“Successful” being defined as “Do they have any funds that Dallas can get at. Doesn’t matter if it bankrupts them.”
As featured in Person of Interest…
2 Likes
There’s a group of HAM operators that are already working on this. I’ll look around and see if I still have their business card but from what I can dig up on google they’re at
Honestly from the network side of things a mesh network is dead dumb simple. Throw up a few Pis with batteries and have them run babeld for routing between nodes mesh and internet uplink nodes all over adhoc mode wifi and one’s got a wide area redundant mesh network that can access & be accessed from the internet (with ngrok or tor hidden services)
I wish I had a back up of blog where the article for how to do this could be posted but hackaday has a good one https://hackaday.com/2012/11/14/mesh-networking-with-multiple-raspberry-pi-boards/
BTW it would be great if we could build one out as a committee project.
2 Likes
AREDN has substantial coverage in some areas, even some parts of the metroplex. But you either need to have an amateur radio license, or a licensed operator to provide a gateway between licensed and unlicensed spectrum.
And any form of encryption is unlawful for transmissions on any of the amateur bands. Look up 47 CFR 97.113, prohibited transmissions, second part of item 4) reads:
messages in codes or ciphers intended to obscure the meaning thereof, except as otherwise provided herein; obscene or indecent words or language; or false or deceptive messages, signals or iden- tification;
Note that I have not located any otherwise provided exceptions, other than the general provisions that disaster relief eases restrictions when no other form of communication is available.
1 Like
With or with out an ISP you are going to eventually connect to the backbone which is owned by AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink just to name a few. If you believe that any of these Business will allow you to connect for free or cheat them out of their money you are sadly mistaken. A simple T3 connection (45 mbps) runs around $2500 per month. For Higher speeds you are going to pay higher prices… Your ISP can sell you the same speed for pennies because the will sell that same 45 mbps service to 100 people knowing that rarely will the demand for the full bandwidth be required and if it is "Oh Well’
And no I did not sleep at a Holiday Inn last night, but I do work for the beast…I mean phone company
@Sk8nmike They claim to not be connected to an ISPs backbone. I do not understand the difference between what they are claiming vs what you are saying must happen. Can you elaborate in layman’s terms?
AREDN has substantial coverage in some areas, even some parts of the metroplex. But you either need to have an amateur radio license
And any form of encryption is unlawful for transmissions on any of the amateur bands
Hence why I’m more pro on building a mesh network with a bunch of self contained raspberry pis and doing a community civic hacking kind of thing like Hacker Pirate Radio in Boulder did with giving away equipment to those that would “host” it.
This topic warrants a SIG meeting. Who would be interested?
1 Like
There are several AREDN nodes in the Carrollton area. DMS is in a bit of a hole terrain wise, but if we have line of sight with any of those stations, we could help extend the network to the west by putting a node up at DMS.
As noted, this is an amateur radio network. So perhaps this would be a better fit in the amateur radio sig.
With the current version of the software, there are internet gateway and tunnelling capabilities.
Once again, this is NOT intended as a replacement for an ISP. It’s technical skill building and emergency comms capability.
How would this work with ANY realistic Internet access use case? Many sites are SSL only (e.g. banking).
Sounds like fun!
ANY realistic Internet access use case? Many sites are SSL only (e.g. banking).
Because what I’m proposing as a direction is using 802.11AC in ad-hoc mode with dual-band config and layer 3 routing via either the babel routing protocol or .batman routing protocol.
Hardware would be solar+battery powered COTS arm boards with at least two wifi nics and custom case for securing against weather or vandalism.
Routing would look something like this:
Exit nodes would be connected to an isp uplink while the rest of the “grid nodes” (rpi based or some other cots) run the routing software and pass traffic to the next hop.
So it works like this:
- Alice joins the grid and points her browser to example.com
- her closes grid node traffics her request towards Bob
- Bob’s isp routes traffic to example.com
- example.com replies to Bob
- Bob passes it back over to the grid where Alice awaits at the end
- All nodes in the grid including exit nodes agree to net neutrality as a whole
There’s other areas we would need to discuss but that’s the general high level idea and over all I’m inspired by how KBFR had their “The Transmitter Site” setup just with 802.11 wan mesh instead.
Imagine the backbone as our city water supply. There is a pumping station which pulls water out of the lake and sends it into the distribution system to be passed down to the individual homes in decreasing pipe sizes. Other cities that want to draw water from our supply pay us a fee to do so based on how much water they plan to pump out (mbps). The city is not going to allow someone to pump water for free.
So this mesh internet will have to have a paying source to the internet somewhere. Useless there are a bunch of people willing to open up their paid connection for others to use for free, you won’t be on the internet, just a private network sharing data.
That’s what I thought, I was confused with the ARDEN reference, looked like a dead end for what we’re talking about here. I’ve done 802.11 mesh (I work in Wi-Fi at AT&T) and would find this interesting. We shy away from it, too many issues and costly support, but it is an interesting topic. What would the SIG’s goals be?
SIG’s goals be
- R&D of the grid nodes
- R&D of node provider client software
- Deployment of the greater community grid mesh backbone across the DFW area where viable
- Recruitment of relay node and exit node providers via various strategies and intensive programs
- Manage Governance oversight over the community grid as a whole
- And because this is one a VCC and Civic hacking kind of thing; Work with city officials and Education Centers to provide access to the community, students, and those of special needs.
1 Like
And for bonus round points…
if we can pull it off. A geosynchronous micro sat for makerspaces and exit points to the connected with CCCHH’s ChaosVPN
3 Likes
Seen a lot of these over the years, both commercial and home-rigged. The one thing I can say about them, is that they uniformly suck.
You can go out and for $50, buy a cheapo linksys or buffalo router, burn DD-WRT on it, and hey presto, you can fire up WDS and start meshing. The hams have tried to take advantage of the higher transmit power permitted with a license, but higher power doesn’t get you past the fundamental problems of terrible performance over anything greater than 2 hops, and the physics associated with 2.4GHz radio propagation, and the legions of interfering radios between nodes.
I’ve tried high-end Tropos gear built specifically for mesh Wifi, and homebrew Hammified Linksys nets (RWK). They all suck.
This is the nature of wifi. It uses crowded garbage spectrum. Perhaps with highly directional antennas between sites aimed at one another some of the back haul problems could be reduced, but even then you’re only cutting out so much of the noise.
I’ve had fair luck in the past with small meshes using 5GHz for the backhaul and 2.4 for the local. The backhaul is where most of the speed loss is, and having higher speed and less interference makes a big difference.
I gather its signal propagation and ability to penetrate urban environments isn’t so desirable which is why it was originally relegated to unregulated use in the first place.
Cordless handsets, RF TV remotes, probably garage door openers, I imagine baby monitors all live in that space as well. But admittedly few are as … verbose … as wifi. And with the exception of cordless handsets as numerous.
Bit of an update, I’ve finally figured out a way to make it to the space after work. Took a little adventuring around on the rail lines but we’ll get the SIG scheduled towards the end of the month.
I’ve also found an older discussion on talk about the same subject which I’ll post below: