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Neighborhood Area Networks? 280

Posted by michael 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!!"
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Neighborhood Area Networks? More

Neighborhood Area Networks?

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  • NAN (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ScumBiker ( 64143 ) <scumbiker@jwe[ ]r.org ['nge' in gap]> on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:19PM (#2447415) Homepage Journal
    I've actually started doing something similar, but with 802.11b. I'll be putting out a flyer in my neighborhood rounding up people to participate. Since just about everyone there are old hippies, the communal thing will probably work.
    • This is great for wealthy areas where everyone is computer literate and already online. In the rest of the world, these neighborhood networks probably won't see very much traffic.

      My ISP, sonic.net, is building an 802.11 network downtown for it's members to get net access. It's not free though (you have to already be a member; there are no extra charges besides that) and it doesn't have much coverage yet.

  • Careful! (Score:3, Redundant)

    by Green Aardvark House ( 523269 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:20PM (#2447426)
    ... a lot of sharing of music and video

    Don't let the RIAA/MPAA find out about this. Then your NAN will be sued and shut down!


    • We should have it setup in an annonymous way.

      Freenet protocal is one option for an annnonymous internet.

      People can take the freenet code and work with that, perhaps modify it alittle bit, but it will work.

      In order for this to work, Censorship must be completely impossibe.

      Everyone must be annonymous to stop Censorship.

      The public internet, perhaps shouldnt be annonymous but private internets are private for a reason. So people could share information in private.

    • By law, these devices can only emit 100 mW at peak. In addition, they must not cause harmful interference.

      Right now, with 11a, you may have less to worry about; however, there are a LOT of users of 11b's radiospace. Cordless phones primarily, but you have to also worry about the neighboring services, like wireless broadband and DBS/DSS reception (which grabs a fairly sensitive signal).

      Not to mention radio amateurs, who have a bit more priority over the spectrum than you do. (If you're a ham, and can figure out a way for the stations to emit callsigns in a clear, common, and unencrypted way, then game-on.)

      Link: Part 15 Rules [arrl.org]

  • The Nekkid Neighbor channel (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:21PM (#2447428)
    Hm. Did someone think their webcam was off? Oops, forgot to secure that Windows box? Wow, nice porn horde you've got there...

  • FCC (Score:3, Troll)

    by pbrammer ( 526214 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:21PM (#2447432)
    This all works well, but the FCC, RIAA, et al will all step in and crush those networks. Don't ya think? They have vested interests in local bell cos and won't let them die because we have taken matters into our own hands. Phil

    • Re:FCC (Score:2, Insightful)

      by M_Talon ( 135587 )
      Don't the broadband licenses already keep this sort of thing limited? I mean, how would you support multiple people using one connect without the cable company or phone company saying "you can't do that, it's a breach of contract" and closing you down? It's easy for the companies to keep this from happening, regardless of wht the FCC does.

      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.

      • Re:FCC (Score:3, Informative)

        by ldopa1 ( 465624 )
        Nope. There is nothing in the FCC regulations that prevent you from renting a dead POTS (about $4.00 a mth) and running a LAN on your street. Speeds are totally up to you. What the FCC does regulate is your SELLING the service.

        Think about it this way: I have a broadband connection between my computers in my house (WELL over the RoadRunner speed). The FCC doesn't regulate that, just the devices.

        Keep in mind, if you house already has a security system, or an take one, you already have a dead POTS. That also means that most everyone else on your street already has one too (probably).

      • The post says nothing about Internet access. It is simply referring to the creation of a network to connect homes to each other for gaming, communications, file sharing, etc.

        Internet access is a whole different conversation entirely.

        • That's an observation I made too. Of course, what I think would be neat is if these NAN's stayed off the internet for the most part. Imagine a localized network disseminating that stuff that the members want and ignoring the rest of the garbage. Find something interesting, upload it on the main neighbor-net server for everyone to enjoy. Oh wait, that's the old BBS world, isn't it? Who says history doesn't repeat? :D

    • Re:FCC (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Winged Cat ( 101773 )
      Heck, all it'll take is a few black hats roaming around, planting zombie hosts within reception range of various NAN APs, then rigging these zombies to do DDOS or to route various access attempts through random NANs. Who needs to root boxen to get an untraceable network?

  • sounds good to me (Score:3, Insightful)

    by esoteric0 ( 105786 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:22PM (#2447433)
    my apartment and the one nextdoor are already doing this with cables. we share a cable modem and have 8 boxes linked together. no complaints so far. wireless would be great for us, but catV is quite a bit cheaper when you work for someone who installs it. heh.
    • my apartment and the one nextdoor are already doing this with cables. we share a cable modem and have 8 boxes linked together. no complaints so far.

      No complaints so far, because you havn't been caught yet (or, there aren't enough people doing this to make it worth making an example of them). You are no doubt violating your cable modem agreement, FCC regulations, and local building codes. And these are the sort of laws that will be used to shut down any attempt at large scale networks that threaten corporate profits.

