WavesMesh: Pay-what-you-can community-owned ISP for Baltimore

by ignoramous • 6 years ago

179 44 6 years ago

posguy• 6 years ago

Have you registered to accept Lifeline subsidies? There is one ISP I know of that does Ubiquiti deployments in MDUs that have a high proportion of Lifeline qualifying residences, as it is an economical way to provide very fast broadband to the poorest members of society.

https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...

runnedrun• 6 years ago

Love this. How long has this been going for? Also excuse my ignorance of mesh networks: how does the mesh connect back to the internet? Is that going through an ISP, or are you trying to circumvent ISPs altogether?

iptrans• 6 years ago

how does the mesh connect back to the internet?

The same way any other network connects to the Internet, through an ISP.

Nominally you can be an ISP yourself, but you still need to buy capacity from other network providers.

ibraheemmmoosa• 6 years ago

I wonder if this is economically viable.

sushshshsh• 6 years ago

What happens when freeloaders show up? Perpetual energy?

gabriel_shatana• 6 years ago

It's the tragedy of the commons

samoa42• 6 years ago

i guess there is hope that whales or public funding will cover them

dddw• 6 years ago

Fair use policy?

rektide• 6 years ago

The marginal cost for most extra users is tiny, so, nothing happens. Freeloaders welcome. But please pay; there are some pretty serious costs.

If a user does start using an inordinate amount of resources, perhaps they can be throttled. Or asked to pay a little more than they had been paying.

rootsudo2• 6 years ago

You shouldn't publicly post your EIN on your web page. It is similar to a business SSN, while it is not truly private, there is more you can lose by having it publicly display then just redacting it all-together.

goldenkey• 6 years ago

Non profit EINs are public knowledge. Perhaps they are non-profit?

rootsudo2• 6 years ago

No, all EIN's are public per se, but they are used as an SSN for getting credit, etc. They are on annual reports, sure but that requires some work vs just having it on the website.

calgoo• 6 years ago

If anyone is interested, guifi.net has been functioning for years here in Spain / EU. Works good, we even have a internet provider that can connect you using guifi.net. Basically, it gives you access to their exit nodes instead of exits that are private. There is also ongoing fiber rollout in rural areas and some dark fiber usage in the city.

deathanatos• 6 years ago

I'm curious what sort of bandwidth they supply? Their suggested monthly donation of $20/mo is quite reasonable (less than what I pay!), and presumably that subsidizes those less able to pay. (Though, I presume they wouldn't mind a larger donation, if one made one.)

(I'm not in the Baltimore area, so I can't really make use, but this is a neat-sounding project.)

ignoramous2• 6 years ago

The website faq says 25mbps.

https://projectwaves.net/faq

StartupTree• 6 years ago

This is free broadband? How is that sustainable?

gigatexal• 6 years ago

They all for donations and and installation fee

1MachineElf• 6 years ago

Their sponsor is Digital Harbor Foundation on Baltimore's Light St. Why am I not surprised? They run a makerspace. It's awesome for Baltimore. It was the first ever location I went to in that city, for a Baltimore Node School event in 2014: https://nodeschool.io/baltimore/

drblah• 6 years ago

I find these kinds of projects very interesting. It is just too bad the site does not talk about the technology they use (or maybe I am just not seeing it?).

I am interested in this because I have recently been working on simulation studies of large Ad Hoc networks where we look at the B.A.T.M.A.N protocol. It was originally built for use in the Freifunk (https://freifunk.net/en/) network in Germany which is similar to Project Waves.

Its fascinating what a bunch of nerds with a mission can put together.

exo762• 6 years ago

They could have gone with Althea design and have both freeloader and sustainability problem solved. Instead they did this...

imw• 6 years ago

Not everything needs to be financialized/transactionalized. In this case I am not really sure what it would solve.

The capital costs of building networks like these, when you factor in the know-how and time required to build and scale a WISP, are really far beyond the bandwidth costs, which appears to be all that Althea accounts for. Passing the hat to cover gateway costs seems like a fine approach to me.

Zeing0Ch4• 6 years ago

This should be illegal, how could private enterprises possibly compete with community organized ISPs? You have to take into account the increase in profit every ISP has to make every year. How is the industry going to survive if you allow competition from ISP's that do not need to make profit?

Many cities are already making this illegal, hopefully Baltimore realizes how damaging this truly is for business.

Olreich• 6 years ago

Considering how much the world relies on internet, maybe it’s a good thing that current ISPs get out-competed by non-profit, community owned ones.

ashneo76• 6 years ago

Access to information shouldn't be a price gouging business. This is amazing. Comcast, Verizon and ATT can go rot in hell

jxf2• 6 years ago

This doesn't seem like a very compelling argument to me. They serve different purposes.

Do Habitat for Humanity stores put Home Depot out of business?

Do food banks put grocery stores out of business?

Does offering free water as a drink put bars out of business?

Same product category, very different markets.

