Community Wireless Networks

Attendees

• Will in Portland & Twin Cities
• Matt - sudo mesh
• Niels - local services for decision making and organizing
• Juul - finishing the firmware for sudo mesh
• Grant - curious!
• Tomas - set up networks in Africa & South Asia; wrote WNDW; wire.less.dk
• Molly - BrisMesh in Australia
• David - interested as related to chat/communication
• Hilary - Oakland schools and connecting Oakland; OLPC in SF
• Adam - wanting to leaarn; sysadmin / networking
• Jenny - Open Garden; local content; Sudo Mesh

Topics

• Local applications
• Mesh networking - Dynamic routing to nearby devices
• Community networks started in ~2003, immature tech;

--> can set up a large antenna and have folks point toward it, or --> can hand out devices and have them connect to each other --> can be practical (no connectivity) or political (owned by the community)

• Node as a content broadcaster - convert people to producers rather than consumers

--> Athens Mesh and Catalonia network

• Village Telco - combined wireless box with a zip/telephony component
• Software-defined radios [very cheap, converts between digital and radio]
• 802.11ac
• Phased-array antennas becoming cheaper
• Security
  • Man-in-the-middle attacks prevalent
  • Location-tracking easy enough to do a traceroute to track static IPs and MAC addresses
• Limitations
  • Each hop cuts the bandwidth in half
  • Solution is to have a separate backbone, though that reintroduces centralized nodes
  • Very tricky for voice and video
  • 2.4GHz is tricky because microwaves also use it.
  • Trees! --> Sometimes line of sight means working in the night (with a large chainsaw)
• Village Telco
  • IP telephony and a mesh routing box
  • Limited to ~4 hops
• Electricity
  • Mali mobile bus
  • Get the devices to use as little power as possible
  • GeekCorps in Ghana - working with an ISP who'd built one hop of a point-to-point network and grew from there
  • Financial reasons for using this kind of infrastructure
  • Truck batteries are largely what's powering this stuff in developing countries - gelpack batteries of lithion ion
  • Could put solar panels on truck batteries
  • Hydroelectric power seen in Kosovo and Armenia, also in Nepal where they're running community radio stations
  • Must be locally-contingent solutions
  • Wind tends to deteriorate quite quickly
  • China and S Africa combined solar and wind power common
  • Portable wind power devices created for sailing, but quite expensive
  • Greenland's Telco providing to northern communities; insane satellite connections; runs off a diesel generator
  • Power requirements are dropping fast! Cheap Ubiquiti gear, the newer stuff
  • Supercapacitors
• Jylland connecting rural Danish villages
• Melbourne Wireless and Toy Satellite
  • Everyone using laptops with wireless cards
• Mesh through a VPN tunnel hides the source IPs
• If you bypass the set of standards it's easy to mesh! But usually communities don't have those kind of resources
• Smart sensor networks in research - guy in the Artic working with thousands of nodes
• Quality of service standards an unsolved problem

Advice to new CWNs

• All about your mission and values
• Freifunk: Give people a reason to talk with your neighbors
• Difficulty in defining success
• Join the global community of CWNs
• Watch the bandwidth requirements

Local Content

• Look to what Athens is doing w/ local Craigslist-esque applications
• Tidepools - Mobile mapping software designed for decentralized networks

Resources

• Wireless Networking in the Developing World
• Libre-Map
• LibreMesh - Firmware collaboration between Guifi, Ninux & Altermundi
• Freifunk - One of the longest-running mesh networks, based out of Berlin, Germany
• Free Network Foundation - Org founded to protect the rights of free networks and help spawn mesh networks across the US
• Engineers Without Borders wrt disaster scenarios and wireless
• Geeks Without Bounds
• Village Telco
• Access for All in the Netherlands - NLNet serving companies first, A4All was the alternative to this
• Microtik and Ubiquiti

Summary

• Author of the first edition of the 'mesh networking bible'
• What is mesh? Dynamic routing, decentralization of networks
• Practical (to get connectivity where there is none) and/or Political (to put networking infrastructure in the hands of the people)
• State of the technology, new hardware and technologies emerging
• Various projects happening globally, some of the more prominent have sold out, others continue to thrive