      • i guess i'm a little nieve. how does this exactly violate FCC regulations? Does the FCC prohibit people from communicating with their neighbour? Let's take away the fact that he's providing internet routing functionality, say my neighbour and i run a cat 5 wire between appartments (through one wall) for networked gaming? or maybe we're working on a project together, and share network resources. what is it about that cat 5 from my bedroom to theirs which violates fcc regulations?

        i'm also curious which local building codes would be in violation? is it against code to have an outlette which originates in one living area, and ends in another living area? that would really prohibit me from renting my finished basement that has a small kitchen and bathroom since it's all on the same wiring, maybe even has a few cross phone lines, cable tv lines, etc.

        so often we view it as, if you're not paying for it, your're stealing it. how about the position of , well, i'm paying for that (cable internet connection, tv, phone, water, electric, etc) i can use it as i damn well please including but not limited to sharing with everyone on the block. yeah, yeah, internet and phone service area fairly flat rates (per month) for most people, but that's just their charging structure currently. it hasn't always been that way, and may not always continue either.
  • I doubt that telephone companies would care. They make money with long-distance calls and lose money on local calls, so they rather make more money if people use other networks for local calls.

  • BAN (Score:2, Interesting)

    by merou ( 27090 )
    like in Building Area Network!
    that's what i've been doing in my building, linking 4 of my neighbours with RJ45, sharing internet connection, files, and stuff! :)
    I'm thinking of getting 802.11b soon... maybe Wi-Fi will unify BANs?
    anyway, for a building-scale network, RJ seems enough, what do you think?
    • How harrd would it be to rig up an apartment's junction box to have it share dsl signals amongst each other? Or is that a futile idea?

  • Ping times? Multiple routers? (Score:4, Offtopic)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:23PM (#2447446) Homepage
    I'd love to find out more about this. My biggest concern is about latency: Ricochet's network was a 'web network' where APs would route packets amongst themselves until they got to a downlink router that had a hardline to the net. This resulted in 500ms latency, making it unusable for gaming and other realtime activities.

    I'm also really curious how lookup tables and downlink load balancing would work in a system like this. If we have 50 AP transcievers, 10 of which are hooked to people's home DSL or cable modem hardlines, how will a router know which one to use to access the greater net? What's to stop one from getting flooded while another goes unused?

    I'm sure these answers are easy for those folks with extensive TCP/IP networking experience, but it would be great to filter this knowledge down as the technologies and responsibilities for managing routers is falling into the end user's hands.

    • Re:Ping times? Multiple routers? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Wolfstar ( 131012 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:44PM (#2447573)
      I'd imagine that either OSPF, or possibly BGP, would work just fine for this sort of thing. The problem is, you need a REAL router to do these things, not one of those $200 USD Router-In-A-Box jobbies that you can pick up from D-Link or Linksys. And even then, you're not going to be able to do that over DSL or Cable, because I don't know of ANY ISP that will provide a BGP table over those connection types.

      More likely would be some sort of setup where their would be a central node that those gateways would report to, and the routers at those gateways would report throughput for their links back to the central node. That node would then distribute that bandwidth as equally as possible on a per-request basis.

      This basically would be just like setting up any kind of NAT-based network with more than two connects to the internet, but without the benefit of BGP to help things along. It's possible, but sticky.

      There's also the subject of the real routers. Netopias won't cut it here either; you'd almost have to have a Cisco. Alternately, you could set up Linux boxen to serve as your router; Zebra is supposedly pretty far along, and would work for internal traffic distribution. There's also LEAF and LRP, two closely related projects for doing a single-floppy router/firewall/NAT device. Find them at:

      The LEAF Site [sourceforge.net]

      Or:

      The LRP Site [linuxrouter.org]

      It'd take a lot of effort, but if you happen to live in a high-geek-ratio neighborhood and you can share the implementation efforts across other shoulders, it should be easy enough.

      • Re:Ping times? Multiple routers? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by isdnip ( 49656 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @02:22PM (#2447798)
        Wireline routing protocols like OSPF are probably not well suited to wireless; there are too many assumptions that break. Radio links vary in quality and are less reliable than wireline; there's also mobility, as a given address might move around within the network. Or even if it stands still, its *logical* location -- which node it's getting best coverage from -- might change. Conventional TCP/IP doesn't handle that well.

        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.
    • Well, the problem with ping times is going to get worse before it gets better. CSMA/CD networks are inherently horrible at that sort of thing, and 802.11b is a wireless implementation of the Ethernet CSMA/CD standard.

      The way to lower latency is TDMA, and the problem is that it requires some sort of intelligence to figure out who gets which timeslots. Proxim's Symphony wireless LAN cards use TDMA to provide better support for streaming media and so on.

      I stand behind 802.11b as an open standard, compared to Proxim's proprietary approach. But from a usability standpoint, the ATM-like TDMA approach is better. You're not likely to be an LPB if you're connecting through a NAN unless it implements some latency fixes. (In the interim, the Cisco/Aironet cards (and others?) support a reduced-preamble mode which cuts down on the latency of an 802.11b link.)

      In order to make feasible NAN's with low latency, someone's going to have to figure out a way to allocate TDMA timeslots in an anarchic network. This gets really hairy when there are more nodes and bandwidth than timeslots, since a given timeslot might be reused several times across the geographic area across which your data travels. The intelligence to perform graceful time slot interchange, and manage the assignments to keep latency to a minimum for sensitive connections, won't be trivial.

