How a DIY Network Plans To Subvert Time Warner Cable's NYC Internet Monopoly (vice.com) 90
Jason Koebler writes: Toppling a telecom monopoly is the dream of many Americans, but the folks at NYC Mesh are actually doing something about it. On any given weekend, Brian Hall and his fellow organizers can be found around the city, installing directional Wi-Fi routers on rooftops. Anyone in the city who lives near another person on the network is welcome to join, and NYC Mesh volunteers will help you install a rooftop router. The network is still small, but it has partnered with two internet exchanges to install "super nodes" that have a range of several miles and are connected directly to the backbone of the internet.
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In a mesh, more nodes = more paths.
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Re:sounds good on paper (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not necessarily true if you're using directional antennas to partition the mesh. For that matter, if you're using directional antennas you could probably get away with infra-red links, which have a huge potential bandwidth. Doesn't sound like they're doing anything that fancy, though. Sounds more like a cellular system with a mesh local connection, which, which a small enough cell, could be done with next to no power so you wouldn't have a problem with overloading.
Yeah, if they were using a simple mesh network they could easily get overfilled, but then they wouldn't be using directional antennas, so that's not what they're doing.
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The part that you don't understand about two-way radio communication is that transmit power is always downwardly adjustable. Therefore, self-interference can be mitigated.
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Sorry, love the tech talk. But get a kick out of all this being a repeat of "wifi for all!" in the 90s. And the autes, and just... well... repeating the same BS every 10 years I guess.
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You can make your receive as directional as you like, but the transmit has EIRP limits imposed by the FCC so you can't just focus it down to a narrow beam or amp up the power.
Also the wireless network may be a mesh. but everyone wants to connect to the internet, so it becomes a (multi) star topology centered around, presumably, a handful of wireless Internet gateways.
Also (can I have that many alsos ?) for most people the traffic will be coming mainly from the internet to the edge not the other direction
Re: Just another ISP (Score:2)
I don't think you need to throttle, but you can have speed tiers. You would probably require each subscriber to use PPPoE to prevent abuse.
If you have a node that is near a super node you will probably be using significantly more electricity and using more of your wireless bandwidth. That means less bandwidth for local traffic.
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I'd prefer to see the mesh hosting any number of ISPs (which the ISP subscribers would tunnel to through the mesh) kind of like when municipal fiber is done right.
Re: Just another ISP (Score:1)
Community Activism (Score:5, Insightful)
When there is a will there is a way. It's only a matter of time before the "last mile" problem finds alternate solutions. I *love* this!
Re:Community Activism: Yagi Antennas (Score:3)
They and others have been around for over a decade and are highly efficient. I assume that is what they are using.
One per row (Score:2)
Moving to town from the ranch to satisfy the whims of the human I was happily sexing with, we ordered up some cable to go with the only rental our budget would allow. It was like Christmas in April on our row, since the last paying cable customer had departed weeks ago... I say row, because it was ill-advised to cross the paved street with your bootleg connection.
As fast as the cable company would uncover illegal splices
Last mile monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
This will provide some healthy competition to a market where there's usually only one or two companies providing internet and who own an officially sanctioned monopoly in the area.
Re: Last mile monopolies (Score:3, Insightful)
It will provide competition until these guys are regulated out of existence. Never underestimate the power of a bag full of money dropped in front of politicians.
Survival of the bribiest. (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. A lot of regulation out there is NOT socialists per se trying to control things, but rather crony capitalism whereby fat cats (legally) bribe laws into place to keep small cats out of the market.
Socialists then get all the blame.
I'm happy someone is trying to stick it to a big telecom. Big telecoms have turned me grayer than Bernie Sanders over the years. They can die an ugly painful death along with Microsoft, Oracle, and SCO. I wish this new endeavor luck and success.
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Really? Far more often I see "lasseiz-faire" or the free market blamed for crony capitalism, not socialists.
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A lot of die-hard right wingers want to stick it to big telecom, too. The problem with regulations is that socialists in a capitalist society can and will use these regulations to destroy companies they don't like (which is pretty much all of them). So it makes it hard to tell the difference.
