FreeWANs - Part II

Originally published here.

Ready to start building your own free (as in open) internet?

As one regular p2pnet reader pointed out, there are always "government departments that regulate what parts of the frequency "spectrum" are used by who, and what for. Well, we know that 802.11 is the standard for local-area networks and operates within the unlicenced 2.4 GHz frequency band. The 802.15.4 standard also uses unlicenced frequency bands - 2.4GHz, 915MHz and 868MHz. There are the standards used by our mesh network.

Blocking or banning usage of the 2.4GHz band would defeat the purpose of having Wi-Fi enabled anything, so the worst case scenario involves a government requiring all users of the 2.4GHz band to have a licence. This would also include people with certain cordless phones and microwave ovens. Because the 2.4GHz band is becoming increasingly noisy with all the Wi-Fi users, the task of licensing home users would become very difficult. This problem would be compounded by all the little gadgets that have appeared which can connect to a PC via Wi-Fi ------ USB flash drives, webcams, security cameras. You name it and somebody has built one that can connect to something else via Wi-Fi.

Finding any device using a radio frequency is relativly simple - it's done by getting two receivers to listen to the transmission, pointing them in the direction where the signal is strongest, and then refining the signal on the receiver to find the missing point in the triangle created by the three devices.

The good news is that to be legally able to do this with any type of accuracy, you need to have a really cool job with the government, preferably with an FBI-type agency. And there's a very good reason for this: if anybody can do it, someone might do it to the FBI-type agency and they don't like the idea of anyone with a few radio receivers knowing where they are (like in the car across the street a drug dealer's house).

Unless the government in question is willing to pay for lots of two-person teams with expensive equipment and cars to carry them about, we'd be unlikely to see any serious attempt at locating unlicensed Wi-Fi transmitters. This government could always authorize someone else to do the tracking, but that would compromise law enforcement.

We also must remember that our hypothetical (at time of writing) mesh network is very ad-hoc. Nodes could be programmed to go offline at random intervals, making signal tracking a hit-and-miss affair. Ethernet cables can also be used too, so taking out a series of mote nodes would not necessarily hurt the traffic flow if it can be re-routed along some Cat-5 cable running between two buildings and then back into a Wi-Fi signal. Perhaps a mote node sitting up a tree with a 2GB flash drive attached? And let's not forget the cheap laptop with a solar panel and a wireless network card sitting under a sheet of plastic on top of an old warehouse.

And at the end of the day, if the multi-billion corporate machines can't stop some kid sending an mp3 to his friends, what chance to they have in stopping people from dropping wireless motes all over the place?

That's right kids, it's p2p for real. But who builds this amazing thing? The same people who build the current p2p networks - the users.

People experiment with stuff. People are generous with their knowledge. People come up weird things, like modded Xboxes, Bluetooth sniper rifles and hacks for Sony's robotic dog, Aibo. Perhaps you've just remembered the capabilities of that wireless chip in your old PDA ------ you know, the one with 802.11 conectivity...

I don't know about you, but I'd be happy to spend a few hundred bucks buying hardware to scatter around my neighbourhood.

I wonder how long it'll take for this to start happening, considering that all this hardware is already commercially available and just waiting for some clever hackers to get stuck into?

If you feel like checking out some of the gear thats around, the following should point you in the right direction.

Get hacking!

• Intel - Publicly Available Devices Based on Intel XScale Technology
  
• Moteiv - US manufacturer of motes. Also designs custom software for mote sensor networks. Check out the online shop.
  
• Crossbow Technology - Wide range of customizable motes. Check out the online shop.
  
• TinyOS - The Open Source Operating System that powers most commercialy available motes.
  
• TinyDB - Home of "a query processing system for extracting information from a network of TinyOS sensors".
  
• An Atlas Of Cyberspace - Topology maps of various networks, including the global Internet, Gnutella and IPv6 test networks. (This is what the networks look like).
  
• $100 Wireless Laptop - Program to give computers to children in developing nations. Devices designed to be capable of forming wireless mesh networks for internet access.