      • Just a quick correction:

        802.11 uses the "carrier sense multiple access protocol with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) medium sharing mechanism." [1] The issue in contention-based wireless MACs is that collisions may not be detectable by transmitting nodes, so both Tx and Rx nodes participate in an RTS/CTS exchange prior to data transmission. This allows nearby nodes to reschedule their own communication so as to reduce the probability of collision. The side effect, as you point out, is increased latency in the actual data transmission; CSMA/CA is necessarily worse in this regard than CSMA/CD.

        Of course, in 802.11b, once a node has secured the channel, it has (up to) 11Mbps to play with. I don't know how Proxim's scheme works, but presumably it trades off effective station bandwidth (each node getting 1/n or somesuch) for predictable access. For various reasons, this kind of design never took off in the wired LAN world.

        -jd

        [1] IEEE Std 802.11-1997 Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications

      • I'm not sure you're entirely correct, that 802.11b is only CSMA/CD. You can run 802.11 in CMSA/CA (Collision Avoidance) mode by using Medium Reservation for hidden nodes. The Hidden Nodes problem happens when you have an access point where A can talk to the AP, and B can talk to the AP, but A and B cannot see each other. It's very normal in 802.11b WAN setups to ensure every card has medium reservation turned on, so they can avoid collisions on the access point. Basically, Medium Reservation causes a node to "listen" for a free "line", if it's free it reserves the channel with the AP. There's a chance that the medium reservation request may collide, but by and large it helps avoid collision difficulties.

        The downside? You're limited to 20 or 30 nodes per AP channel, so you have a similar problem. Also, in my experience, medium reservation very slightly downgrades performance per machine under heavy loads for the network.

        I've been using an 802.11b uplink to my ISP for two years. It's been an on-and-off proposition. We share airspace with a bunch of emergency alert towers since our town is near a chemical weapons depot (Tooele, UT), and the interference from those siren communications is pretty enormous (right in the same band with 2.4GHz). However, within a mile or so you can get really good performance using directional or YAGI antennas for an ad-hoc peer-to-peer net without an access point, or with an amplified AP (but you have to be careful you're staying under the FCC 1-watt limitation if you amp your AP).

        A friend of mine and I had a discussion on just this topic not long ago. We called the concept "ghettonet" -- that people shared connections amongst themselves, with gateways out to DSL, modem, or other wireless links. Routing and channel bonding were the thing we figured would stymie the effort, beyond just a few nodes in the NAN.

        Thanks for the info about the reduced-preamble mode; I cut my MTU down to 576 to try to get around the issues with some packet loss due to the interference from the aforementioned towers, but the negotiation overhead with my ISP's AP makes the reduced MTU of somewhat dubious value. It's reduced the number of dropped packets at the expense of bandwidth. Eh well. It's a fun game to play!

    • Re:Ping times? Multiple routers? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This would require proper use of ROUTING protocols, as most routers, or linux boxen can be configured to talk at least RIP and possibly more.
      For those without experience, routers move ROUTED protocols (TCP, IPX, DECnet) between interfaces depending on the touting information they have stored. ROUTING protocols allow routers to communicate with each other to determin best-path to dest. RIP is very simple and basically counts the number of hops to get to it's location. BGP allows time metrics to enter into the equation, and is considered standard on the net. While some ISP's do filter Routing protocols from thier customers, it would not affect running these downstream within your own network. Indeed most businesses with multiple access to offsite/internet locations use a Routing protocol to enable redundant/load-balanced/QOS services to work. QOS would be most useful for the gamers.
      Unfortunatley, the cheap $200 DSL routers are not going to support anything above RIP, if that.
    • MIT has been doing some really interesting work on a wireless routing protocol called Grid [mit.edu].

  • A Sense of Community (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BluePenguin ( 521713 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:24PM (#2447451) Homepage
    Could this actually get neighbors talking to eachother? And might the neighbors start to value geeks in the sense that the neightborhood plumber has always been valued? I mean, think about it. If you had NANs poping up, how long would it be before the geek (previously confined to his cable connection in the basement hapilly perusing slashdot) becomes a common invitee to neighborhood social events.

    "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!

    :q!

    • Can you say Ham? At one time (50-70 years ago) the Ham's, usually a youngish person or even a kid or teenager, would be the one source of information for rural communities (the U.S. has become a great deal more urbanized, and wired, since WWII). Newspapers employed them in small towns. And they were a big source of information during war time. Remember the the radio set is the equivelent of the PC back then.
    • Hmm more like:
      Grandma,"That shady nerdboy told me I could drop AOL and use his scary wireless thing. Now my computer has this blue screen! ITS HIS FAULT"

      And I'm sure it will get you invited to ALL the best parties: "Hello? We're having a fine old party here and all the incrowd is enjoying dowloading porn, but it's not going very fast. Could you come over and take a look at it? Oh and be sure to use the servants entrance."

    • Re:A Sense of Community (Score:5, Insightful)

      by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportlandNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Thursday October 18, 2001 @02:02PM (#2447668) Homepage Journal
      AS someone who has been known as the neighborhood geek, let me assure you I don't ever again want anybody in my neighborhood to know I'm a 'computer guy'.
      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.
    • Do you really want to be bothered?
      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.

