Ask HN: P2P Wireless
1 comments
This is called mesh networking; the Google will turn up plenty of information, disinformation, products, research, etc. Right now it's pretty immature IMO, with a price/performance that is 10x (or more) worse than point-to-multipoint wireless. Technically, mesh is very cool because there are plenty of interesting problems yet to be solved, but practically I think point-to-point or point-to-multipoint wireless is better for rural Internet access.
Some background: I live in Alaska, so reliable, high-speed Internet is something most people in the US take for granted and Alaskans consider themselves lucky when they have it. I live in Fairbanks, a borough (county) of about 100,000 people. So I hardly consider it “the sticks.” The problem is, in Alaska, due to its size, zoning laws, terrain, etc. houses are very spread out up here. This makes it prohibitively expensive for cable companies to wire a neighborhood and DSL is mostly out because of the distances between places and lack of repeaters etc. In many neighborhoods, the only option, believe it or not, is dialup.
Additional background: I’m not a hardware guy and know very little about electrical engineering, so if this sounds dumb, it’s because I am.
My question is this. Would it be possible to create a wireless “router” that transmits and receives data, and then “partition” it so that you use half the “throughput” and the other half is reserved to feed the “grid.” The “grid” being anyone else how has one of these grid routers. In other words, if total “throughput” is 1.5Mbps, you get to use 750Kbps, and the remaining 750 is used by whoever else is using your “grid piece”. Likewise, their router is partitioned and on and on. Essentially it’s peer-to-peer hardware. You create a mesh. Therefore someone who doesn’t have a hardwire would essentially get “to the internet” by hop-scotching from one “grid router” to the next to the next until it hits the “access point” which is hardwired. Obviously there may be some latency issues, but those could potentially be resolved over time. The added benefit is the more people on the mesh, the faster your speed, just like p2p downloads.
Obviously at some point, you would have to be tied into to a real fiber line, so somewhere there would have to be a “wireless access point.” Seems to me it would make sense for the ISPs to do this because it saves them the huge expense of wiring and gets them customers where it’s too expensive to wire period. Or, you could be the “neighborhood access point.”
An added consideration is the security angle, or giving someone access to have your router. Which is why the partition would have to be pretty secure.
I know Alaska isn’t the only place that could benefit from something like this. Any thoughts on this? Is it possible? Is it done already?
Didn't mean to ramble on there, but I figured there are enough smart people on here, I could get a better answer here than anywhere else.