
NYC Mesh is trying to get around the big ISPs one node at a time - winstonford
http://technical.ly/brooklyn/2015/08/11/brooklyn-mesh-networks-red-hook-initiative/
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winstonford
There is an interesting symbiosis developing between NYC Mesh and my startup
Canopy: the data mesh wants power, the power mesh wants data. Both want the
other to be more resilient and less expensive.

In the pic at the top of the article, taken on my rooftop, you can see a
white, round thing. This is a ubiquiti nanobeam wifi radio. Just below it you
can see a solar panel. It belongs to an off-grid solar power unit called Ra
[http://canopyrising.com/#ra](http://canopyrising.com/#ra). The nanobeam is
now bolted directly onto the solar power unit Ra enabling the node to support
the local data mesh during a blackout.

On the roof and inside Ra, a beaglebone black runs the
[http://sunpress.co](http://sunpress.co) network of websites directly on off-
grid solar power.

Ra also delivers solar power for lighting and usb charging in the form of the
Canopy Cuba table
[http://canopyrising.com/#cuba](http://canopyrising.com/#cuba) , a bedside
table that stores days worth of power and is found in the
[http://tremolino.co](http://tremolino.co) guest rooms 1 floor down.

Canopy aims to create a marketplace where neighbors who invest in the products
to generate solar power trade with those who invest in capacity to store it.

Unlike traditional solar and storage, which is limited to property owners as
it requires financing, design, permitting, and installation; Canopy is
accessible renters and owners as it is low cost and requires no financing, no
design, no permitting, and no install.

~~~
oconnore
How does the cost and resiliency compare to purchasing energy from the grid?

For reference, I buy 100% wind source power from Xcell @ $0.14 / kWh.
Reliability is generally very good, but to compare apples to apples it would
cost ~$500 to purchase a backup generator [1] for the 1-2 hours of outages we
have every year.

[1]: a battery system would fulfill a similar role, but I'm not sure of the
cost -- and for something that I would essentially never use, it may actually
be better for the environment to keep the generator.

~~~
winstonford
Great question @oconnore. 2 answers.

1\. The target price for Ra
[http://canopyrising.com/#ra](http://canopyrising.com/#ra) is $600-800, just
under what you would pay for a 1kw emergency generator. Initial market is
apartment renters in flat-roof, multi-floor urban buildings, who can not run
generators indoors b/c of fumes, etc.

2\. Battery capacity built into the Cuba table
[http://canopyrising.com/#cuba](http://canopyrising.com/#cuba) allows power
arbitrage, buying power at the lowest price during off-peak hours to charge
up, then drawing from batteries during peak pricing on the grid. In NYC,
Conedison sells power for 7-19 cents during the day, but from midnight until
8a, it costs just over a penny. Voluntary time of use programs are common
across the country, but few products exist to leverage them.
[http://www.coned.com/customercentral/energyresvoluntary.asp](http://www.coned.com/customercentral/energyresvoluntary.asp)

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jamesblonde
Hi. I do research on Guifi.net (part of www.clommunity-project.eu), referenced
in the article. Guifi.net has 30k+ nodes, and provides Internet access. We
have also built decentralized services specifically for these type of
"Community Networks" \- including a decentralized search services, and a
Video-on-Demand service (www.decentrify.io - to be released this month). Happy
to answer questions.

~~~
michaelt
Does the mesh network have enough bandwidth to link distant cities, or do you
just use the mesh for the 'last mile'?

For example, if there were mesh networks in New York and San Francisco (which
are a few thousand miles apart) I would have thought the link would get
congested quickly, if you could establish it at all.

If you use something else for backbone, what do you use and how many users
does it support / how many users do you need to pay for it?

~~~
jamesblonde
It's a mix of 802.11 directed antenna connections and now fibre linking up
large areas with downtown Barcelona where the connection to the outside
Internet is located. There are large valleys with poor 802.11 connections to
Barcelona, and now many of them are getting fibre. Volunteers have learnt how
to splice fibre and negotiate where to lay fibre :)

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pjc50
Interesting decision to not have it connected to the full Internet. That makes
it essentially a local, social, network like the old BBS scene. You use the
mesh to talk to people, not so much for streaming media. That will save a lot
of bandwidth. It also keeps it enthusiast-only and reduces the need to work
out how to handle abuse.

~~~
comrh
I hope these aren't enthusiast-only. The idea of a 311 type service for a
community with craigslist type services, job postings, city info and social
aspects would be great for low income people. You could put all of wikipedia
on it and partner with Khan Academy to give free access to learning to every
kid in the city.

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lorenzhs
In Germany, there is [http://freifunk.net/en/](http://freifunk.net/en/) (the
English wepage is a bit sparse) which has the capabilities to do mesh
networking where nodes are dense enough. Since this is rarely the case, it's a
great way for people to share their internet connections with the world
without taking on any liability. All Freifunk data is routed through their
VPN, and they are registered as a provider, so they're not liable under
Störerhaftung.

~~~
nitinics
One of the strategy NYCMesh took for where line of sight was not available was
to tunnel through the Internet to mesh. This would enable anyone to join the
mesh without line of sight requirement, and once more and more people join and
the density increases, they can get their dependency on Internet Tunnels away,
by connecting/hopping through line-of-sight nodes.

