Re: [PLUG] What became of the wireless mesh talk?

gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net> · Sat, 7 Feb 2004 11:13:59 -0500

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 12:10:20PM -0800, M.Simons wrote:
> Well, TALK is misleading.

No it isn't. There was discussion, synonym talk, of setting up a
wireless mesh among members of this mailing list on this mailing
list. I'm a little vague on why it ever left this mailing list.

> Some of the others interested and involved have included Darxus who also
> moved away.

I don't recal this having come up till after Darxus had already left
the Philly area, but I could be mistaken.

> Previously we had mapped people's housing and/or
> business locations to get an idea of the feasibility of locale and
> connections.  This may be a good starting point.

The exact discussion I recall, especially with Magnus for the brief
time that he and I worked at the same place and lived slightly
nearer to each other than we do now, involved the Swarthmore area.
This is probably a good place to start because I know personally
more than a few people in the area with a broadband connection who'd
be happy to share it[1].

It's also an attractive place to start because of the
technically-clued college students in the area. It's routinely
lamented that the Ville of Swarthmore doesn't really offer
businesses that attract students (or, from the Ville's point of
view, that the students don't frequent their businesses). It'd be in
both groups' advantage to support something like this, and they'd
see that if it were presented the right way. I don't have the energy
to present it to them, though, and already have wireless access, so
the part of this that isn't fun for me (the political wrangling)
isn't worth it for me. The technical stuff would be fun for me, but
it requires some support (dropping wireless relay nodes on
Swarthmore's campus--the highest point for a fair distance around--
that wouldn't necessarily need to touch Swarthmore's internal
network at all) that I'm not willing to go out of my way to get.

> I had also created a mailing list on yahoogroups called PLAN-TALK P.L.A.N.
> being Philadelphia Local Area Networking or something like that... my
> interest and philosophy in that is connectivity by any means neccessary,
> be it wired, or wireless, light, or otherwise based.

I don't see why it's necessary to fracture this from the existing
PLUG mailing list or, at least, why we can't just use the existing
mailing list infrastructure that PLUG maintains.

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 04:10:37PM -0500, Magnus Hedemark wrote:
> http://www.nodedb.com/unitedstates/pa/philadelphia/?
> 
> See the "phillymesh" nodes.

But these are just nodes. There's the relaying hurdles (both
political and technical) that we still need to cross for those to
really be useful the way we've discussed before. (Unless you've
actually got these hooked up together, in which case, great! I see
you added me, though "laundromat roof" is a bit of a stretch at this
point. It's more like "inside a brick building, third floor".)

(Magnus knows what I'm talking about, but for the rest of you: we'd
like to see a given node have one omnidirectional antenna and a
couple of directional, high-gain antennae connecting to other nodes.
Some nodes would have local Internet access--mine does, for
instance--some would just be relays. Addressing within the mesh
would be some reserved-for-internal IP range, and you'd be able to
carry DHCP leases between the cells. Traffic to other nodes would be
the highest possible--ideally, 802.11g. Traffic to the Internet
would be whatever you could get from the nearest node with Internet
service.)

> I don't mind setting up a mailman list on yonderway.com;  I just have to 
> find a little time to set up Mailman for it.

But we've *got* a perfectly good Mailman server already running for
PLUG!

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 04:59:25PM -0500, Magnus Hedemark wrote:
> http://www.yonderway.com/mailman/listinfo/phillymesh

::sigh::

[1] The basic concept of "share" here is that we wouldn't want money
for access, but we would want to know who you are. If, at some
point, usage by other people got to be a noticeable bandwidth hog,
we'd probably like some contributions. Our ISP, Speakeasy in fact
encourages this, and has mechanisms that are easy for Speakeasy
users to configure by which wireless users of our network connection
can contribute to our Speakeasy bill (even anonymously, if they'd
like).

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net