Double Tall Iced Mocha, Lite on the Chocolate

There are some questions being asked about the Google wifi project in Mountain View, CA. It appears that the real world performance is not acceptable from some user complaints and the network appears to buckle under pressure! Imagine that, a wireless network buckling under pressure!

The wireless portion of the network is powered by Tropos, a “mesh” wireless vendor. Tropos has responded.

We know that wifi was not designed with these deployments in mind, however its “what we got” and its in everyone’s laptops. Alot of these problems could be caused by the standard issues with wifi deployment such as interference from other Part 15 devices and attenuation caused by physical obstacles such as houses and their pesky walls or roofs.

At the Community Wireless Summit I watched an informative presentation by Jeffery King of Northrup Grumman describing the Corpus Christi Tropos deployment.

My one question at the end of the presentation was something like this “Did your due dillegence cover assesing the risk of going with a propreitary solution and the vendor lock in that happens?”. Most people don’t think of something like Tropos as being proprietary because it talks 802.11 to the end user. But all of the backend/backhaul mesh is proprietary, its what makes them in Jeffery’s words “infinitely scalable”. The problem being that extending the mesh requires buying tropos equipment because they do not use an open standardized routing protocol. Jeff’s answer was an honest “I don’t know if that was investigated”.

So now my question is why is the google project Tropos powered? There are open source mesh solutions that could really benefit from an injection of cash to move development forward. In addition these technologies need large scale deployments to help move them forward and make them better. This seems like it would be right up googles alley. Additionally deploying an open source mesh network would also mean that it would be possible for the users to extend the network themselves in MANET fashion.

You could say that my opinion is such because I am an owner of a company that sells wireless gear based on Open Source software. However I think we have already learned of the Internet that prorietary protocols in infrastructure devices does not go very far. I think this particular issue gets overlooked as a result of people assumming the network is standards based because its 802.11a/b/g. Most commercial mesh implementations are proprietary ,Google is in a position where they could help out the Open Source mesh networking world and change that. It’s not too late.

So one of the running themes this past weekend was the Quality Inn Hotel. This is where Matt and I stayed. The Canadians stayed there one night and then checked out after being less than impressed with “Quality” of the Quality Inn. When asked how the hotel was, my response was “They definitely got the INN part down”. However they had free wifi in the rooms and it was close to the waffle house.

Anyways, I found it amusing that I received a survey from Choice Hotels, the owner of the Quality Inn. I am not going to fill out, but I figured someone else might want to

We value your input!  Our records indicate that you recently stayed at a Choice Hotels property – thank you for choosing us!  Please take a moment to complete a Choice Hotels guest satisfaction survey for a 03/30/2006 stay at the Quality Inn & Suites Historic St. Charles in Saint Charles, MO. Completing this survey by 04/14/2006 will help us continue to improve our customer service. Thank you.

Survey Link

Technorati Tags: NS4CWN

So it looks like the storm we experienced left some serious devastation in its wake.

So here we are sitting at the Sheraton in St. Charles, MO. It may sound like the beginning to a bad joke: “I am sitting in a bar with an Anthropologist and Physcologist from Intel, people from the and Ghanna Community Wireless Network, Eastern India Community Wireless and of course Matt.”

Bogdan of Belgrade Wireless just got done describing the network in Belgrade which has 30 interconnected nodes and close to 400 users. The kicker is that the majority of people actually use the network for local communications. Currently the nodes are mostly running Atheros G cards in turbo mode for the point to point links and they experience network speeds of close to 80mbs on the turbo mode point to point links. Its awesome to see community wireless taking off in so many places all over the world. One the coolest things wasto here Bogdan say when he started talking about his project was that its not about internet access, first and foremost its about building a local communications network.

John from Wireless Ghana is working on the project on tour with the Peace Corps. He initially joined the Peace Corp to be a math teacher, but is quite happy now working the wireless ghana network which now has 8 interconnected nodes on their network with 1kb VSAT uplink.

Among other things I have been describing to them the Seattle coffee scene, David Schomer’s espresso preparation innovations, and decompressing from the conference and the tornado incident earlier in the day.
The Summit went off with out a hitch, props to Sascha for putting it together and props to everyone that attended to discuss and share their experiences, visions, and inspiration.

So a few moments ago the Community Wireless Summit was wrapping up and a bunch of us were hanging out saying our goodbyes. In the course of 5 minutes a beatiful sunny day with people going shirtless turned into a complete grey sky with large green clouds rolling through fast enough to make everyone turn around and look. In the course of 30 seconds a strong gust turned it to screaming winds. Tornado I thought?? Really loud sirens started sounding, we all scattered to the nearset building waiting for someone with a key to the dorm building to let us in.