  • The only real barrier... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Sj0 ( 472011 )
    The only real barrier to this is that unless you have some tech saavy neighbours, you'd have a pretty hard sell. Instead of thinking of all the possibilities (there are even more than with the internet!), they'll be thinking of 'why should I go out and buy a fifty dollar part so I can talk to my neighbours?'. Even with all the advantages, there are a lot of "I don't need access to a network unless I'm at my computer desk, and the internet is great for that" mentallity. If it could be done though, I could see this being a new utopia (think of the internet 5 years ago) until businesses learn about it and government agenices start to try to limit peoples freedoms using it.

  • Co-OP Internet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:26PM (#2447462) Homepage Journal
    A few friends are considering doing something similar in a guerrilla internet kinda way:

    We're looking at creating a bandwidth co-op where we lease a small amount of office space, and a symmetric DSL line (total cost, sub-$500 a month, closer to $200). The members get a single UPS'd power plug and an ethernet drop.

    You end up with whatever services you want to provide for a nominal startup cost and $15 a month...in whatever OS you want.

  • How Wonderfully Idealistic! ;) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Scot Seese ( 137975 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:28PM (#2447471)
    This certainly is a terrific idea! However, working as a network engineer at one of the nation's first widely deployed consumer wireless access companies, I'm all too familiar with the expenses involved in building such a solution.

    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
    • How about this: Everyone buys their own seperate connection to the Internet, and the NaN is simply used for high-bandwidth low-latency neighborhood communication, not connected to the Internet? That way people can share their files or play games or do whatever through a nice fast local network, and the Internet is still there for longer-distance communication, and you don't have to worry about paying for an Internet connection. With that cost out of the way, there's essentially no cost to the network and everyone can connect for free.

      Someone needs to write some point-and-click software for Windows to set up a network like this. Something where you could go to the store, buy some wireless network cards, plug them into some computers, run this software, and have an instant network. If it is easy enough, people will start doing it. The killer app would be MP3 sharing - Everyone in the neighborhood can share their MP3s at 1000x the speed of their puny modems that they had before. It would be great! Once the network was established, new uses for it would start coming out of the woodwork; uses so novel that we haven't even thought of them yet.

    • However we must remember, regardless of the technology available, ultimately the twin evils of Money and Regulations drive the market; free or otherwise.

      If it weren't for "evil" money, do you honestly think this technology would now be available to us?

    • Well.. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mindstrm ( 20013 )
      Having worked at a company designing and building the devices you use to deploy such networks...

      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.

  • Standalone NAN is easy (Score:4, Informative)

    by RollingThunder ( 88952 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:28PM (#2447473)
    There's really nothing to setting up a (open/insecure) NAN, provided it's just linked to itself.

    Sure, you could have problems with overlapping NANs, with frequency fights, but that's mostly handled silently by the hardware.

    Inter-NAN is a little thornier, especially if the hardware becomes commodity items installed by Joe Average. I can easily forsee accidental broadcast loops due to misconfigurations.

    The hardest one, however, is actually linking up the NAN to the 'net to get somewhere else, as has been mentioned in every other "setting up a wireless network" article. It's against just about every TOS. Sure, you could try buying a T1 lease, and charging for that... but now you have to track who has paid, keep people from hooking up others on the sly, provide support... in other words, become an ISP.

    Now, if we all said "the hell with it, we'll ditch the Internet", and built our own from the ground up (possibly with NAPs at universities, those pesky academics are always giving stuff away for free) with long-run links between towns in a kind of wireless fidonet, then you're on to something. The infrastructure costs on that though... yeesh.

  • Doubtful... but (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FatRatBastard ( 7583 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:28PM (#2447477) Homepage
    Maybe NANs could put the telephone company out of business.

    Doubtful it will put the telco's out of business, but I've always thought that cheap (over public spectrum) wireless is eventually going to be very, very big, and I think 802.XXX is where its going to start.

    Like the beginning of ISPs, radio, TV and cable I bet that small, regional Wireless ISPs are going to spring up all over the place (because it doesn't cost all that much money to set up). Some will be non-profit, some will be small for-profit. I think we've just started entering that phase. Eventually the market will mature and there's going to be consolidation as companies start buying each other out, including the big telcos.

    This is still good though, because as the tech becomes more refined its going to give traditional telcos, Cell phone companies (who are trying to push G3) a run for their money, and keep them on thier toes.
  • Does the neighborhood network really need to happen if high speed internet is available in every home? If there is someone in your area savvy enough to help everyone get connected to their group router, then it seems likely that that same person would be willing to help everyone set up their own FTP/Web/whatever else server using their existing cable/DSL connections.

    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?
    • High-speed ISPs do a horrible job of routing wherever I've looked.

      What path do your packets take to get from your house to your neighbour's? How many collisions or how much backplane bandwidth does that cause that are unnecessary?

      Connecting neighbours to each other for the sake of their interconnectivity is different than connecting them to each other to save costs on sharing a cable modem.
  • Along the same line, if you look overseas, you will see a lot of neighborhood have done things along this line of "sharing".

    For example, I personally know places that share telephone lines, cable lines and even electrical lines to name some. While those neighborhoods have done so out of economical need and government/corporation irresponsiveness, doing the same in a developed country such as the US to create a NAN, or any other sharing utilities, is a dangerous thing to do.

