Open Spectrum Does Not Mean Free Internet 60
CowboyRobot writes "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski recently proposed making RF spectrum publicly available, and many in the media (including the Washington Post) have been mistakenly conflating open access to WiFi signal with free Internet access; anyone can put up a wireless access point but that doesn't give them access to the Internet. The proposal will probably mean more attempts at providing free Internet access to specific neighborhoods or municipalities, but as Larry Seltzer at NetworkComputing points out, these programs also usually forget that access to signal is not the same as access to the Internet. After getting the funding to wire a city, these isn't money left to pay for the actual bandwidth usage."
Re: (Score:2)
So... what's the point? You're either limited to a LAN-sized network within a building or campus, or you're laying fiber yourself to create a WAN and you'll end up spending more than the bandwidth they can't afford anyway. At any rate, the point is people want access to Internet resources, which requires connection to an ISP at some point in the chain and therefore bandwidth charges.
Re: (Score:1)
You're an idiot. What ISP? The idea seems to be to make a full AS and THEN interface it with the other AS that make up Internet. Nothing is that has anything to do with the ludicrous scam that is the public-facing Internet access industry.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
yeah! AND LET'S TIE THOSE NETWORKS TOGETHE VIA INTERNET!!!
oh wait....................
and if you really want access to such a "local net", just go to some parts of russia or just about any reasonable large university housing project anywhere.
however the article is a bit bullshit since bandwidth isn't _that_ expensive. you can buy 100mbit connections that you can pretty much rape with torrents if you want pretty cheaply. but it's the fcc guy so he's shelling for couple of big telecoms which like to create an
Re: (Score:1)
well, I was suggesting that people could just put servers that are only available on those "offline" locations, then people within that network can access it, then perhaps networks will overlap and be connectable then you can attach them together into a single larger network, an internet based entirely on wifi, completely controlled by people, not huge telecoms. one less reason to be bent over the barrel and asked by the telecom companies to like it.
I already know it's possible and I already know people hav
If they were connected, that would be "online" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
thats awesome! so please describe to me what happens when the telco cuts the cable, or you can't afford the cable? or there is no cable in the first place?
there was a reason I typed what I typed, I didnt just do it for fun you know.
what you seem to be saying is, because you are able to use fibre, you should and that would negate my idea, but if you read through what I wrote, you might start to get the reasoning behind WHY i said it and WHY it could be useful in some scenarios...
so perhaps we can push the re
Re: If they were connected, that would be "online" (Score:2)
Which was why he was suggesting replacing the expensive, monopoly controlled, centralized infrastructure with a decentralized, cheap, user-maintained system that doesn't require digging trenches and laying fiber.
Now, you can argue the merits of such a system with regards to bandwidth and long-distance links, but the concept is a valid one.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a valid concept except for two issues:
1. Latency - All these little, cheap wifi networks are going to add up to huge latency before you make it out of your neighborhood, nevermind another city.
2. Assholes - There will always be a few guys who are an essential link connecting a neighborhood or street to the rest of the network that decide to turn their wifi off just to fuck with people.
Re: (Score:1)
I suppose there are ways to know that and route around it if required, but all the equipment belongs to the assholes, so lets hope there are less assholes than we imagine in real life.
I suppose herd mentality would take over though, yes somebody might be an asshole, but being an asshole to a technology they themselves also rely on might make them think twice about being an asshole in that way and instead direct his rage at IRC channels instead, since it causes him less self-harm.
but again, just thinking alo
Re: (Score:1)
THANKYOU! somebody finally understood what I was trying to get at.....wish I had mod points :(
Re: (Score:2)
A city sized network should have no problem getting bandwidth to the internet at <$4/meg with a committed rate. A typical ISP these days might oversell that by a factor of 100, but they could provide excellent service by only overselling by a factor of 10.
That leaves not a free service, but at $4/month for 10Mbps symmetric service, or $40 if it's a 'business class' connection (where you get to run a heavily used server), it would be hard to beat.
Re: (Score:1)
ok, so basically we could have edge nodes all paid for by city taxes and available to everybody in the wifi "mesh" in the center.
that would bridge the darknet and internet together, but I still think that the darknet idea is a good one, we all control the hardware and depend on nobody to give those services, but as an addition you can gain access to other locations outside that network through the edge nodes.
Re: (Score:2)
Essentially, yes.
Re: (Score:2)
You have fun with that. Those SSL/TLS packets (that you don't have keys for) will be very informative. Very.
Unsurprising, unfortunately... (Score:3)
I suppose we nerds need to step up and take some of the blame:
We've been so industrious about our networking duties that when the noobs see an ethernet jack or an SSID they just go and assume that it will lead them to the bounteous lolcats and porn of the internet...
