Motherboard and VICE Are Building a Community Internet Network (vice.com) 142
In order to preserve net neutrality and the free and open internet, we must end our reliance on monopolistic corporations and build something fundamentally different: internet infrastructure that is locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people who connect to it, writes Jason Koebler, editor-in-chief of Vice's Motherboard news outlet. He writes: The good news is a better internet infrastructure is possible: Small communities, nonprofits, and startup companies around the United States have built networks that rival those built by big companies. Because these networks are built to serve their communities rather than their owners, they are privacy-focused and respect net neutrality ideals. These networks are proofs-of-concept around the country that a better internet is possible. This week, Motherboard and VICE Media are committing to be part of the change we'd like to see. We will build a community network based at our Brooklyn headquarters that will provide internet connections for our neighborhood. We will also connect to the broader NYC Mesh network in order to strengthen a community network that has already decided the status quo isn't good enough. We are in the very early stages of this process and have begun considering dark fiber to light up, hardware to use, and organizations to work with, support, and learn from. To be clear and to answer a few questions I've gotten: This network will be connected to the real internet and will be backed by fiber from an internet exchange. It will not rely on a traditional ISP.
Re:Nice Contradiction That Shows Ignorance (Score:5, Informative)
I think what they are saying is that they are going to connect to the internet via the kind of provider that just sells you a fat pipe to the internet and doesn't care what you do with it unless what you are doing is harmful to their network or unless they are required to care by legislation, regulations or a court of law. The kind of provider that doesn't have a pay TV network (cable, fiber or otherwise) to protect.
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It's called a leased point to point circuit, and all those evil scary ISP's already sell those services. That's how all those little companies the article talks about haul their data around.
Yes, this is true, but this way a bunch of people only have to buy one big fat connection with one big fat wallet, which will carry some serious clout when negotiating the price. This way the buyer prevails, or at least there is a balance of power. "Socialism" from the bottom up.
if by "socialism" you mean free market competition (Score:1)
"Socialism" from the bottom up.
If by that you mean free market negociation then yes.... On subject: This exact thing happend years ago in our country (Eastern Eu), which led to very good connection speeds. Unfortunately the big ISPs bought the smaller networks but the net effect is that the high speeds became standard as consumers were demanding them. This is real world what happend, not some theory.
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We've known for a while now that socialist European countries do free markets better than the late-stage capitalism in the US.
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There is nothing wrong with people using their government to acquire clout in the free market. In fact, it's only way they can. They don't have the capital needed to play the way the super rich do.
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I'm not sure it's technically socialism, if it's voluntary. Depends on the definition chosen, and I don't argue definitions.
But it's definitely libertarianism.
There's room for (voluntary) socialism in a libertarian society. Or even a partially libertarian society that allows such libertarian institutions.
Allows them so far, anyway.
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Is a government of the majority "voluntary"?
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No.
If you and two muggers vote on who gets your wallet, majority rules. But the transfer of the wallet is hardly voluntary, unless these are the kind of muggers who take "no" for an answer.
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Basically what this article is saying is that Motherboard and Vice have decided to start an ISP to compete with other ISPs.
So, exactly what anyone in favor of repealing the FCC rules would have suggested they do and other than the attempt at publicity for their ISP using political buzzwords, not something which relates in any way to FCC Title II regulations.
The worst part is the authors of the article don't even seem to realize what an ISP actually is and that what they're doing is creating one. That doesn'
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since they're naming the guide they're writing "Motherboard Guide to Building an ISP" i think they realize it better than you think.
Obligatory (Score:1)
With Blackjack, and hookers!
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Re:PR Stunt (Score:4, Informative)
No, you dimwit. Unused fiber is dark fiber [wikipedia.org].
The Revolution will not be Televised (Score:4, Funny)
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The revolution has started now that we have a leader in the US who is for the people and not for the government.
Re: The Revolution will not be Televised (Score:1)
As long as those people have the surname "Trump".
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Exactly. The sparsely populated, rural county in which I live is served by community broadband -- fiber up to 1Gb/s in town, fixed wireless up to some 100's of Mb/s in the rural areas. The network is content neutral by default because we're not about to retain anyone in office who attempts to screw with our data.
A noble aspiration, but... (Score:1, Troll)
They should have kept their mouths shut until they had everything ready to go and the nastiest pack of legal attack dogs money can buy hired and hungry for blood.
Ajit Pai and his masters will want to strangle this baby in its cradle.