Socialism is worse than crony capitalism because crony capitalists only do evil things that they can make money from. Socialists will do any evil, and money is no object. In fact, they'll happily run their own natio
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Yep, socialism is the worst... we really need to get rid of that social security and medicare socialist BS.
Also, public roads and parks are a socialist agenda, stealing land from people and redistributing it to the public...
Let corporations make the rules, they have our best interests at heart.
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Such as slavery, polluting the environment, building a dangerous factories in the middle of a city, locking your employees inside so they'll perish in a fire...
Also, I really don't see why you assume a capitalist - crony or otherwise - wouldn't be just as hungry for power in all its non-financial forms as everyone else.
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The problem is without regulation, the small cats will not have a chance either.
Fat cat company will heavily discount in the area where small cat is, small cat goes bankrupt. Fat cat buys the assets cheaply.
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I find it amusingly ironic that the US, with its supposed "free enterprise" ethos typically ends up with a monopoly or near-monopoly in internet provision, where we in the UK, with a regulated telecomms market with a single near-monopoly carrier have a thriving market. Because we had a single carrier at one time, they are obliged to resell wholesale bandwidth to any qualifying operator - so, even out in the sticks I can choose from upwards of 40 providers, all of which rely on BT's infrastructure, and I do
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Monopolies are a natural result of unregulated capitalism. For capitalism to work, a regulated market is required. Adam Smith, which it touted by lots of people who apparently think that monopolies are ok and are lobbying for less regulation, mentioned that monopolies would appear in unregulated markets and warned that this should not happen.
People who quote Adam Smith and at the same time think it's fine to stifle competition very conveniently forget the other bits that Adam Smith mentioned about regulatin
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There is no monopoly. There are already 28 ISPs in Brooklyn New York:
http://broadbandnow.com/New-Yo... [broadbandnow.com]
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In NYC apartments you usually have one choice and that is mostly Time Warner cable. Some people also have Verizon FIOS. Most of those ISPs in that list are for businesses.
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From my apartment I can pick:
1) Any cellular phone service.
2) DSL - various companies.
3) 50-1000 mbps by the cable TV network.
4) Connect through the first Ethernet network we got in the area back in year 2000 which I don't know what speeds they sell because for whatever reason I can't connect to their webpage right now (even though I still use them.)
5) Connect through the municipal network which has 13 different providers which offer Internet at a speed from 10 - 500 mbps.
I don't know how many options that
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The easier regulation is to hold the router owner responsible for everything that passes through it, which will, of course, include child porn and terrorism.
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it has partnered with two internet exchanges to install "super nodes" that have a range of several miles and are connected directly to the backbone of the internet.
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Well, they mention that they are partnering with two Internet exchanges, so I assume TWC is not involved.
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> I don't understand how this works.
Somewhere, it funnels everyone to an AOL dial-up machine running Trumpet ...
Re:Mesh who's the backbone? (Score:4, Informative)
what about the bigger legal issues of CP & upl (Score:2)
what about the bigger legal issues of CP & uploading / downloading copyrighted stuff over this. Where the host can be the one doing the hard time.
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TWC will try (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for what these people are doing. I just can't see TWC letting this go without a fight, or at least a temper tantrum.
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That is the situation some WISPs have faced in contested areas. The incumbent wired ISPs buy up tower space preventing the competing WIPS from using it and then flood the ISM bands with generated traffic. Canopy gear was popular for this because it uses TDMA instead of CSMA. More direct measures like jamming critical nodes with a flood of traffic on the same channel from a directional antenna at long range are also used.
Community Wireless Networks (Score:5, Informative)
Air-Stream in South Australia have been doing this successfully for a long time and is one of the largest wireless community networks in the world.
http://air-stream.org/ [air-stream.org]
Also WACAN in Western Australia is doing well.
http://www.wacan.asn.au/ [wacan.asn.au]
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Freifunk is doing quite well too: http://freifunk.net/en/
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Don't feed the trolls.... Don't feed the trolls.... Gotta keep telling myself that...