All jokes(but not all jokers, alas) aside, WTF is wrong with these 'journalists'? Reporting 'FCC proposes additional wifi spectrum' as 'FCC proposes free internets for the masses!' is about as conceptually confused as reporting 'Staples offers 2-for-the-price-of-1 sale on copier paper' as 'Staples, Amazon, New York Times take sides over plan to slash print media prices by half!'.
Seriously, I'm not expecting these guys to not fuck up something actually tricky, just to make the basic conceptual distinction between the price and availability of a transmission channel and the price and availability of what is transmitted over the channel...
The difference between fantasy and reality (Score:1)
Used to live in a city with "free wifi". It was horrendously slow because everybody used it and most still paid a normal provider.
Re: (Score:2)
Used to live in a city with "free wifi". It was horrendously slow because everybody used it and most still paid a normal provider.
Given that use of the relevant ISM bands is minimally restricted, and not charged for or sold exclusively, in most of the US(sorry, suckers [nrao.edu]), every city has 'free wifi' in the sense that the FCC is actually proposing to expand... It's just that a few of them also decided to put up APs and then connect them to something.
Re: (Score:2)
It's more akin to saying that anybody can write if they want to(subject only to some limits on broadcast power); but that getting published is your own problem.
Aim for "low cost" instead of "free" (Score:2)
If you make a public resource, you have what economists call a "free rider" problem: most people aren't obligated to pay in to it, so they simply take advantage of it without paying in.
This causes the quality of service to decline. It is related to the "Tragedy of the Commons" [garretthardinsociety.org] where overconsumption of a public resource results in its depletion.
A better option to "free" internet m
Re:Aim for "low cost" instead of "free" (Score:4, Informative)
With wifi systems, there are really two different problems, because of the two major choke-points:
1. The speeds that available technology let you wring out of the slices of RF spectrum you are allowed.
2. The speed of whatever internet connection(s) you've purchased to connect the thing to.
Problem 1 is the really fundamentally nasty one. Physics gives you some hard limits, silicon vendors give you some rather tighter soft limits(but at least they raise them every few years) and whiny TV broadcasters and cellular telcos keep you from expanding your slices of spectrum.
Problem 2, unless you are really in the sticks, is much more amenable to pricing-based solutions: it isn't horribly difficult to throttle bandwidth per-device, or do captive-portal authentication, so you can make fairly granular decisions about how much of your cake you want to have, and how much you want to eat. Have you determined that some amount of 'free' internet access is good for local business/a human right/a public convenience that local taxpayers want, just like having the grass mowed at the local park/whatever? Ok, provide unauthenticated access to that amount of bandwidth per device. Do you find that some users of your free service would prefer to use it much more heavily(to the exclusion of a home ISP, say, rather than just at the coffee shop or in the park)? Sounds like you need an authenticated non-free tier that charges more in order to buy more bandwidth to provide to paying customers.
If you are over-subscribed at the RF level, you are pretty much doomed, at least until better silicon or more spectrum become available; but over-subscription at the ISP pipe level is much more fundamentally solvable.
Re: (Score:2)
Its fun to mashup this interpretation vs public parks and public libraries. This brings up the next issue that where I live the parks and library are really nice places to visit, but areas run by some other subcultures turn into dumps you'd never dare to visit. I could imagine areas where the wifi actually works vs areas mostly populated with MITM attack systems.
One interesting contrast is a commons has no theoretical demand limit... If I make $200 annual profit off each cow, there's no reason to limit my
Re: (Score:2)
However with current technology its not possible for a person to use more than a couple dozen megs for a uncompressed 3D hdtv stream. On average, most will use dramatically less.
Yes, but people keep coming up with more demanding applications. I remember when very few people could use as much as a 56k modem, but hardware got better and new applications came along. That's been the way for a long time, ever since people started hooking computers up to telecommunications equipment...
Re: (Score:2)
Disagree. Back when I used my first 300 baud modem around 1981ish I had no problem thinking about "looking at still pictures" or "hearing sound" or, although it seemed kinda far out, sound and live video. Easily imagined, this stuff was all over sci-fi books and movies however unrealistic/magical it appeared at the time. Now its here.
But what can be imagined that anyone wants that takes bandwidth beyond high res 3-d surround sound video? Touchy-feely stuff is actually pretty low bandwidth. Smell and ta
Re: (Score:2)
True -- but if you add up, say, the bandwidth needed for a wall-sized display at 600ppi and 80fps I think you'll be surprised at how much bandwidth is required. We have a ways to go.