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Except this is community based. So when you live downtown and a free or near cost wifi opens up because someone was nice, there really won't be much the ISPs can do about it. They could try to deny connections to the people but if the AP goes to a VPN and they run a an internal tor routing node on the connection it would be pretty hard to figure out who is running these things for awhile.
Once people start to use them and like them, it'll be hard to put that genie back in the bottle. Remember back when
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I truly hope you're right, my friend. I suspect, though, that the laws written to kill this off will be more akin to those state laws crafted to keep Tesla out of the market, or drug laws allowing the police incredibly wide discretion to stomp on Americans' freedom in the name of "save the children and kittens".
There's rarely been a time when I wanted so much to be wrong.
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There's rarely been a time when I wanted so much to be wrong.
Well remember this when some kook in your city starts talking about public or shared wifi. Volunteer.
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And right below the dent in the mattress being made by your daughter. (snicker)
Peering? (Score:5, Informative)
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At $1.50 per month you can lock me to 10Mbps and I'll be happy about it.
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In fact, do exactly that. Charge twice the cost to allow for profits and to run the company, so:
5Mbps for $1.50 per month.
10Mbps for $3.00 per month.
50Mbps for $15.00 per month.
At those prices, EVERYONE will want to be connected and everyone will be able to afford it, even the poor who are using a computer they got for free at the recycling center.
Heck, even at four times the cost, it's still cheaper than most places. Nobody offers 5Mbps for $3.00 per month. And 5Mbps is more than enough to connect the dirt
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Make your subscribers use Wi-Max routers and do a mesh link between everyone, connect only a few users directly via cable?
Does it make sense or was that buzzword bingo?
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In theory, yes, but when everyone comes home after work and turns on Netflix or any other HD streaming service, performance will suffer - significantly.
Got a cost on these Wi-Max routers you expect/propose everyone buy?
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No idea for the cost of those Wi-Max routers. Maybe other ideas would be better. Maybe the wires only run the streets and you connect the subscribers via Wi-Fi or Wi-Max.
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Not when the streaming service is p2p from other people on your local mesh. I can even see netflix offering edge caches, either for a little cash by the node operator or for free just as a big fuck you
Re: Peering? (Score:2)
That's great, but how will people feel about going to Hurricane Electric's datacenter to use their $1.50/month 'unlimited' internet service?
Oh, I see, you are going to use magical infrastructure that never fails and has no acquisition costs or on-going maintenance costs, and will be delivered to each of your customers in a manner that doesn't limit their access speed or use any competing provider's infrastructure.
This is a brilliant idea, I can't imagine anything that might impact your well thought-out plan
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Actually community dialup radius networks used to be somewhat common. They were ran by mixtures of nerds, schools, and other community organizations. Often they'd sell radius access to commercial ISPs for their ppp dialup.
It's already happened before my friend.
How can you not know this with a 4 digit ID?
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I can't see it.
So I go to Hurricane Electric, hand them $1,500/month, and they give me (effectively) a Cat6 connection that provides me with an unfiltered, unthrottled, uncensored 10 Gb/sec connection. Great.
How do I get that out of HE's datacenter? Am I laying/renting a fiber connection from HE to the offices of Motherboard Vice? That costs something, but we'll consider that a manageable cost.
Now, I go up on the roof, and I install some Ubiquiti sector antennas, a whole bunch of them, three sectors per non
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The problem they're trying to solve is that there is a lack of competition for last mile access networks. Without legally mandated network neutrality, competition is the only way to ensure that the internet doesn't deteriorate into a new version of cable TV.
No, the last mile isn't the issue - it's the carriers that bring the data up to the last mile.
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Or you nationalize Hurricane Electric and the rest of the Internet infrastructure [slashdot.org] and watch the costs go up to and subsidies [wikipedia.org] become necessary.
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As I recall, web services like google, Netflix, and akimai, and others will drop redundant mirror servers near ISPs regional connection point to provide improved access to their services, preventing a lot of streaming traffic from travelling across the backbone of the internet. That's a good thing.
If this group buys a raw data connection from, say, Hurricane Electric, they will not have access to a local caching server for Netflix, so all Netflix traffic for this "unthrottled" internet will have to travel f
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Who says they won't have access to a local cache? Who says there won't be p2p caching soon after all of this catches on. Hell we can have a whole p2p web and you might just pay your local mesh provider for seeding.
Not that different from the internet when it didn't suck actually.
