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'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

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Re: 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

#161

Post by rdiddly »

walrus01 wrote: post #46

Actual ISP network engineer here: I'm sure these people are having fun and all, but it's insignificant in the larger scheme of things. (correction to original post: I did not at first see an ASN for them, or announcements of their own IP space. They have an ASN and announce two /24s, and peer at one physical location in metro NYC). Real five nines network infrastructure takes significant capital investment. This part…

I think maybe the whole point is that not everybody wants all that shit, or they want to experiment with doing without some of it. That last 5% of reliability is on the order of 50% of the cost, or more, isn't it? Is it worth paying double for the small 5% improvement? Not for everyone, obviously.

And that's true even assuming just bare costs without markups. Obviously when you take into account how much profit & graft is attached to every single level of that stack, it really starts to add up. Throw in the absolutely, inexcusably bad, awful experience nearly everyone has with the big telecom companies and their employees, and that's enough ill will to propel many an alternative DIY network.

Metaphorically speaking, you just told a bicycle owner what a terrible car he has. Or rather, warned him how much the car is going to cost that he doesn't want in the first place. Is it possible the bicyclist can actually tell the difference between a bike and a car? Maybe he even sees some advantage you don't? (As opposed to the implausible but apparently favored hypothesis by car-owners that no, he just likes punishing himself while unsuccessfully pretending the bike is a car. When we don't know a stranger's rationale we glibly tend to assume there is none, and they're just cray-cray.)

To make yet another metaphor, when all you know is hammers, the whole world looks like it's full of 1) nails, 2) hammers, and 3) things that suck at being hammers.

Re: 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

#162

Post by danShumway »

gowld wrote: post #157
danShumway wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that you're joking, but this is basically how public wifi works. A bunch of businesses and nonprofits offer free wifi to their customers, and over time you build up a big enough blanket that pretty much anybody can walk into a coffee shop or library and check their email. Tons of security risks, of course, but... I mean, I've used public wifi before during personal emergencies, and I was pretty grateful it exis…

Comcast doesn't do it for free . That is financed by bill-paying customers

Yes?

Comcast provides its wifi by allowing you to connect to any other customer's router. (Roughly) a mesh network provides its wifi by allowing you to connect to any of the other nodes within the mesh.

What's your point? Is the money/infrastructure less legitimate because it was donated? Is the public wifi down at the library fundamentally worse because its cost wasn't bundled into the price of a coffee?

Hardware is hardware. If it works, who cares where it came from?

Re: 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

#163

Post by mentos »

walrus01 wrote: post #46

Actual ISP network engineer here: I'm sure these people are having fun and all, but it's insignificant in the larger scheme of things. (correction to original post: I did not at first see an ASN for them, or announcements of their own IP space. They have an ASN and announce two /24s, and peer at one physical location in metro NYC). Real five nines network infrastructure takes significant capital investment. This part…

You have any opinion on if internet should be treated as a utility?

Re: 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

#164

Post by bigiain »

ForHackernews wrote: post #142
juliangoldsmith wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I imagine consumers would be fine with 95% uptime of a gigabit connection compared to 99,99999% uptime of 16mbit. I can guarantee that nobody would be okay with 95% uptime. That means that your Internet access is down for over an hour every day. Given that people go berserk when their Internet is down for even a few minutes, 95% uptime will be unacceptable to consumers.

Depends which hour it's down. Plenty of people would be happy to have their internet down from 3-4 am every morning if it meant they paid $10/month instead of $70/month.

FWIW, many of the people selling five nines would just claim those 3-4am windows as "scheduled maintenance" and go down for an hour every night anyway whether they need to or not...

(Actually, if I were an evil ISP lawyer/marketer, I'd try to claim a "Maintenance window of 1hr downtime sometime between 4am and 3am", then ignore any downtime of less than an hour during the day and if you complained about not getting yur expensive five nines I'd laugh and say "published schedule maintenance not included!"...)

Re: 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

#165

Post by bigiain »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #64
nycmesh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are upvoting [things that are not true about us]

> you are upvoting nonsense I don't think this is a helpful reply. Since it sounds like you're associated with the project, can you address some of the specific concerns mentioned, like reliability? Do you disagree that hundreds of thousands of dollars are required for five nines connectivity? Do you disagree that that level of reliability is required for your customers etc.

