Friday, November 04, 2005

cantenna

here it talks about the cantenna. I have started to move utilites as we are moving and SBC wanted to peg me with a $200 'early termination' fee for moving my dsl. I explained to them that we would be moving out, and the service would sit idle for 1.5 months but I was happy to pay the bill and not receive any service at all. they said the DSL had to be tied to something. so I suggested tieing the number to my cell phone and they didn't like that very much.

in the end, after 2 days of back and forth on the phone, we found that it appears we can cancel our current service, and as long as we APPLY for new service at the new place within 30 days we don't get charged the early cancelation fee. BUT, we are still stuck with a service contract. at least it's down to 6 months instead of one year. I'm seriously considering just paying the month to month rate (probably $5 more) and then canceling as soon as I find a nice neighbor to share broadband with.

its high time we build wifi networks like bittorrent. it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a system where people can share their connections for free, or set a flag to sell their bandwidth. theres a $1 a month connnction fee for all that want to be part of the network, and you just set what you want your bandwidth to be worth if your selling, and if your the leacher you set how much yoru willing to pay, and boom. instant network, everyones happy.

mesh networks:
tropos 5110
plugnplay solutions
communitywireless.org
mesh with WRT54gs
WRT54 open
openwrt.org
mesh discussion
locustworld.com

2 comments:

forkev said...

man, what a COOL idea.
mesh networks for bandwidth sharing.
NOW we're talking.
couple that with a server in the middle for 'public' files and we're off and running. everyone wins. we stop downloading the same crap all the time, AND combine the bandwidth.
i wonder if there is a way to attach a cat5 storage device to the linkys wrt54g, get it to share its hard drive into a mesh datastore, and all run on power over etherenet?
a drop in server!
couple that with port fowarding, a public dns resolver, on a few public ips and WAM - distributed, atonomous servers.

once 802.11N gets up and running, those meshes could be HUGE. i wonder how effecient that would be...

forkev said...

i'm sure there is some topology we could pull from the tor network to get it up and running (they deal with similar issues on an unrelated project) http://tor.eff.org/