Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 215 posts

Re: New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

#131

Post by corndoge »

woah wrote: post #66

Shameless plug: My company Althea ( https://althea.net ) is making router firmware that makes it easy to people to set up incentivized mesh networks in their communities. It allows routers to pay each other for bandwidth which means that everyone hosting a node earns money for the packets they forward. We have 2 networks live, one in rural Oregon and one in Medellin, Colombia. Also, 4 more networks people are current…

How's Babel treating you at scale? (What scale are you running anyway?) Are you upstreaming your changes?

Re: New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

#132

Post by unnouinceput »

Quotes:"The Mesh maintains a “super node” antenna and 31 hubs throughout lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn that collectively serve about 350 residences."..."“Plus the people are nice,” she said. “It’s a great community.”

Yeah, 350 is less then a block of customers for Comcast or Verizon. When only few people are involved everything is great, try to scale this bigger then you'll the real shit go down. It's human condition, individually we are smart, but when in large groups we're stupid.

Re: New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

#133

Post by c3534l »

unnouinceput wrote: post #132

Quotes:"The Mesh maintains a “super node” antenna and 31 hubs throughout lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn that collectively serve about 350 residences."..."“Plus the people are nice,” she said. “It’s a great community.” Yeah, 350 is less then a block of customers for Comcast or Verizon. When only few people are involved everything is great, try to scale this bigger then you'll the real shit go down. It's human c…

Does it need to be scaled up beyond a community of neighbors?

Re: New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

#134

Post by jotto »

some context on the primary ISP in NYC: 1 year ago (2018-07-27) Spectrum got "kicked out of NYC": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17628906

then in April 2019, managed to avoid getting kicked out by agreeing to expansion and paying a fine: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/04/charter-avoids-g...

Re: New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

#135

Post by dredmorbius »

c3534l wrote: post #133
unnouinceput wrote: post #132

Quotes:"The Mesh maintains a “super node” antenna and 31 hubs throughout lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn that collectively serve about 350 residences."..."“Plus the people are nice,” she said. “It’s a great community.” Yeah, 350 is less then a block of customers for Comcast or Verizon. When only few people are involved everything is great, try to scale this bigger then you'll the real shit go down. It's human c…

Does it need to be scaled up beyond a community of neighbors?

If you want to offer this as an alternative to more than 0.004% of the population of New York City, yes.

Either larger groups or more of them, or both.

Re: New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

#136

Post by jkilpatr »

corndoge wrote: post #131
woah wrote: post #66

Shameless plug: My company Althea ( https://althea.net ) is making router firmware that makes it easy to people to set up incentivized mesh networks in their communities. It allows routers to pay each other for bandwidth which means that everyone hosting a node earns money for the packets they forward. We have 2 networks live, one in rural Oregon and one in Medellin, Colombia. Also, 4 more networks people are current…

How's Babel treating you at scale? (What scale are you running anyway?) Are you upstreaming your changes?

Our biggest test network is only ~50ish nodes. Simulations show we won't have issues until several thousand.

Babel has been very reliable and we haven't really made any changes beyond our extensions. The price extension probably isn't appropriate to upstream. I'll admit I've been remiss up-streaming the full path latency extension.

Re: New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

#138

Post by mfkp »

spacecowboy17 wrote: post #137

What if every household enabled an open "guest" SSID on their Wifi router? Wouldn't it have a huge positive impact of giving access to people who can't afford mobile data or home internet?

Sure, but then you have random people doing illegal things on your network and it gets linked back to you. Also, most of the major ISPs are implementing data caps, so I wouldn't want to get overage charges because someone used all my data.

Re: New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

#139

Post by myself248 »

oskapt wrote: post #112
corey_moncure wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already illegal twice over. Anyone "forwarding" packets from a connection to an ISP is almost certainly in breach of contract. Amateur packet radio service regulations state that you may not use it for applications that are available over commercial services.

This isn’t APRS or amateur radio at all. The article doesn’t call out the band info, but if this is running over 2.4 or 5 GHz, it’s unlicensed spectrum and available for use by anyone. If they were running over licensed spectrum, the FCC would have shut them down in the US.

Hams can run high power and high gain antennae with regular wifi gear, they call it HSMM. It doesn't sound like the mesh folks are doing that either, and even if they were, might it fall under part 15.23?

Re: New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

#140

Post by dahfizz »

spacecowboy17 wrote: post #137

What if every household enabled an open "guest" SSID on their Wifi router? Wouldn't it have a huge positive impact of giving access to people who can't afford mobile data or home internet?

You'd lose bandwidth and gain liability. Not a winning proposition.
Post reply on HN