So now we are sitting in basement of a dorm at Lindewood University listening to the sound doors clacking and recounting what for a lot of us is our first potential tornado. The quickness with which the storm took over a completely sunny normal day was amazing. It was really just long enough to for you to start thinking “Is this a tornado wind?”, by the time the thought crossed your mind your running.

…

So 15 minutes later the storm has passed over, all thats left now is some steady rain and lightning.

Photo taken by Matt:

Nocat Auth was the first and for a while the only open source captive portal, written specifically to address needs in community wireless networks.

WifiDog is a open source captive portal project written by some folks from the Ile Sans Fil community wireless networking project.

WifiDog really shines in aggreating content and making it available in splash pages. It can take dynamic data feeds, such as geo-coded or location based information feeds and display it to people on the splash page. It has google maps integration and sports a monitoring map that shows you all the status your nodes running wifidog and will alert you if a node goes down.
In addition the fact that is designed to aggreate information feeds means that you could feed stuff such as Itunes sharing bonjour advertisements and display that on the portal page.
I saw it demonstrated at a session this weekend and am extremeley impressed. I encourage anyone looking for a captive portal based solution to check it out.

Network Neutrality

I have been long wanting to get more involved with Network Neutraility discussion, so this weekend at the Community Wireless Summit I went to a great panel discussion with:

Ben Scott

Victor Pickard

Harold Feld

Mark Cooper

In short network nuetraility basically entails keeping packets under common carriage. Network providers should not be able to manipulate 1s and 0s that they deliver to you, or even block certain bits. We have seen some of this for a while with ISPs blocking certain ports so you can’t run a mail or web server. But it gets worse.

The supreme court has ruled that Cable operators do not need to open their network ala telcos so that over your cable line you can choose who delivers you internet access. This combined with the de-regulation of the telephone companies providing access to the wires they run into you house is a bad combination.

Alot of people predict that this is the beginning of a duopoloy where everyone but the largest cable and telco providers will be weeded out.

The kicker is that without network neutraility and without alowing competition for who delivers your internet access, providers will be able to provide a new type of tiered service. Not tiered based on the speed you want, but tiered based on the services you get, just like cable TV. You want internet access? Well you will get basic internet access, lets say port 80 for $30 a month. Oh you want VOIP? Well thats the next tier up. Get what I am saying?

Large operators claim they will not do this, and they will not manipulate or block your bits, however they want to reserve the right to do so. Hmmm

Now of course there are always technical solutions to people blocking bits. You can always get around firewalls, routing acls, its been solved. Thats why we have things like RPC over HTTP. However the technical problem is irrelevant. THe problem is they can work this into their end user contracts so that you will essentailly be braking the law if you work around their limitations.

YOU WILL BE STEALING CABLE IF YOU ATTEMPT TO PASS TRAFFIC TO THE INTERNET THAT IS NOT YOUR TIER OR PRICING PLAN.

This is very real and very possible. Now there will always be ways to get unaltered internet connections, and those of us in the geek circles will probably always be able to get our bits around. But people getting on to the internet for the first time will not be getting on the same internet. They will be getting on the cable tv internet. They wont know any better.

If I had kids I would not want them growing up thinking that network access is a tiered service like cable televsion, or that its a one way street. This does not promote innovation, this does not promote communication between people over the internet.

This really hits home to the point that we need to continue building alternative networks, now more than ever. We need to be able to give people a real network that promotes communication and innovation.

Lack of network neutrallity will turn geeks into cable thiefs. Tunneling VOIP over HTTP to get around your providers firewall will the same as plugging your self into the cable junction box in your apartment building. That is wrong.

So I have heard some funny and interesting sound bites in various prensentations and Q and A, I will try and keep updating this over the weekend.

“Infinite Scalability, Totally Secure”
- Jeffery King, Northrup Grumman IT, in reference to the Tropos based municipal wireless network being built out in Corpus Christi

“Infinite Scalability, Total Bullshit”

-Kyle, Slice Networks

“Digital Divide 2.0″

-Ken DiPietro, Connx

“Earmarks are not looking so good in DC this year”

-Christian Sandvig

“So Benoit, how do you run the dog?”

-Matt Westervelt, probing Benoit Gregoire about WiFiDog

“Hey, who was that guy? You know the wireless guy?”

-Becca, ILSR