Monopoly ISPs are a bad idea (Score:1)
So I love this.
Death to Time Warner (Score:3)
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Nice idea...
But to fit into the FCC's "Safe Harbor" category, where you, as an ISP, aren't held liable and legally responsible for the illegal content flowing through your network (think child porn and DMCA), you'll have to maintain records for each and every IP address: who is using it, when they are using it, and ensure you can send the lawyers to the exact location that was using that IP address at the date/time that they specify.
Did you consider this one legal facet of your idea (out of probably 100?) T
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Do you have a citation for this?
I think you might be referring to the CALEA [wikipedia.org] requirements which also apply to WISPs. There is no CALEA requirement to maintain the records you suggest however most ISPs do for other reasons and if you provide voice over IP services, the FCC does require location data to support E991. With or without these records, CALEA requires ISPs to aid law enforcement in identifying and wiretapping targets.
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No, CALEA is completely a different situation, and yes, as an ISP you would be required to conform to CALEA requirements as well. Safe Harbor is defined in the DMCA: http://digital-law-online.info... [digital-law-online.info].
Packet Ham Radio (Score:4, Interesting)
As much as I admire these folks, it's gonna be a network with limited throughput but potentially high resiliency except where it interfaces with the rest of the 'net. I've done many tens-of-kilometer shots, many home-brewed networks, using things like DD-WRT, Open-WRT, Tomato, etc., and it's great fun but it's something that requires regular heavy lifting, maintenance, investment, and quickly one realizes just how hard it is to not only keep running but to expand and grow. Go for it!
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How it could be done (Score:3)
How a Group of Rural Washington Neighbors Created Their Own Internet Service (November 01, 2015)
http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service (Nov 1, 2015)
http://arstechnica.com/informa... [arstechnica.com]
The "But all of the nodes are eventually routed through a
What can an existing network cartel do about such competition in their captive cities and states? Some car sale related ideas might be useful?
For security each connection has to be paid for, listed and have an ip range that can be logged.
Ensure every connection in the US to a consumer is a final hop directly to a federally listed provider by law?
Make sure the list of allowed brands that can sell to the US consumer is complex, regulated and very expensive to join.
A system of internet medallions per city, state that show users can be tracked. Only a select few traditional providers brands could have long term secure staffing for all direct contact with end users to legally supply the internet.
Invoke a law to alter free bandwidth use to ensure the final internet connection can only be for use by the user paying for their own network.
Users can connect to each other in a community network but any internet sharing is not legal. No direct selling down to groups of end users.
Track and chat down each home connecting and then find the new "direct" provider. Users will then have to reconnect to the more traditional providers.
God's light will save you (Score:4, Insightful)
We the Church of God's Light feel our message should be spread and shared. God's light cannot be spread by sound or by electrons. This is God's Light: it must be sent by photons. Google fiber is perfect for spreading God's Light, but many areas are sadly deficient. Members may also string their own fiber optic networks on their local telephone poles to stay in good standing. If your municipality, HOA, or zoning board objects: please explain they will have to ban Jewish eruvs as well and how much luck they will have with that. [tabletmag.com]
Sermons are from 6:00:00 PM EST to 6:00:30 on the summer solstice. Members are warmly encouraged to spread light on their networks at other times and for other purposes. It is all God's Light.
Can I get an Amen?
Cover up..... (Score:5, Insightful)
....incoming Time-Warner lawsuit in 3...2...1...
Oh I can't wait to hear how Time-Warner will claim that this "stifles their business" or that it's an "unfair competitor" or or "will promote child porn" some other such silly horseshit. Whatever it is you can bet the Time-Warner lawyers are working overtime thinking up ways to shut it down. Mark my fuckin' words.
I thought Verizon was also a player (Score:3)
Doesn't Verizon have FIOS and/or wireless networking through converted phone booths? I didn't know Time-Warner had such a firm grip on New York's high-speed Internet access market.
Monopoly? (Score:1)