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The peering agreements are fine. You pay for a pipe you get that much bandwith and maybe there is a data cap. If your ISP can't pay for it's network connection when it owns a portion of the backbone itself and still charges customers 100/mo for internet.
Well I guess they need to go out of business.
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That's a lot of bull. All the trunk lines are paid for through their leasing contracts. Every connection is paid for. They want to double dip and regulate content.
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Well, hopefully we'll use the law to prevent that kind of crap, because it is theft.
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Once these sorts of networks let you get talk radio over IP nearly for free will you admit liberals are better a solid 70% of the time?
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You understand that there are no "tax rebates" in the GOP tax bill, don't you?
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It's more than semantics. There are nothing even resembling tax rebates in the GOP tax bill.
So if you're "calculating your upcoming tax rebates", I can help you out. Just put a big "0" on the line.
Google failed trying to do this (Score:2)
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and
"easily and reliably achieve several hundred megabits per link"
I don't think we would agree on definitions of easily or reliably.
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It's really easy nowadays. There are products you can buy for $200 a pair that come ready with integrated high-gain antenna in an outdoor enclosure, powered via Ethernet, injector included, and have software that guides you through the setup process, which consists of plugging in an Ethernet cable and roughly pointing the things at each other. There's an app for that too.
ISPs want you to believe that networking is hard, but all that's hard about it is when it touches public ground. Even medium haul fiber co
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So your plan is to litter the community with consumer-grade hardware?
And where will these backbone nodes be installed, on rooftops? You do know that landlords charge rent for installing equipment on their buildings, right?
On Telco poles? Think again, those aren't publicly-owned, your telco will want revenue if they deign to allow your hardware on their poles.
On your own poles/masts? Sounds great, you're gonna have a real fun time filling out the permit requests, sending surveyors out to map the facilities,
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Kenh negative nancy from neptune. It doesn't have to be perfect it just needs to poke holes in the ISP stranglehold on the last mile. The existence of other options.
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Awesome, you are going to compete with carrier-grade infrastructure with a consumer-grade alternative, your going to expect people to buy, configure, and install them themselves, and then your going to charge them for the privilege of sharing a mesh network node with everyone else.
I'm sure Comcast, Verizon, Time-Warner are all quaking in their boots at the thought of your "poking holes in the ISP stranglehold on the last mile."
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Oh I'm sure people said the same thing about voice and video when the internet first entered the consumer market. First it will be hardcore geeks and then you'll see commercial devices supporting the network whatever it looks like.
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It will suck at first but I imagine that nerds will handle issues quickly. Projects nerds are passionate about run at breakneck speed compared to the corporate projects that pay their bills.
"The Internet" as an entity does not exist (Score:5, Insightful)
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As it is now, most people have at most 2 options and in many places just 1.
So, because there are a limited number of "wired" broadband ISPs in a community, we need to build a "wireless" ISP, ignoring all the wireless ISP that already serve the area?
The entire country is served by satellite service.
The vast majority of the country is served by multiple wireless providers.
And of course, as a practical matter the majority of communities are served by both a cable company and telco company, both of which typically offer some ISP services.
In most communities there is typically only one
$10/GB (Score:2)
So, because there are a limited number of "wired" broadband ISPs in a community, we need to build a "wireless" ISP, ignoring all the wireless ISP that already serve the area?
Communities want prices lower than $10 per GB. From a document published by a nationwide wireless ISP describing its home Internet service [verizonwireless.com]: "Overage is billed at $10 for each additional 1GB." In the age of multi-gigabyte operating system updates and movie and game downloads, $10 per GB is seen as prohibitive for a household's primary information and entertainment connection.
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Re: They are starting up their own ISPs? (Score:1)
You know, like the way the post office 'juices' it's customers by offering Priorty Mail service at a premium over standard first class mail...
"Faster, more dependable service at a premium price! The post office is stifling innovation and will throttle first and third class mail delivery to force people to choose Priorty Mail instead! They must be stopped, we need 'Postal Neutrality'!"
Re: They are starting up their own ISPs? (Score:2)
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Wait, are you suggesting that internet providers should be run more like the government?
How will they handle the tough decisions? (Score:5, Insightful)
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>I also want to make it clear that my ideas of a free and open Internet do not include sanctioned/allowed illegal activity
The problem - and it is NOT solvable - is identity.
Either you can trace it or you can't, there's no middle ground. With the ability to identify who the source of illegal content is, you can stop illegal content (or at least catch after the fact those who share it). Without it, you can just give up trying.