    This is why we have laws and license personal for those tasks. If we don't fallow them, you will regret it.

    I am not against such projects, but just want to point out that things sound simpler than they really are.

  • retread (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Alcimedes ( 398213 )
    he he, i set one of these up in order to split the cost of a cable modem. you get a few houses running from one wireless hub and the cost of cable goes way down! :)

    and it looks way less suspicious than bright blue wires hung between houses. :P
  • I actually have a "Network Neighborhood"!! It is not that hard to do. Me and a friend live two doors down. We asked the neigbors if it was ok if we ran a cable across their yard. They said Yes. So we went to our friendly local computer dealer asked for 270 feet of network cable. He pluged it into his computer I plugged it into my hub. Click a few widgets and BOOM BANG We have a NAN.

  • Great idea... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 4mn0t1337 ( 446316 )
    Yeah great idea...
    Until one of the kids in the area decides he is going to be 31337 h4X0r and starts going after the pentagon or some such, and *you* get the knock on the door from The Nice Men in Suits(tm).

    Or the MPAA watches 20 people download MATRIX II from *your* connection and gets your ISP to lock down your account.

    Seriously, how do you prevent stuff like this?
    My house is close to our 2600 meeting, and I have thought of providing access for the meeting, until I am reminded that the feds used to collect logs off of the place we last used as a meeting place (and the owners of the cyber cafe finally kicked us out after they got fed up with the visits from The Nice Men in Suits(tm) every time we left).

    Last thing I need is a bunch of people screwing around on my connection, getting me in trouble. (I can do that well enough on my own, thank you.)

    • How to stop it?

      Don't connect to the Internet. We grow a newer Internet, without .mil, or .com, or .org.

      Maybe we get our all new TLDs on our own name servers, and BLOCK ALL THE OLD ONES.

      Call it a private network, and tell the RIAA, MPAA, and the various agencies to go hang.

      • Re:Great idea... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by darrick ( 413403 )
        ...and in the meantime, you correct all the problems with the "wired Internet" (especially my pet peeve, the domain name system, TLDs, etc.; what a mess!). You add features, rip out old cruft, and, in general, improve on the Internet, but on your own terms and not on some corporate or government type's terms.


        Well, let's rebuild FidoNet, but wireless! I still remember the first time I got FidoMail on my first BBS...how cool that was!

    • Re:Great idea... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 4mn0t1337 ( 446316 )
      Okay, my mistake.

      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.)

  • Shared Internet Connection. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by groebke ( 313135 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:36PM (#2447525)
    The real problem that may be encountered with NAN's is when a neighborhood group gets together a NAN (and assuming there are no technical/ fiscal problems) and wants a connection to the Internet.

    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).
    • A Neighborhood Network wouldn't need a connection to the Internet to be useful. You could play network games, share music and videos, transfer computer files, use it as a videophone, whatever, all without an Internet connection. Just the MP3 sharing aspect of it would be enough for many people to want it. Everyone can buy their own Internet connection if they want it, seperately from the neighborhood network. The logistics and cost of providing an internet connection through the neighborhood network can be entirely avoided.

  • NAN? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:36PM (#2447526)
    Not a Number?
    Not a (real) Network?
    Nanites against Nanotechnology?
    NAK ACK NAK?
    news.admin.net-abuse?
    Nethack all night?
    Nontrivial Address Nodes?

    NAN is already overused, and might lead to confusion. I could go on for some time. Why don't we instead call these something like 'Residental Area Networks' or 'LANS for Blocks'.

  • So you want me to share my paid-for ISP connection so a bunch of folks can leech off of it while at the same time the highspeed industry is going under.

    I pay, you get free access, we all lose out in the end when the ISPs who are the unwilling backbones go under.

    This is a case where there are real costs & TANSTAAFL.

    • Bandwidth is cheap. Installs are expensive. If you're doing the installation yourself for you and your neighbors, and you're willing to pay the provider more per month for TOS that gives you more bandwidth and the right to use it among multiple computers, then you are actually helping the DSL industry by helping it solve its last-mile problem. The ISP can always adjust their bandwidth prices for supply and demand.

      If you're hurting anyone, it's the phone company who would bumble the installation anyway until you give up on the competitive ISP and just sign up with them anyway.

  • I just don't see it. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by oneiros27 ( 46144 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:40PM (#2447554) Homepage
    As someone who's been involved with three different wireless networks, I just don't see this being a threat to the ILECs like you're thinking it will be.

    First, I had Ricochet. For what I wanted, it was great. I wasn't tying up my phone line, I could take my portable anywhere on campus and get a connection, and hell, it was a PPP connection, as opposed to the terminal connections my school was offering, for not much more than what a dialup through an ISP would cost. And it wasn't significantly slower, as it was in the days before kFlex/x2/v.90. It had its problems, however, as there were times when I would get some massive latency. The worst location I could keep the modem was in my apartment...other places were great, but the fact that I was in a concrete building sucked ass.

