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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug: My company Althea (https://althea.net) is making router firmware that makes it easy to people to set up incentivized mesh networks in their communities. It allows routers to pay each other for bandwidth which means that everyone hosting a node earns money for the packets they forward.

We have 2 networks live, one in rural Oregon and one in Medellin, Colombia. Also, 4 more networks people are currently pre-registering subscribers for in their communities, for example https://althea.net/hilltop.

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It is quite shameless, here is an awesome volunteer run basic service project, and this is a Blockchain rent-seeking VC startup.

Ironically I went back to the 2015 thread and found much the same "shameless plug", minus the Blockchain.

Replacing few freeloader nodes in a volunteer network with a whole rent-seeking company. Pretty sad.

> It is quite shameless, here is an awesome volunteer run basic service project, and this is a Blockchain rent-seeking VC startup.

You're implying that there is something shameful with providing a market for connectivity which allows for people who can't afford to work for free to participate. What is shameful about this?

Taking attention from a free community project to market your for profit company certainly isn't a purely altruistic thing to do.

theres still a monthly fee for free. weird right.

Taking attention? I have enough attention for both. Who cares if it isn't altruistic? 99.9% of human interaction isn't, and most of it is positive.

Shameless and full of snake oil this time lol

"The 100k investment they took on is peak rent-seeking," said the commenter on news.ycombinator.com

Love the project! Why does my intuition suggest big ISPs are going to try to regulate this out of existence in the US. It's depressing.

It's already illegal twice over.

Anyone "forwarding" packets from a connection to an ISP is almost certainly in breach of contract.

Amateur packet radio service regulations state that you may not use it for applications that are available over commercial services.

The decentralized part will be a necessary part of this then... I highly doubt it's illegal to make open source software which does this.

> Anyone "forwarding" packets from a connection to an ISP is almost certainly in breach of contract.

You can buy resaleable backhaul it's just a drag and expensive. NYC mesh gets free resaleable backhaul and it's a key thing for them.

> Amateur packet radio service regulations state that you may not use it for applications that are available over commercial services.

point to point long distance antennas on free spectrum are commercially usable and more than adequate https://www.ui.com/products/#airmax

>NYC mesh gets free resaleable backhaul and it's a key thing for them.

I feel like this is the key differentiator between community mesh projects that succeed and those that don't.

At the end of the day, without backhaul you're just saturating a few donors' residential bandwidth.

I thought mesh networks were peer-to-peer? If people's connections to the internet are single pre-determined nodes, isn't that more like mini ISPs?

In any given mesh of peers, or for example the NYC mesh, suppose I am a mesh client with no ISP. How do I get internet without using another mesh client's ISP connection?

Edit: can't reply because rate limited or something. My point is that relying on good will doesn't scale.

I thought mesh is supposed to involve hopping from neighbor to neighbor - not everyone directly connected to an ISP. What is the difference then besides that it is volunteer-run with donated bandwidth?

While many neighbors could be connected directly to a traditional ISP, in a hilly/mountainous area, only a few nodes may be able to connect directly to an ISP, and this will connect indirectly accessible nodes to the Internet via only intermediary nodes. This is not theoretical - the test network in Oregon does this.

There's payment (out and also in), so it doesn't rely (entirely) on good will - running a connectivity-important node can even net you payments!

> NYC mesh gets free resaleable backhaul

Why/how is it free? How much is it typically? Do all/most cities have "backhaul" easily available? Isn't backhaul owned by ISPs as well and basically like a fat pipe?

A barrage of questions, but I'm quite interested!

NYC, among very few other places in the US, actually has some insanely good options for business grade (and priced) connectivity. (HFTs pay for very high speed connectivity.) As for why it's free to NYC mesh, I don't know. Pet project of an employee?

You can get connections suitable for backhaul pretty much anywhere as long as you are within reach, or prepared to pay for, a copper or fibre connection to an exchange. It just costs more.

I'm not up to date on prices.

Backhaul is 'just' another connection but without the same contractual restrictions as you'll usually find on normal subscriber connections.

You'll find it used in at least two different ways: as a synonym of transit to talk about a way for your ISP to connect to any other ISP via the provider they get it from, and as a means of having an access provider forward last mile traffic to one or more central locations.