Zeing0Ch4• 6 years ago

I think your comparisons are terrible, they are either not the same product at all or exactly the same argument applies. Of course food banks should (and are in many places) be means tested, so as not to compete with grocery stores. You can't compare water with booze, there may be an argument of tab water competing unfairly with bottled water though.

In this case, 25 MBit/s is 25 Mbit/s there is no difference in service between a community ISP and a commercial/public company ISP except the price.

drivingmenuts• 6 years ago

Commercial ISPs will do fine - in the coming age of work-from-home there are always going to be those who need/desire more bandwidth than that provided by community ISPs. Most basic access doesn’t require the kind of high bandwidth that commercial providers are supposed to be capable of.

A threat to commercial providers is a very good thing as it might force them to step up their game and provide even better access, if people realize they don’t need continuous access to streaming media to get by. More likely, they’ll just throw money at lawyers and politicians to get any competition shut down, but hope remains.

Zeing0Ch4• 6 years ago

The market already makes commercial ISPs "step up their game and provide even better access" exactly as you say, it works perfectly. If you have every community suddenly owning their own fibre in the streets they live on, what are commercial ISPs supposed to do? No there has to be legislation to stop this, many cities are already doing this which is a good thing.

elliebike• 6 years ago

Is this satire? I'm genuinely confused.

abdullahkhalids• 6 years ago

It clearly is with this line:

You have to take into account the increase in profit every ISP has to make every year

Not profit every year, but _increase_ in profit every year.

jancsika• 6 years ago

My uncle worked for a community organized ISP and you cannot imagine the amount of corruption. Basically a race to the bottom with slave laborer (ehm, volunteers) who don't even know how to provide proper service with trivial things like data caps, etc.

States like Maryland really need to pass right to assemble laws so that citizens can organize on commercial ISPs without fear of their internet being collectivized by a bunch of cultural marxists.

IggleSniggle• 6 years ago

I get this is satire, but for anyone who doesn’t:

I live in Baltimore. I pay $130 a month for an extremely unreliable high latency “DSL” connection from Comcast. There is no other reasonable option at my home. When I need a strong and reliable connection with low latency, I switch to tethering from my phone. The only thing that makes a wired connection preferable to the cell network is data quantity.

The number of hours I’ve spent on the phone with Comcast and with incompetent technicians is staggering. I am using my own modem, but am now also “renting” a modem from Comcast for $30/mo because they will not even attempt to provide any support for fixing their own network if you don’t use their spyware modem. So I plug it in whenever I decide to give it another go-around with their tech support in a futile attempt to get reliable service.

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

I lived in Baltimore, from 1980-83. Back then, it was a blue-collar town, but not like The Wire.

It has broken my heart to see what has happened there, since, but I know that it's a really strong town, and I'm glad to see this.

dx87• 6 years ago

Considering the name of the ISP, it feels like a missed an opportunity not marketing "no data cap" as "no wave cap".

digdugdirk• 6 years ago

Would it be possible to add a blockchain (/blockchain-like) layer to a network like this that is tied to your node's provided throughput?

I.e. - I pay for a node in the network, and get paid incrementally every time someone accesses the network via my node? The payment being slightly higher based on the speed/bandwidth of the node I've provided.

I imagine the payment could be a combination of a "pay what you can" donation as in this example, and a generated coin based on the increase in value of having a network like this in a regional area.

rienbdj• 6 years ago

The overhead of the blockchain would be too much compared to the bandwidth provided most likely.

cowsandmilk• 6 years ago

See https://www.helium.com/ for an effort focused on iot and device companies rather than home internet.

ignoramous2• 6 years ago

I pay for a node in the network, and get paid incrementally every time someone accesses the network via my node? The payment being slightly higher based on the speed/bandwidth of the node I've provided.

Thats exactly what new-age dVPNs like Orchid and Mysterium do. You can share your "residential IP" and bandwith with other dVPN users in exchange for crypto micro-payments.

Also see Golem, Elastos, and other such Web3 initiatives.

vorpalhex• 6 years ago

That would not be free, that would be very expensive - it just wouldn't be expensive in direct billing.

jtxx• 6 years ago

this is awesome. really excited to see more community owned ISPs picking up.

if you’re interested in community owned meshes, there’s one in NYC [0] and after searching I see Miluwalkee [1] and LA [2] have projects in progress. I’m sure there’s other projects happening in other places too, and they’re usually looking for volunteers - check out what’s going on in your town, and maybe start something if you can’t find anyone!

[0] https://www.nycmesh.net/

[1] https://mkemesh.org/

[2] https://laxmesh.net/

amhoab• 6 years ago

Regarding Comcast pricing being out of reach, what are your thoughts on their low-income program, https://www.internetessentials.com? It's 25Mbps for $10/mo. There are probably hoops to jump through, but it does seem within reach otherwise.

WavesMesh: Pay-what-you-can community-owned ISP for Baltimore

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