, but is rather limited in scope. People in Toledo ought to be able to be able to at least send email to folks in Detroit without unreasonable delay. There will be a handful of savvy volunteers willing to maintain short-haul inter-city links, but only if there's popular demand and a low-cost technical means of putting them together -- after all, any way to avoid paying Ma Bell for T1 circuits is a Good Thing in this context.
5) I touched on this before, but we'll need better protocols, or at least good shims for existing ones. If such a network ever happens, it will be one where there are relatively vast amounts of relatively local bandwidth for free, with things slowing down considerably as distance inreases (along with increased costs that someone will have to cover).
A diverse network of transparent squid proxies will help markedly with http, but what about ftp? Cursedly indiscriminate P2P? Even IRC can consume substantial bandwidth with a few thousand consumers. All of these things can be cached/proxied/otherwise-massaged, rate-limited, or simply operated on a strictly-local basis. But, someone along the way will have to write, implement, and enforce these policies at the border. The investment in time required for such needed, hatred-inspiring rulemaking will not be small. (Read: operating gateways is going to be expensive, time-consuming, and quite thankless.)
6) And for the sanity-in-infrastructure requirements, it'll have to run IPV6 more-or-less exclusively -- nobody wants to be known as 10.4.249.57, and real IPV4 address space costs money. Besides, in a free network, there's no reason for every man, woman, child's palm pilot, bicycle, and toaster oven to not have unique addresses. Is the state of IPV6 under any incarnation of Windows sufficient to support this endeavor?
That all said, you could count me in if I didn't live in a downstairs apartment with windows facing outside of town.
Is the idea too early, or too late? You tell me. Personally, I don't see many of these problems being solved very soon in the current climate, but you be the judge.