    My next network was a bunch of us from my work living in an appartment complex. We had some ISA wavelan cards that one of the guys had, and it connected up three of our apartments, to an ISDN line outbound. For what we wanted, it worked fine. When there was snow, rain, whatever, the connections would flake out, and you'd have to find a new 'optimal' place for the antenna. Of course, then the person with the ISDN line bought a house, and moved out. The new uplink was put in my place, but GTE had changed their tarrifing for residential ISDN lines [and our complex was 19k feet from the switch, so no DSL, which had just come into the area, and they weren't on the public cable system, so that was out, too]. For what we needed, it worked, but it wasn't a sort of 'set it up and forget it' situation.

    Now, I've set the wavelan cards up, and I've got line of sight to my neighbor, who's sharing my DSL [business class, not residential] line. It works better having line of sight, but it still flakes out randomly once in a while, and you have to nudge the antennas a little bit 'till you find a good connection [that whole problem with nodes and antinodes in wavelength].

    Wireless may solve problems that you have, and you may be willing to deal with issues, but I don't see people setting up a network, and watching other people start hogging their uplink, or probing their boxes, dealing with the support issues, etc. I do think that wireless has good potential in many, many areas, but I don't see it being anything for the telcos to worry about any time soon.

  • wireless neighborhoods (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zerocool^ ( 112121 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:47PM (#2447587) Homepage Journal
    Speaking of 802.11 antenna's, my friends and i at one point had a plan to get an uncapped ("business class") cable modem, and to share it out w/ wireless

    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

  • Have a look at consume.net [consume.net] to see a practical start on encouraging wireless neighbourhood peering through boosted 802.11b antennae in the UK. They host a database of active and potential nodes, so you can get an idea of whether you'll have anybody to peer with when you put your pole up.

    consume.net is aimed more at connecting people over hundreds or thousands rather than tens of metres, and the recommended kit reflects that at £500/$750. But once you've got your mighty 802.11b antenna and lightning rod up, there's nothing to stop you talking to your neighbours on their wimpy little PCMCIA cards as well.

  • Forget the Internet. Time to make a new network. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Catbeller ( 118204 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:51PM (#2447605) Homepage
    Let's see:

    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.
  • My girlfriend is in law school at Ohio State Univ. They have a wireless network, for the law students at least, that lets them connect in all their classes so that they can look up cases/case law/etc. while in class and taking notes on their laptops. Pretty cool if you ask me.

    I'm sure wireless networks will be the new way to go to bring the 'Internet' back to the users and away from the banner ad dominated corporate wasteland out there today. Besides, how is the RIAA going to try and monitor thousands of seperate networks versus one big corporatized MSN 'net? I think my next big investment will be a wireless card so I can start experimenting 'round the home in preperation for the first NAN that pops up near me. And hey, maybe there's even a market for being a NAN set up company that can help those little cookie-cutter home builder communities build there own individual NAN's?

  • Which is not Redmond, by the way, we're on the other side of Lake Washington, which has cities on islands in it.

    I've heard of some at the UW, think there's some around Phinney Ridge, Fremont, and Ballard, and some on Capitol Hill and Belltown. Speakeasy.org has some connections and there are free terminals to the freenets at some of the local cafes.

    I even think two of the nine candidates for mayor are involved in this.

  • ...we will all realize pretty quickly this is NOT the Internet...

    This sounds like the revival of the BBS. Oh how I miss those days, when everyone on a board was from the local community. When you never had to deal with advertising and corporations. Only people and most of whom were friends.
  • But unfortunately I don't have time to find it. The guy who wrote it had set up an 802.11 NAN with basic ISP services including internet access through his broadband account. I beleive he used Linux for his servers and maybe BSD for the firewall. Check rootprompt [rootprompt.org] or the various linux*.* sites. I'm pretty sure it was linked on rootprompt, but it was a few weeks ago and they don't seem to have an archive search engine.

  • If things go right (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HanzoSan ( 251665 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @02:03PM (#2447677) Homepage Journal


    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.
    • These freenets are great ideas, and I for one would like to see them continue...

      But think for a second on what would happen should these freenets upset the "powers that be"...

      They use radio frequencies, in a "free" spectrum - sure, a lot of other equipment uses this free spectrum as well, and companies have vested interests in keeping it open. But none of this stops the government from stepping in and regulating the system, taking back the frequencies, finding and prosecuting "pirates" who continue to use "banned" equipment, etc. None of this stops those same companies from going a different route if they see their subsidiary markets threatened (they may not want freenets).

      So the glass house come crashing down - simply because the equipment in use can and will be regulated by the FCC.

      As I stated before - I hope this isn't the case, and I hope this keeps flourishing - I would love to try to get in on it myself someday (when I have more cash and time). But I sincerely think that freenet members should start looking into comm technologies which can't be regulated (like lasercomm, or LEDcomm ala Ronja), rather than setting themselves up for a later fall (and yes, I know of people who are doing this, and have been sucessful on a number of fronts. I also know the arguments about there not being an "omni" capability with these type system - people, with wired systems there isn't an omni capability, but that didn't stop anything, did it?)...

  • Unlicensed wireless networks are fragile (Score:4, Informative)

    by n8ur ( 230546 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @02:05PM (#2447689) Homepage
    This is the ???th article in ./ in the last couple of months about building a wireless infrastructure on top of 802.xx.

    You need to realize that these unlicensed services operate on frequencies that are specifically not guaranteed protection from interference, and which are shared with other users.