FWIW, I have many many companies as customers for whom I've offered pricing for three, four, and five nines of reliability (for mobile app backends, not residential ISP service, but lets run with it any way).

Not a single one of them has ever signed up for anything more expensive than three nines. Only a few have even discussed the differences between 3 and 4 nines solutions.

I'm reasonably sure I'd choose the same for my home internet connection - if offered representative pricing based on costs of providing 3, 4, or 5 nines, or possibly even 2 nines - I'd choose the least expensive because losing a few minutes or even occasionally 15mins a day of connectivity at home (or maybe more realistically an ~8 hour outage per month) really isn't going to bug me greatly - not if it's two or more orders of magnitude cheaper than a four of five nines connection.

Re: 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

#166

Post by oliv__ »

nycmesh wrote: post #112
quiet_obrserver wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the Wifi NAME in Manhattan?

The public access point SSIDs are usually "-NYC Mesh-" or "nycmesh" followed by location.

Inb4 everyone renames their networks to nycmesh-something and MITM unknowing crowds

Re: 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

#167

Post by walrus01 »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #101
walrus01 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is that people are fed up with the large ISPs and that the large ISPs have made it all-but-impossible to start an ISP. that's the thing, they haven't. Not in the service territory this new nonprofit is operating in. There's something like 14 different ISPs which overlap service area with them in their part of New York City, none of which are big nationwide Comcast or Centurylink sized entities. What they'…

NYC, and potentially a few other urban areas, have the capability to run fiber easily. I'm also just not sure why you're acting like this. You're being simply dismissive of the project. There are many successful meshnets. You've yet to give a specific complaint about this project and have simply ranted about how they're just small, underfunded, and not a real ISP without ever actually substantiating any of that or sp…

NYC is actually the textbook example of most expensive places to run new fiber, due to needs for nearly 100% underground, and extensive pre existing utilities. I'm going to guess you've never been involved with an outside plant fiber project.

Re: 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

#168

Post by bigiain »

nycmesh wrote: post #148
eric_h wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DE-CIX, our IXP, donated bandwidth to us, and we have transit also donated from Packet Host and WebAir. What is the incentive for them to donate bandwidth/transit to you? Your non-profit status? Do they get something else in return?

We get a lot of support from the NYC networking community, and we have a lot of friends at the NYNOG meetups. Everyone is very helpful and they also want the big ISPs to have some competition, so we get donations from quite a few people. Some also join our network and get nodes on their own roofs and help with other installs! DE-CIX is the biggest IXP and they measure their network in terabits/sec. It is not a big de…

So you're sharing a 1G connection between 600-ish users - all presumably on 802.11ac 450Mbps (or 1.3Gbps if they've got three-stream?) connections?

How often do you see full saturation on that link? I'm guessing if all 600 of your users all tried to stream one stream of $TV-show-de-jour at once they'd barely get 16Mbps each? Can one user's home office full of Apple gear flood the bandwidth downloading a dozen Apple software updates simultaneously?

Re: 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

#169

Post by nycmesh »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #154
nycmesh wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We bypass traditional ISPs by connecting directly at an internet exchange point (DE-CIX IXP) and peering with other networks. This is basically how the internet is formed, by networks peering with each other. We don't need this ISP layer.

I was referring to walrus1. Sorry for the confusion. Y'all keep doing what you're doing. I have big hopes for efforts like yours.

Thanks!

Re: 'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

#170

Post by GCU-Empiricist »

zug_zug wrote: post #107

I really don't understand the HN reaction here. Why all the presumed negativity? This is tech, the best encyclopedia in the world is built on volunteer work and donations. A genius builds the de-facto version control system on his own in 3 months for fun. 2 guys in a garage build revolutionize search. Certainly there are logistical differences between these things, but I don't understand why one would assert with con…

Because this requires brick and mortar industrial hardware to be logistically salable, lacking that it becomes vaporware.

I think an unconscious bias may be that a bad but free connection that can negatively impact the perception of web solutions from casual users, which in the end is the revenue base for everyone here involved in B2C business models.

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