Wireless Freenets As The Parasitic Grid

Lester67 writes: "Infoworld has a pretty cool article on the "the Parasitic Grid," which is basically people (mainly in large cities) opening up their high-speed access through 802.11b to anyone that wants to use it, and how it may threaten telecom profits. One guy has a pretty interesting use for a Pringles(tm) can too (but only after you've removed your hand)." This article ties together several of the recent stories on free-for-all community networking, and fits in nicely with the recent post on bridging networks with 802.11b.

Who reboots for changing an IP address????

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you sit down and reboot in order to DHCP an address?

What are you talking about? *Even* in Windows you don't have to reboot for changing your IP address, if you use DHCP.

Errors in the article

[Gaewyn L Knight]

Several people on the Bay Area Wireless User Group [bawug.org] mailing list have pointed out a large amount of factual errors in this article.
Such things as that the pringles cans are ANTENNAS not REPEATERS and that you can not get ANY wireless fully 802.11b access points for under about 160$ new (even on ebay).

For some more on this check out the mailinglist archive at [bawug.org]
http://lists.bawug.org/pipermail/wireless/2001-A ug ust/thread.html under the subjects "Did you know you were a parasitic grid?","Infoworld writer responds
" and "Unprofessional conduct on the part of Ephraim Schwartz". Definately shows how little this writer actually knows...

consume.net

[labratuk]

This kinda thing has already been going on in the London (UK) area for a couple of years. It's not exactly the same, but the principle is very similar.

It's here [consume.net], and speaking of which I wonder how its getting on: I havent had a look for a couple of months.

Re:How can this work?

[haruharaharu]

It doesn't. This is just FUD coming from the Linux crowd.

In windows 9x, you do need to reboot to change your static IP. WinNT claims the same, but you actually don't need to.

Re:How can this work?

[Sir Mix A Lot]

A lot of companies are working on support for mobile IP and mobile layer 2. It won't be long until the handoffs are seamless to the IP layer. It will require a mobile IP aware router in a couple of places, but that's not that big of a deal. As for the the 802.11 handoffs, you said that the cellular system handles handoffs (obviously). It shouldn't be that large of an undertaking to apply similar technologies to 802.11. In the end it just comes down to which access point has higher signal strength. You tell your current access point to tell your router to switch the new access point. Listen on both for a short period to collect stray packets, then switch entirley over to the new access point. At least I think this is how Mobile IP works...

Common Pasture Problem

[lewisatlewis]

Wonderful idea.

The problem seems like an economic one called the common pasture problem:
(see http://dieoff.com/page95.htm ) In the same way that a group of farmers will all overgraze a common pasture, a few people will abuse a free network, and people in areas of high density (say, living next door to a coffee house for example) will have their personal connections saturated.

Check out the link above or do a google search for common pasture and economics.

-Lewis

Re:Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

the downfall of this free wireless net could be the same as the downfall of CBs. They're still available and the bandwidth is still there, except that now it's full of foul-mouthed truckers cursing all night and all day, making civilized conversation all but impossible. Even on the emergency channel, apparently, it's just people hurling insults.

Having been a trucker and a user of CB radio, the truckers are not the problem. Childish and abusive behaviour comes from kids playing and immature adults who enjoy annoying others within their range.

These "annoyers" are ususally people who are not truckers, but rather individuals who operate out of a base station in their home. Nationwide, cities have regular offenders. These regular offenders will get "nicknamed" by the CB community to identify the source of the disturbance.

Truckers use the CB as a tool. It is useful for situations such as, warning other drivers of an upcoming road hazard and assisting with directions for the area. On the CB you will often hear truckers advocating proper use of CB radio.

Labeling all truckers as foul-mouth offenders on CB radio is akin to labeling all hackers as script-kiddies or crackers.

Re:Parasitic?!?

[monkeydo]

Well, if you are doing NAT then you'd need 100 IP addresses, on the other hand if you are doing PAT, (NAT using ports instead of seperate addresses) you'd have a shitload of traffic going to high ports. That's what they look for, not utilization. Saturating the pipe with a couple of big transfers to one machine looks very different than saturating the pipe with 100 people browsing the web.

Re:Pringles can waveguide?

[xof]

http://www.wlan2.dabsol.co.uk/tincan.gif
http://www.saunalahti.fi/~elepal/antenna2.html

and more of these on
http://www.wlan2.dabsol.co.uk/antenna-page.html

(from http://www.wlan2.dabsol.co.uk/page2.html)

:-)