    The power levels unlicensed systems can legally use are very low, and they are vulnerable to interference from cordless phones, other wireless data users, and other services sharing these unlicensed bands.

    All things considered, these systems have worked remarkably well so far, but they are fragile and there's no guarantee they'll continue working.
    • Actually, 802.11a is in the 5GHz range. This is a reserved frequency spectrum, unlike 2.4 GHz (Bluetooth, HomeRF, cordless phone, microwave oven interference).

      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.

  • Remember when telephone technology was finally cheap and easy, and each neighborhood set up its own telephone network for talking to each other?

  • Your Microsoft NANny (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @02:20PM (#2447789) Journal
    6. a common platform for Web of Trust will emerge. It will be anchored in real relationships since the NANs will be so local. Accordingly the NANs will become, strangely enough, the native environment for conducting ordinary purchases, sales and settlements in a way that the globally visible, anonymous and hacked Internet never achieved.

    7. the global Internet will come to the NANs for various confirmations of location, authentication and reputation. A reputation on the Internet will be unthinkable if you don't have a reputation someplace in the NAN environment, Like, who the heck are YOU, if nobody knows you on the NANs?

    Which is the way it was, sortof, before AOL discovered the Web, or Microsoft with MSN.

    Speaking of which, how much you want to make a bet the Microsoft either tries to take it over, monopolize it, or outlaw it as competitive to them?

  • ... Welcome to the Pr0n neighborhood.
  • Wasn't it called fidonet?

  • Why stop at only a few miles? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pongo000 ( 97357 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @02:39PM (#2447877)
    The amateur radio community has been transmitting data over wireless for many years now, over ranges that span the globe, not just next door. However, the FCC places some pretty stringent restrictions on what you can transmit in the US on amateur radio frequencies:
    • No music.
    • No encrypted communications.
    • Nothing commercial.

    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.

    • The biggest obstacle to amateur radio being used for this purpose is licensing. Everyone who operates a transmitter on this theoretical network would need to be licensed. It might be possible for your kids or wife to use the system if you are present (third party traffic), but that's no good when you're not around.

      I'll reiterate that no encrypted connections would be tolerated, but if you send your music in MIDI form, some people would consider that acceptable. As far as "commercial stuff goes," recent rulings have suggested that everything except the actual sale may be conducted online; some clubs run "Swap n' Shops," etc.

      Yes, I am a licensed amateur radio operator. No, do not take this as gospel; I have study books from various years that contradict each other. Amateur radio frequencies likely won't be up for grabs anytime soon; they are used for emergency management and are partially regulated by the International Telecomuncations Union [itu.int].

      For more information on Internet and ham radio, visit ampr.org [ampr.org]. Everything 44.*.*.* online has been an amateur radio station since the 1970's. Note that most of these (to be legal) do not allow you access to their systems. That could qualify as unauthorized operation of a radio tranmitter on their part.

      And if you want to know how over 350 amateur radio operators worked over 5000 man-hours helping in the aftermath of September 11th, go here [arrl.org].

  • Start linking the individual NAN's together and you have something like an "underground" internet starting.

    Who would administer something like that?

    Would there be any rules, or would anything be fair game?

    It could be a very cool thing as long as it would remain separated from the internet at large, there could be some security issues.

  • RU the helpdesk? (Score:3, Funny)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @02:43PM (#2447898) Homepage Journal
    You have 61 new messages.

    Beeeeep!-

    "Hello this is Ms. Johnson from down the street. The computer is broken and you have to fix it now. I didn't do ANYTHING to it it just stopped working. Don't ask me anything about it cause I don't understand computers. Just come over my house and fix it. Thanks."

    Beeeeep!

    "Yo you luser my skilz rule and I will h4xor your shit everyday!"

    Beeeeep!

    "Hi, can you - hey you kids shut the fuck up!!!, put that rock down!" click.

    Beeeeep!

    "Can I buy a computer from you?"

  • So.. first. I'm not talking about building 'free internet' for people.. just neighborhood networks.

    So you get a bunch of networks.. people doing whatever. Then you get some networks hooking up with other networks over whatever is convenient. Then you need some kind of unique routable addressing scheme... like IP.....

    The way the internet USED to work was, if you were building a network, you would use IP, and you would get your address space assigned, regardless of whether you were hooked up to another site or not. The reason for the unique addresses was so that you could join to another network if you wanted someday. The Internet is the result of this practice. Now it's all perverted.

    So what we really need to do is start again. And we can do it, with ipv6.
  • Where I live is cut off from the world. My neighborhood is served by a RT with a DLC; the RT is 18000' from us, and the RT is 18000' from the CO. This means (1) we're out of range for DSL (2) we can't get modem connections better than 28,800, and (3) no one cares about us. We also are without modem cable, so no cable modems.

    [we can get IDSL; 128kbps for $80/mo; I have this now]

    I've been looking at this for a while. My thoughts are share the costs of a fractional T1 and somehow wire the neighborhood.

    As it ends up, I can get a full T1 (with SLA) for $800/mo; split over 20 houses, that would be $50 each. That's on pare (or better, bandwidth-wise) with most DSL and Cable offerings in the area.

