Self hosting helps make the internet more decentralized, but at the end of the day someone else owns that series of tubes.
This is probably a pipe dream, but I think it would be cool if we self hosted not just servers but networking infrastructure as well.
I have an extra class amateur radio license and one of the many niches within the ham radio hobby I’m interested in is packet radio and wireless mesh networking.
Packet radio could technically refer to any RF communication that uses packets, including wifi, but I mostly see it used to refer to the AX.25 protocol, which works like an old-school dial-up modem in that it converts data into audio tones that are transmitted using FM or single sideband radios built for voice communication. AX.25 is used mostly nowadays in Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) which is used to report location and status info. There’s a website, aprs.fi, where you can track vehicles sending their location or weather stations reporting conditions and so on.
In the olden days there were tons of bulletin boards hosted over AX.25 all over the globe that you could reach either directly or through repeaters. There are a few hangers on, and I even hosted one for a while but nobody visited. You could by hardware terminal node controllers (TNCs) that had a BBS feature, and nowadays there are a few software TNCs available.
Several Wifi frequency bands overlap with ham bands, and various projects have arisen that modify commercial wifi gear to turn them into mesh nodes forming a wireless wide area network, operating under FCC part 97 rules rather than the unlicensed part 15 rules that they use out of the box. This allows higher power and channels otherwise off limits to wifi stations. The project I’m most familiar with is Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) which uses a fork of openWRT firmware. I’ve tried a couple times to get the other hams in my area interested in setting up a network, but it’s slow going.
There are also ham-adjacent projects like Meshtastic that I’m not as familiar with.
This barely scratches the surface of what’s out there. The ham bands are explicitly non commercial and there are limits on what you can transmit and how much bandwidth you can use, but I dream of a day when everyone’s wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood which is connected to all the other neighborhoods in the city which is connected via repeaters to all the other cities and so on. Sure it would be slow, but we’d be communicating on our own system that only costs as much as the hardware you run it on.
Cuba has their “Snet”, a peer to peer mesh network of routers. It’s pretty cool but it’s gotta be crazy slow
ISPs should be regional users cooperatives everywhere. Rural areas in the US have local ISPs structured this way, but corporate ISPs have been trying to use regulation to make them illegal in normal service areas, which is disgusting.
I predict that point to point private fiber (currently used by high speed traders) will become more and more prevalent as issues with AI impersonation and spoofing become more prevalent, we should use this infrastructure drive to push linking co-op and public mesh networks using the same long-run conduit.
Why not a municipal service?
I always thought that the municipality should own the last mile. FTTP for every unit, then the ISPs could run their lines to a local POP and just cross-connect to the house, apartment or whatever that wants their services. That way it would reduce the infrastructure that an ISP needs and also increases the available choices for a customer.
Payment for the municipal last mile could either be leveraged via your taxes or a fee that is paid by the ISP (which inevitably would be paid by the customer anyway)
It would already help if apartment buildings had an internal network with a single connection point, but I can tell you as someone who worked on this as a volunteer for student dormitories back in the day that ISPs are extremely hostile to the idea.
Some do, but that means you’re locked in to whoever the landlord chooses for the ISP, and you can’t call the ISP for support if you have issues.
afaik the Ruhr Universiry of Bochum has an intranet that connects the uni and all the dorms. And they selfhost a couple of services, like email, git and pastebin. You can see a line going to the dorms on the graph.
Yeah, German Universities have special direct internet access via the “Hochschulnetz”. We had some pretty fancy 5ghz directional wifi connections over several km connecting to it, but it was fairly slow (shared 10 mbit), which made that impractical for most private internet use.
There’s Freifunk as well!
Nice! Thanks for posting this. Does it run on all wifi bands? Is there provision for mesh extension by wired Intranet?
As far as I know it uses the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol. On a channel within the regular 2.4GHz wifi spectrum. So no license needed unless it collides with laws for point-to-point beams. All people communicating to each other obviously need to agree on a channel. It comes with some hierarchy where I’m at. There are local chapters who make up some config and who also operate nodes and exit nodes into the internet. These are necessary because Germany has stupid laws.
Definitely possible, and there is already some tech with the kinks worked out like wimax that could wirelessly serve a whole town. There are also folks who have created their own isps to fill in where the big players don’t bother. It is apparently regulatory hell to get up and running.
The problem isn’t technology, it’s people.
but I dream of a day when everyone’s wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood
A modern resurrection of the party phone lol. I remember those well.
Man it’s been a hot minute since I was in my ham shack as a kid banging out code on a little 5 watt transmitter/receiver. There are a good handful of repeaters in this area and they are quite invaluable when we have climate related emergencies, or other. During the pandemic I would listen to the chatter. They definitely serve a valuable purpose. The general public doesn’t really realize how these little ham shacks can be quite the boon in hard times and are usually surprised that they even exist.
There is a user here that mentioned he is in funding talks for a local, independent ISP. I’m not really sure I’m ready to be connected to my neighbors intimately. Good fences make good neighbors.
There is a user here that mentioned he is in funding talks for a local, independent ISP. I’m not really sure I’m ready to be connected to my neighbors intimately. Good fences make good neighbors.
Why do you think an independent ISP would operate any differently at the networking level on a per-customer basis? This is basic network segmentation, and my home gear can do that pretty easily. Throw each customer on their own vlan that’s a /30 and they can’t do anything more than talk from their node to the central router.
Good firewalls make good digital neighbors, and an independent ISP isn’t going to survive long if Alice can access Bob’s home network over the ISP without having something specifically configured in Bob’s network to allow that.
Oh I get how it would all work, I’m not into sharing my network. lol I did have to provision a separate vlan for my lady friend when she comes over so she can get her fill of all the advertisements she wants, but, there are direct benefits of such a compromise in this instance. ;)
Oh I get how it would all work, I’m not into sharing my network.
See, I’m struggling to think that you do. You’re not sharing your network with anyone. You’re just hooking your uplink into someone else’s network, who will take as much (or more, given how fucky current ISPs are) care to keep you and your neighbors from talking to each other without your own config letting it happen.
You mention meshtaatic. There is also halow on the consumer side now. One of my goals for the next year is to set up a few open halow nodes in a mesh. As a local anarchist community network of sorts. With little or no intention of bridging it to the internet. Outside of connecting to other similar remote network segments or maybe an email/xmpp bridge. Mostly a separate local network with separate local resources.
Like every protocol in the unlicensed 900mhz range, 802.11ah has a very limited transmission rate in the 50 to 100 kbps range.good for occasional data like sensors or a few bytes of message, but not for any modern comma like AV, mass file transfer, etc.
It will of course varry by environment, topology, and configuration. As everything does. But even a megabit, 125KB/s leveraging modern technologies. Would be very usable. Capable of pushing DVD level streams of AV1 and opus though at saturation. More than easily able to push basic websites. High traffic probably not. But I wouldn’t expect neighborhood/village traffic to be too heavy.
I’ve been watching halow for a while, I haven’t yet seen any sustainable, real-world examples beyond a few hundred kbps (not bytes). I have seen the 1Mbps results, and they’re promising, but most places with any other traffic in the free band is busy. If you have any successful and repeatable tests hitting at usable speeds, I’d love to see them.
After getting into meshtastic and a few other lorawan projects, I’m a bit concerned that tests for these are always high and visible, which doesn’t work well in the mountains, even at shorter ranges.
I used to be more hands-on with these new standards, but I’ll wait for better tests to come from halow before I try it out.
