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

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

#171

Post by bigiain » Thu, May 03, 2018, 1:39 AM UTC

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…

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair

I wonder how much it's because so many Silicon Valley salaries are dependant on people assuming that replicating what they do is way harder than it really is? What happened to Britannica or BitKeeper or AltaVista might just happen to the ISP industry - or any other Start-up-de-jour...

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

#172

Post by nycmesh » Thu, May 03, 2018, 1:44 AM UTC

nickthemagicman wrote: post #143

Hate to sound stupid but how does DNS work on a mesh?

We originally used the qMp/OpenWRT package that included mdns, which is a version of zeroconf for the internal network. It isn't scaling so we now use our own DNS server to resolve internal addresses on our 10/ network.

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

#173

Post by bigiain » Thu, May 03, 2018, 1:51 AM UTC

GCU-Empiricist wrote: post #170

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.

I wonder?

Unreliable but redundant commodity grade hardware pretty much allowed "cloud computing" to eat 99.9% of "big iron" sales.

I strongly suspect what Google does internally with software defined networking looks a lot closer to what these people are doing than the traditional "buy a small number of powerful-but-expensive entrenched vendor network hardware" approach.

This mesh is kinda the network equivalent of autoscaling or autorepairing cloud computing strategies that are so common these days. Once this grows to 2 or 3 IXP connections it won't surprise me much to find they stomp the traditional ISP model reliability-wise, and if they can build that "virtually", where they don't need much more than a bunch of somewhat transient mesh participants with a few medium reliability "super nodes" which are mostly completely remotely configurable...

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

#174

Post by nickthemagicman » Thu, May 03, 2018, 1:56 AM UTC

nycmesh wrote: post #172

nickthemagicman wrote: post #143

Hate to sound stupid but how does DNS work on a mesh?

We originally used the qMp/OpenWRT package that included mdns, which is a version of zeroconf for the internal network. It isn't scaling so we now use our own DNS server to resolve internal addresses on our 10/ network.

Mesh networks are going to be incredible when they're widespread!

It's truly superior to centralized control by ISPs/Governments and the world will be grateful for this after this whole net neutrality debacle recently.

You guys are brilliant and doing an amazing job and I'm grateful people like you guys exist!

Thank you for the response!

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

#175

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 03, 2018, 2:06 AM UTC

nycmesh wrote: post #169

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

[deleted]

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

#176

Post by gcb0 » Thu, May 03, 2018, 2:19 AM UTC

oliv__ wrote: post #166

nycmesh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

why would you trust random people more or less than other random people? That's crazy talk.

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

#177

Post by StudentStuff » Thu, May 03, 2018, 2:35 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #168

nycmesh wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

That is a pretty low ratio in terms of over-subscription, on many cable networks you'd have 24 downstream Docsis channels @ 38Mbps usable per channel, for 912Mbps usable across all houses on said node. A single node often supports 500 homes, and that 912Mbps of capacity carries switched digital video, voice & data traffic.

Cable companies consider these high ratios to be quite embarrassing actually, as it shows how crummy their networks are: https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r31258251-Speed-Issues-Char...

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

#178

Post by alexandercrohde » Thu, May 03, 2018, 2:49 AM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #137

alexandercrohde wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I just figured that a pro-anonymity, pro-startup, pro-charity, anti-monopoly, anti-comcast community would see this as a win on all fronts. At least that was my read on this community.

My reading of the negativity in this thread isn't "here is why I am opposed to your project" but rather "here is why your project seems like it will fail". The latter isn't anti-startup or pro-comcast at all.

It's easy to imagine reasons something might fail, even for something that actually will be a success.

Compared to most funded startups, this idea seems extremely practical and feasible (1.6 million people in Manhattan alone). Wireless internet is already a successful business model (Monkeybrains in SF), and extending it with mesh may add latency but I'm not going to pretend to know more about it that the guy who is currently doing it...

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

#179

Post by Zigurd » Thu, May 03, 2018, 2:51 AM UTC

When you compare comments here a few themes emerge:

1. The internet has been captured by the telcos, who operate the internet like telcos have operated the circuit switched voice network.

2. We are all overlooking the fact that smart radios make spectrum ownership obsolete. That means that the potential of mesh wireless connectivity is orders of magnitude larger than can be realized in current unlicensed spectrum.

3. The assumption that anyone is owed a business model in internet service is going unquestioned. Of course it costs a lot of money to run the internet the way the Bell System ran phones. But there are plausible alternatives, not all of which are compatible with investor-owned near-monopoly "markets."

This is an economic tragedy and a case of local optimization holding a global optimum hostage. ISPs are a sweet business, in a way that costs the rest of the economy dearly. Kill the incumbents and reap an across the board boost in GDP.

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

#180

Post by woah » Thu, May 03, 2018, 3:13 AM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #95

jimktrains2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mesh networks are too complicated to be reliable over a long term I mean, this isn't true. I'm not even sure to begin. Perhaps specific points instead of nebulous nonsense would help us better understand you.

Sure. The protocols, the routing, the interference, backend and gear maintenance, regulatory requirements, expense and complexity of multiple WAN links, and ad hoc setup of said links in an uneven physical environment. To say nothing of managing uneven customer load. Running fiber is expensive but less complicated and less error prone. And unless I missed something, there aren't any initiatives by big companies (that…

What are you talking about? Most wireless ISPs running OSPF could be classified as “meshnets”, plus the whole internet backbone is routed by BGP which works in the same way.