    In fact, the T1 provider in fact has no problem with sharing the circuit (a portion of their TOS allows such); they only care that there is a single responsible party.

    My problem is figuring out the actually costs of building and deploying a NAN. 802.11a is almost perfect; most of the area is open and has good line of sight.

    The key is "most". My house isn't in line of sight with the rest of the neighborhood; I have a barrier of about 400' of forest to cross.

    I'm looking for pointers to people with experience in building something like this. Or, companies that sell such gear that can tell me what is likely to work.

    Any help?
    • I'm no expert, but from what I understand trees = very bad. Supposedly one of the reasons trees cause so much interference is because they contain lots of water molecules, which prevents the signals from passing thru.


      However, If you can somehow get that signal over the trees, this would work, but you're gonna need some awfully big towers on each side to do it. Perhaps one of your neighbors has a better central location for the T1. I guess you could run fiber to the neighborhood from your house, but that would be very expensive. Normal CAT5 ethernet cable won't work either, because the distance is too great (100m (which is 328ft) max for CAT5).


      Anyhow, it sounds like you may have your work cut out for you. Check out the wireless access list: here [isp-planet.com] for more information and tips. Good luck--

  • Similar idea (Score:3, Informative)

    by mountain_penguin ( 43679 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @04:03PM (#2448521) Homepage
    The halls that i live in at uni (Bangor N. Wales) were all laid with cat 5 for years however the university refused to actually install the routers and switches till this year. Me and some other geeks in the building started planning the following solution to the problem
    Every 2 floors we bought 1 adsl connection (£40 pm) and connected all the machines to one back bone a squid proxy + linux box connected to eac adsl line + ip masquradeing then connectect each machine to local squid serevr and each squidd server to each other as peers
    make the squid server Masquarade but rather than just simple masqurading use a round robin DNS so each connection request went to a different adsl line. Hope fully this would keep down starvation/flooding of links. Using tos for more advanced routing and a couple of patches u can favour local (ie close low number of hops) connections if they are free and use further away connections when localtraffic is high so ping times will vary but bandwidth will remain constant.
    This also means u can use a large number of different ISP's so if one goes down every ones access gets slower but doesnt die compleatly
    so now you have a system where every x many houses share an adsl line amungst them and the larger nan is only there for local use or when there are a lot of local requests also your squid proxies share amungst themselves (most traffic is web only) and reduce total bandwidth use you can also use this to have ipV6 in the nan and ipv4 on the internet connection (this will help with namespace and ip allocation :))

  • This is nothing new (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18, 2001 @04:27PM (#2448710)
    This is nothing new. Windows 95 has had Network Neighborhood for years. You stupid linux geeks are so behind the times.
  • Funny how this somewhat lacking story gets approved, but yet my post with some actual substance, was rejected last week.

    Anyway, here's was my original post:
    I was sitting around last night and came up a pipe dream of sharing my ADSL with the rest of my low-income neighbors. I'd like some practical feedback from those of you with experience with Linksys gear (or advise another economical brand, but they seem to be pretty decent as far as low-end 5 port switches and also routers).

    My main concern is being able to control any sort of topology loops (STP is used in standard bridging/switching, what about wireless?). How can I control which Linksys acting as a Bridge connects to which other bridges?

    Any other design concerns in my little pilot test? What about scaling this to homes beyond... how many Bridges can be connected in series before problems occur?

    Details are posted at the following (currently):
    http://jason.artoo.net/#home [artoo.net]
    (now under):
    http://jason.artoo.net/#hacker [artoo.net]

    If a day or two goes by and I blog more, it'll always be up at:
    http://jason.artoo.net/blogger/home/2001_10_01_ind ex.html#6148163 [artoo.net]
    Newest posts here:
    http://jason.artoo.net/blogger/home/2001_10_01_ind ex.html#6334347 [artoo.net]

    http://jason.roysdon.net/blogger/hacker/2001_10_01 _index.html#6334590 [roysdon.net]


  • Instead of arguing and whining and picking during an association meeting, we could just duke it out on the network, in Quake Arena or something.
  • Some people in Sweden rallied together and bought themselves a 100mpbs network for their whole village. They dug up the trenches for the fiber lines themselves. Pretty neat stuff. I don't know if this is exactly what you were talking about when referring to NANs, but this is what came to my mind.

    Check it out: http://www.acc.umu.se/~tfytbk/mattgrand/ [acc.umu.se]. There's some cool pictures of the equipment, screenshots of 6mb/sec downloads, etc.

  • 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. ;-)

  • MaN (Score:2, Interesting)

    by snuffle_upaguss ( 526065 )
    theres a Metropolitan Area Network being set up in Brisbane
    • www.itee.uq.edu.au/~mesh
  • Seattle, where I'm from, has a free local wireless network setup. A number of people from the Seattle are have put up wireless antennas and access points to help the infrastructure. From what I can see, there are at least a couple hundred people already involoved with more joining. The web site for the project is here:

    http://www.seattlewireless.net/

    The map of all the current nodes is here:

    http://ofb.net/seattlewireless/

    I hope you fellow Seattlites get all your 802.11b networking equipment together and help the cause.

    - pr00f
  • neighbour: can you download the new (insert) linux distro and put it in your shared dir?
    me : sure, could you mow my lawn this afternoon?

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