WavesMesh: Pay-what-you-can community-owned ISP for Baltimore
projectwaves.net
projectwaves.net
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.
https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
Many cities are already making this illegal, hopefully Baltimore realizes how damaging this truly is for business.
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.
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.
No difference except the price, really? So, you don't think any of the following are differences?
* What the provider is permitted to do with your data
* Whether there is a soft cap on usage before throttling begins
* How aggressively they do traffic shaping
* What you're allowed or not allowed to do as per the terms of service (e.g. run a server)
and so on.
It seems like you're hand-waving away a ton of stuff and dismissing it as unimportant.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
(I'm not in the Baltimore area, so I can't really make use, but this is a neat-sounding project.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is also a ton of value. It makes people who donate more confident that their donations made through corporate gift matching or donor advised funds are going to the right place.