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kator
Reminds me of the old days of KA9Q and pushing IP over packet radio. Tech has
come such a long way this might actually be a real alternative. That said
bandwidth management will become a real issue quickly since it's hard for the
general public to understand the shared nature of a mesh.

~~~
PaulHoule
Mesh networks are for the birds. For those who want to enable codependent
telecoms to not show moral fiber they are appealing, but one side way to make
a radio network slow and unreliable is to retransmit and retransmit and
retransmit... If I wanted to have bad internet I can call up my telco and pay
an arm and a leg for DSL.

~~~
look_lookatme
If only there was an entire class of protocols developed over the last 30
years to negotiate and route network traffic efficiently.

~~~
PaulHoule
These work well for wired networks, but not for ad hoc wireless networks. Mesh
networks are on of the many areas of CS that produces endless conference
proceedings but no working systems because the DOD has the hots for it.

~~~
nycmesh
There a many huge mesh networks all over the world, just not so many in this
country. Guifi in Spain has 29,208 active nodes so there is no argument that
mesh doesn't scale.
[https://guifi.net/en/node/38392](https://guifi.net/en/node/38392)

~~~
makomk
I can't find much in the way of specific technical information in English, but
from what I can tell Guifi has are tiers of nodes, ordinary nodes and
supernodes, where nodes connect only to supernodes and the supernodes have
fixed, manually configured directional radio links to other supernodes. It's a
lot easier to get thirty thousand nodes on a mesh network if the vast majority
of them aren't actually taking part in the meshing and the ones that are use
fixed infrastructure links. It basically avoids all the inconvenient "mesh"
part.

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mrspeaker
Awww, I love this idea... I am sitting in a cafe in Brooklyn reading the
article. I checked the available networks and found an "nycmesh" ssid. Went to
ev.mesh and got the "this is not the internet"! So cool, but I tried to create
an account but got "Error message: can't send email", and I can't log in.

Still, I love the idea though - feels like a secret internet club!

~~~
vcavallo
Hey, do you happen to be in Dumbo?

~~~
mrspeaker
Yup! Spooky! Internet on NYCMesh is much faster than WelcomeBRC ;)

~~~
vcavallo
you, sir, are on my node. enjoy!

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paulsutter
You could support Netflix by adding a Bitcoin-based system of transit
settlements. This could provide the capital to really scale up, without any
central control or administration. I

Of course the cooperative part of the network remains free. A payment system
just makes expensive infrastructure possible as part of the system, like fiber
under the oceans. A decentralized payment system could allow massive scale by
allowing investors to finance and make money off network segments, repeaters,
etc. Real competition forces them to compete on pricing and quality. One can
imagine a smart routing algorithm that takes cost and quality into account.

I mention this because I'm a skeptic about many proposed applications for
Bitcoin, but infrastructure with no central control is a great use case.
Bitcoin needs some solid use cases before it can really take off.

Edit: any comments along with the downvotes? I was hoping for a conversation.
I know its crazy but I'm speculating about creating an entire new internet.

~~~
adrianmacneil
100% agree. Of all the potential use cases for Bitcoin, decentralized
protocol-level payments (for network bandwidth, torrent seeding etc) are one
of the most compelling.

I've seen this being done for torrents already, but would love to see someone
try it out for negotiating bandwidth for wifi/mesh networks.

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cthyon
Really cool idea. Does anyone know about the legality of sharing internet
through meshes as referenced in the article, "RHI pays its internet
subscription to Brooklyn Fiber, and redistributes this coverage for free to a
dozen parts of Red Hook." ? Or whether ISPs would be able to shutdown mesh
networks for sharing internet subscription like this?

~~~
justizin
Brooklyn Fiber is a commercial provider, so buying access from someone like
them is basically how an ISP becomes an ISP.

If you were sharing your Cable or DSL, you might run into issues with your
contract.

In both cases you would have to be prepared to handle abuse complaints, or
your IP space would likely just get blocked from large parts of the internet,
or at least major services.

For instance, the administrator of an office network may receive DMCA
complaints about employees downloading movies or somesuch. If these continue,
at some point your internet provider will terminate your connection. The same
would be a concern for anonymous internet sharing.

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dinoby
We tried something similar in many cities around Ireland in early 2000's when
the first 802.11b antennas were coming out -
[https://web.archive.org/web/20030420231414/http://www.dublin...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030420231414/http://www.dublinwan.org/dw/FrontPage)

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adrianmacneil
What would it take to set this up in a new city? It would be awesome to have
this in SF as well.

~~~
unoti
This might interest you [http://www.broadband-
hamnet.org/](http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/) it's a mesh network using
modified wifi access points for setting up a very high bandwidth mesh network.
Quite a few people in my area (Pleasanton, Livermore) are using it. I'm sure
there are people in the SF area. This website would be a good starting point
for finding them. Also there are some of the worlds best ham radio clubs down
in San Fran and the South Bay the towuld be a great place to start in finding
people that want to get serious about mesh networks. Another related field
that is fun is microwave community cations, and I'm pretty sure there are some
active groups in your area for that.

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colanderman
There's a commercial version of this in parts of Boston:
[http://www.netblazr.com/](http://www.netblazr.com/)

~~~
cryoshon
Yeah, but their coverage is poor. Comcast has Boston completely strangled.

~~~
mjcohen
Boston is strangled in many ways. Miraculously, they evaded the Olympics.

