Every station an ISP, 1++ vote Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net> wrote:

On Sat, 17 Mar 2001, Jim Choate wrote:

...

900MHz packet (<$100/site) coupled with Plan 9 is the base you want to start from using current tech. It will require updating firewall software so that it also handles bandwidth throttling and fail-over routing.

I've looked at that, but I'm unsure about it... the problem is that if not enough people have it you're out of range - but if too many people have it, you're choked for bandwidth and get interference problems.

With a range of a few hundred feet to a few miles, routing can also become problematic.

It would be nice though: a $100 'packet box' for each station, that allows you to set up independent IP connections with your neighbors. If you can get them common enough, it would be impossible to cut someone off by cutting their ISP access -- 'cause out in the wild, a packet is a packet is a packet, and if all the stations run IP protocol, even if every ISP in the world rejects a packet, it could still make its way across any continent in short hops from station to station.

And this is not just an anti-censorship thing, either; this is more properly a tool for 24/7 uptime for people who can't afford t3's and can't get PacBell's attention to fix their damn line in the first minute after it goes down. I can picture that sales pitch appealing to a lot of home businesses who get cut off from their DSL connection for a week at a time while PacBell pulls its head out of its collective ass. Or Cinci Bell, or Southern Bell, or NTT, or Deutsche Telecomm, or whoever serves their area.

I like it. Every station an ISP.

Bear

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