Content itself can be masked any number of ways and WILL be so masked if you tr
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Oh give it a rest. It hasn't even happened yet and you are predicting massive oppression from a project specifically designed to route around censorship.
It's as if you scan every story looking for how you can work the cis white male oppression angle in. The fact that you have to stretch so hard to do it suggests that there isn't any real oppression to complain about.
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If it's vice, it doesn't need to be alt right, just their definition of it. They've really changed over the last decade. Sad outcome of safe spaces.
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If you're a twitter user it's safe to say you're an attention seeking psychopath. Twitter should ban as many users as it can.
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It depends on the provider. Eventually dailystormer will find a way to host itself p2p or out of hundreds of neighborhood providers, find one that tolerates them. I'm no fan of daily stormer but according to weev the biggest issue is actually not hosting. The biggest issue is that nazis don't have enough talent to run websites at scale and the few of them that can get ran ragged.
Getting your website shut down by your hoster is just the final straw that makes these guys give up and get a new hobby.
And the net effect is? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's nice.
But how, exactly, do these bastions of Bias-Free Internet propose to carry their customers traffic to and from each other, much less the world-at-large that everyone want to connect to?
That's right, through the backbones of those Other players. You know, the ones who are busily writing the new best-seller, "How to Throttle for Fun and Profit".
Community fiber (Score:2)
It would be interesting to try community fiber, 1Gbps symmetric broadband, for a low monthly cost maybe $30-$40 per month per household.
There's all this "dark fiber" that the federal government subsidized just sitting under our streets. If communities were able to connect the last mile to all that fiber we could bypass the telecoms entirely.
You'd basically pay nothing for internet access then pay for TV and streaming services. Fuck verizon!
Re: Community fiber (Score:2)
^^^ said the guy whose greatest technical achievement was 'hiding' the SSID on his linksys router.
It's great how you gloss over any and all difficulties in the so-called 'last mile'...
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: aww, cute (Score:2)
How many streaming Netflix boxes can this proposed 'mesh' or peer-to-peer Network support simultaneously?
These kids have their panties in a wad because they are afraid an ISP might choose to throttle a handful of websites, so their answer is to implement an alternative mesh/peer-to-peer Network that because of it's inherent design effectively throttles ALL traffic?
Brilliant! That will show them what's possible when the 'community' comes together.
BBS returns (Score:2)
It's like having a BBS with a bridge to the Internet (emails, Fidonet, ...) like we did in the 90's. :)
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Stealth (Score:3)
No, not sneaking around. These guys:
https://stealth.net/ [stealth.net]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Local, and they've been putting their own fiber in the ground.
They should consider partnering, if this is more than a publicity stunt.
Disclosure: I have done business with Stealth in the past.
So let's see... (Score:2)
...GOP wants less government generally.
So to "prove those dirty Republicans wrong", 'populist' web groups create a functional substitute ... that doesn't require government to run it or police it.
Hm, I guess that'll show 'em, right?
Clueless Article (Score:1)
The article is a bit clueless. Comcast and AT&T have quietly bought out the internet backbone companies that actually run the internet. With acquisitions and buy outs; the duopoly of Comcast and AT&T have acquired a majority of the ISP companies that provide connection to the internet for most of the U.S.
Now, they have won a victory in a battle that they have been playing since the mid 1990s making it lawful for an ISP to edit, throttle, and control what their customers can do on
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Meshing does work, if:
1. All your nodes are of the same brand, model, and revision.
2. If that particular implementation of the Atheros chip or whatever actually works fine with meshing
3. The driver support for that particular embedded linux you want to use is good
4. You are willing to accept speeds in the "single digits" of megabits even with "single digits" of users.
Meshing will obviously never work even closely as good as a 1300mbit AC device at 5Ghz in the same room. But that's what people tend to benchm
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Hey friend care to post your regular slashdot username that you totally have so we can educate you on the history of the internet?
The truth is that the internet was highly highly regulated for 20 years until some liberal fuck ruined it all by helping you get on.
Fucking liberals.
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You do realize that in many states it is now unlawful to set up a muni wifi?
The large ISPs have gotten court orders to shut down muni wifi as it is government directly competing with private business. Direct competition even if the ISP doesn't provide service to small town and rural areas.
That was one reason net neutrality, keeping an ISP out of personal business, was so necessary.
My personal experience with muni wifi is very very bad. When you fill wifi with inserted advertisements making reading anythi