But in both cases it just suggests that you have agreed with a provider to forward traffic for your users on your behalf.

> Why/how is it free? How much is it typically? Do all/most cities have "backhaul" easily available? Isn't backhaul owned by ISPs as well and basically like a fat pipe?

Sometimes but not always, the Tier 2 internet market is acutally quite competitive and usually you can get fiber from a couple of providers within 50 miles of any location in the US (5 or less if it's reasonably populated). The problem of course is to be an ISP you have to deliver the traffic that last few miles.

This whole thing is further obfuscated by the fact that the entire infrastructure market is very human powered. Few providers provide public maps and in order to find these fiber connections you literally have to know the right people. The internet has automated everything but those people building and maintaining the backbone still need sales calls to tell you where they can connect and a bribe before you get a good price.

Heh, I clicked the comments on this to make sure Althea was being talked about. Glad to see you guys are getting deserved attention!

This isn’t APRS or amateur radio at all. The article doesn’t call out the band info, but if this is running over 2.4 or 5 GHz, it’s unlicensed spectrum and available for use by anyone.

If they were running over licensed spectrum, the FCC would have shut them down in the US.

Hams can run high power and high gain antennae with regular wifi gear, they call it HSMM. It doesn't sound like the mesh folks are doing that either, and even if they were, might it fall under part 15.23?

Where did they say they were using amateur radio bands?

1) "Breach of contract" isn't illegal. It's a civil violation. Also, they may have "wholesale" internet connections that allow for re-sale.

2) They're using unlicensed spectrum, not amateur radio.

Alleged breach of a private contract is not "illegal."

Please know what you're talking about before providing legal advice.

Breach of contract itself is not illegal, but depending on intent, it could be more than breach. If you enter into a contract with the intent to extract value without abiding by the agreed terms, then it can be considered fraud. Whether it is possible to prove, or worthwhile for that to be pursued by a prosecutor is circumstantial. IANAL

Couldn't this just be solved by simply encrypting all traffic similar to an onion router setup? Could also be solved by the users just using some sort of VPN which encrypts all traffic. How is the ISP suppose to know you're forwarding traffic?

Great post by NYC Mesh on why companies like Althea are a total scams or run by morons (probably both) --> https://www.nycmesh.net/blog/meshcoin

/u/woah Thoughts?

Isn't there a liability issue here? If I join the network and someone were to use my node in the transmission of something like child porn, how are you so sure I wouldn't be pinched for it?

It was a nice idea until the website mentioned block chain...

All yall talking about altruism but no one is really making internet faster and more affordable. This shit is revolutionary, and the system it sets up is going to be the backbone of a network of Co-ops in the next 10 years. A parallel economy is possible.

How's Babel treating you at scale? (What scale are you running anyway?) Are you upstreaming your changes?

Our biggest test network is only ~50ish nodes. Simulations show we won't have issues until several thousand.

Babel has been very reliable and we haven't really made any changes beyond our extensions. The price extension probably isn't appropriate to upstream. I'll admit I've been remiss up-streaming the full path latency extension.

I had this exact idea a few years back. Great to see someone working on it! Brilliant! I could actually use this service at my work. Being able to pay 25 cents/gb on my mobile would be amazing, especially if it is really fast speeds.

Wow, can you provide more info about Medellin network ?

You may appreciate Deborah's blog post.

https://blog.althea.net/faster-cheaper-internet-in-medellin-...

Ask away as far as other questions go.

That sounds awesome. How do the payments work?

50 real USD says it's some kind of cryptocurrency nonsense.

Well it looks like a rare good application for a cryptocurrency.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I explain it in some detail here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw

Essentially we use Eth because we don't really need a 'cryptocurrency' as much as we need an api for cash where very small payments (10c) are practical. For reasons that I explain in the presentation the key simplifying assumption of low fee transactions makes a simple billing scheme (pay per forward) work.

Yes, one added value that people often miss from Ethereum is programmable money. Ethereum gives you a nice API of money.

Oh it’s so nice to see crypto being used for this!

As a network architect this seems pretty cool to me - incentivizing individual node/router operators. How is billing & payment reconciliation handled between parties?

See my presentation at NANOG 76 on that subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw

woah

Great!

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