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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

#201

Post by thomastjeffery »

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…

The problem here is that those of us who have a positive presumption have almost nothing to say. The success speaks for itself. Positive comments are generally avoided on HN, unless they actually have a something to add to the discussion.

To contrast, those with negative presumptions have plenty to say, and incentive to say it (arguments are a form of discussion).

This leaves us with a skewed representation of attitude.

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

#202

Post by Pica_soO »

cabaalis wrote: post #117
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…

I love HN but there is a very healthy level of suspicion for developing different ways of attacking already-solved problems. May not be the best example but look at the comments on announcing Dropbox. Doing > Wanting to do in nearly every instance. So to borrow from popular culture, Just Do It, and Haters Gonna Hate.

Remember the guys who had it easy learning at university? Imagine you are one of them- good at using existing rules, good at ingesting and reusing existing knowledge. But deep down know you are unable to recombine, think outside the box or just experiment childishly - to truly innovate - then those tinkerers poking the unknown could render you a obsolete dinosaur any day.

Which explains while there is always a caste of "professionals" who for the sake of "security"(job) - defend against the relentless wave of people who unleashed could undo there little safe space in life. To be fair- most of them have familys, so they are not doing that for greed- but because out of vulnerability.

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

#203

Post by hux_ »

pavs wrote: post #187
tlrobinson wrote: post #151

There's an impressive amount of negativity in these comments. A community-run mesh network? HN should be all over it, but it appears to have turned into a bunch of network engineers telling us why they are very smart and it won't work, or is "insignificant". More power to you, NYC Mesh.

It's OK to be optimistic about something different. It's also ok to discuss the reality, that's not necessarily negativity towards a project. Are we only supposed to discuss one side of the argument and ignore reality just because it makes us feel nice inside? There are bazillion reasons that this is nothing more than a cute side project that will fall on its face when its time to scale in any meaningful way. Unless…

Once upon a time the network, storage and data center guys thought Facebook/YouTubes one to many broadcasting of content would never scale too. Now they fall over themselves to work there.

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

#204

Post by js1k374 »

hux_ wrote: post #203
pavs wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's OK to be optimistic about something different. It's also ok to discuss the reality, that's not necessarily negativity towards a project. Are we only supposed to discuss one side of the argument and ignore reality just because it makes us feel nice inside? There are bazillion reasons that this is nothing more than a cute side project that will fall on its face when its time to scale in any meaningful way. Unless…

Once upon a time the network, storage and data center guys thought Facebook/YouTubes one to many broadcasting of content would never scale too. Now they fall over themselves to work there.

I think pavs is referring to physical limitations of the technology that prevent it from scaling.

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

#205

Post by zimablue »

adamsea wrote: post #186
ForHackernews wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First guess is it would be most likely to be down when traffic is highest.

You could switch to mobile data on downtime? And make that switch automatic/unobtrusive?

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

#207

Post by 8bitsrule »

tlrobinson wrote: post #151

There's an impressive amount of negativity in these comments. A community-run mesh network? HN should be all over it, but it appears to have turned into a bunch of network engineers telling us why they are very smart and it won't work, or is "insignificant". More power to you, NYC Mesh.

It has been a few years since I learned about Guifi.net (non-English site; English portal:guifi.net/en/node/38392) in Catalonia/Valencia - a 2004 startup. WP says that (as of a year ago) it has 'over 33,000 active nodes and about 46,000 km of wireless links.' It's described (in English) in this 2016 paper

http://dsg.ac.upc.edu/sites/default/files/dsg/acm-sigcomm-ga...

as 'known to be the largest community network in the world ... and is still growing while successfully evading the collapse of the tragedy of the commons. Undoubtedly, this is due to the governance model that the foundation has developed....'

Since it's been around for a while, and still viable, that says something about the idea worth attending to.

More info: http://www.dtic.upf.edu/~jbarcelo/tmp/guifi.net.pdf

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

#208

Post by chriswarbo »

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…

This comment sounds very much like the AT&T engineers mentioned in http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex... (a post which appears on HN quite regularly).

---

> In the mid-90s, I got a call from some friends at ATT, asking me to help them research the nascent web-hosting business. They thought ATT’s famous “five 9’s” reliability (services that work 99.999% of the time) would be valuable, but they couldn’t figure out how $20 a month, then the going rate, could cover the costs for good web hosting, much less leave a profit.

...

> The ATT guys had correctly understood that the income from $20-a-month customers wouldn’t pay for good web hosting. What they hadn’t understood, were in fact professionally incapable of understanding, was that the industry solution, circa 1996, was to offer hosting that wasn’t very good.

...

> For a century, ATT’s culture had prized—insisted on—quality of service; they ran their own power grid to keep the dial-tone humming during blackouts. ATT, like most organizations, could not be good at the thing it was good at and good at the opposite thing at the same time. The web hosting business, because it followed the “Simplicity first, quality later” model, didn’t just present a new market, it required new cultural imperatives.

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

#209

Post by notyourday »

isostatic wrote: post #198
notyourday wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the location. If you are talking about downtown Manhattan you can get dark fiber between any major buildings for about $5k/mo. If you are not in a mojor building then Zayo would do it for about $20k build out worst case scenario + same $5k/mo, since Zayo touches a boatload of manholes. There was also Metro Optical but I dont know how large is their footprint. They are quite creative. But in general, go…

Yes, that sounds about right -- we pay about $4k for 1gig midtown-midtown However GTT offered me 1gig from New York office to London Docklands for $2400! Under $2k for p2p to office in Washington DC. If local internet is $500pcm , get two lines into the building for $1k/month, charge 50 people $30 a month and give them 1 gig and 25:1 contention ratio, plus the cost of dropping the fibre and a router, leaving $6k a ye…

There are actually a lot more interesting things that you can do:

Order an SDI video circuit from VZ to one of the interconnect buildings. That's $1.5K/mo but it is delivered as a point to point single mode fiber with VZ gear being plugged in. After they install it and leave unplug VZ gear. Plug in your 10G. You just got yourself a 10G transport for $1.5K/mo.

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

#210

Post by rayiner »

tlrobinson wrote: post #151

There's an impressive amount of negativity in these comments. A community-run mesh network? HN should be all over it, but it appears to have turned into a bunch of network engineers telling us why they are very smart and it won't work, or is "insignificant". More power to you, NYC Mesh.

The weirdest part of HN for me is the optimism. Engineers are pessimistic because engineering is hard and physics is unforgiving. Engineers like to point out things won't work because it probably won't and engineers like to be right. Mesh networking is incredibly hard to get right to the point where I wouldn't even say anyone really has ever gotten it right at scale.
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