Re: (Score:2)
free wifi is good for torrenting, porn and anything else to save your bandwidth and use up the free stuff
Sad (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect that they don't know that and are, instead, approaching the problem through some sort of horrible caricature of naive Bayesian induction:
"The whole system is a magical black box that I don't understand. However, I have connected to 'the wifi' at home, work, starbucks, and the airport, on numerous occasions and in numerous locations. Almost every time I connect to 'the wifi', I obtain internet access. Therefore, 'the wifi' must provide internet access, and an FCC proposal to 'expand the wifi' must
Re: (Score:2)
Silly comparison maybe, but it's more for the point that other groups who defend knowledge take it seriously and yet most "knowledgeable" electronic geeks smile, nod and just move on without doing
Re: (Score:2)
Your right and this is what we need to stop! If someone willfully insulted the writings and work of Shakespeare you would have 50 thousand english and play nuts ready to kill the offender, however when someone makes a completely wrong statement about computer / electronics, most of us sit back and do nothing.
Silly comparison maybe, but it's more for the point that other groups who defend knowledge take it seriously and yet most "knowledgeable" electronic geeks smile, nod and just move on without doing anything at all.
They consider it much ado about nothing?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
then telling people "That means we now get free TV", it's not true.
Thats the funny part, is the average drone thinks TV comes out of a $100/month satellite dish or coaxial cable, but there's a large fraction of the population that thinks they're smarter than the average bear because they know they can connect an antenna and actually get free over the air HDTV from the major (and many minor) networks. Then you add the crowd that thinks they're 'leet because they read a gawker article online about somebody making a pringles can wifi antenna... Combine the two and you get pr
Connecting Communities (Score:2, Interesting)
If the goal is to connect together people then access to "the Internet" is not necessary. Communities could roll their own network, their own servers and address space. All you need is a DNS server to bind it all together (or a P2P system). There would be many benefits to this. However it would not be the same as accessing the Internet.
OTOH a few communities could peer up, then a few more, etc etc. until everyone was connected. The problem would be interconnects. It would be slow without dedicated fibre an
Last Mile (Score:2)
So why couldn't an ISP set up a tower with a GigE connection and tell customers they have to set up a directional antenna pointed to my tower, but my prices are a fraction of what a wired or totally managed (cellular provider) ISP would have to charge. After all, we keep hearing that the reason we don't have a massive buildout of fiber to the home is because the last mile is extremely expensive. If the customer is paying for the equipment to connect, along with open white space spectrum (or whatever is bein
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I own one and it is exactly how you postulate. I started with one tower 12 miles from the nearest Fiber POP. Now I have 7 towers covering 34 square miles in less than 1 year.
I provide a good service for a reasonable price. No caps, no filters, just the "speed limit" that your tier of service is set to.
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to have a very optimistic view of tower cost / rental.
For a good laugh talk to the ham radio guys about what a decent 150 foot tower would cost in total, not just the tower but the installation, base, guying, etc.
Now don't get fooled by people who don't know what they're doin... all that "a section of Rohn45G is $300 delivered, so 15 of em is only $4500 ... well you're forgetting that 45G is "ham grade" and can only self support to 40 feet or so... You want something 150 foot rated (and here we ne
Re: (Score:2)
Tower costs are still FAR cheaper than stringing fiber to every customer. Try $7-12 PER FOOT for underground construction. $7 is nice and easy, just trenching in the right of way, while the $12 range is for road bores and other "tricky" jobs. That's just for getting the fiber in the ground, not for the glass or lighting it up. Hope you pass a lot of customers along the way. If not, that guy at the end is going to take a long time to pay back.
And you have to pay pole rental if you want to run aerial, along w
Who says we want internet access? (Score:3)
We want free, unfettered, networking ability. The internets dieing a slow death of a thousand DMCA request paper cuts. Give me a free alternative any day. If my local municipality setup their own local network, I'd hook up. We've all got this idea that "The Internet" is the only network to connect to, but I think an alternative is the only solution to the corporate nonsense that's been going on over the past 10 years. Maybe this time we can build it smarter, knowing ahead of time what these jerks are going to try and do.
Re: (Score:2)
We want free, unfettered, networking ability. The internets dieing a slow death of a thousand DMCA request paper cuts. Give me a free alternative any day.
What makes you think the DMCA wouldn't apply to your alternate "internet" as well? If you read the language of the DMCA, or other copyright laws which pertain to sharing of files on a network, you won't see the term "Internet" anywhere. The laws are all crafted generically, referring to networks and the like, but no specific reference to THE Internet.
This could be useful but won't be (Score:4, Informative)
This might resolve the net neutrality problem (Score:2)
Open Spectrum is.. (Score:2)