So I was thinking about what if we could make a network that the only thing you needed to connect to it is to directly connect ( through wires or directed wireless antennas ) to at least 1 computer that takes part in it, with no centralized node of any kind. For that we would need a whole new protocol and address system. THIS IS JUST A THING IN MY MIND TO TALK ABOUT. I AM NOT ADVANCED IN THIS DOMAIN.
At first I thought at making groups of 256 nodes so that every node inside of that group knows every other node. A node will know nodes’s group address that until now are just 2 hexadecimal digits like “D8” and the location address. A location address means what path to take to connect to any node, a location address for 98 would be “connect to 63, ask 63 to redirect message to A9, ask A9 to redirect message to CF, ask CF to redirect message to 98”. Messages between a groups nodes would be all encrypted and all steps of the location address would be encrypted for each node in part.
Now every node in a group can send encrypted messages to anyone else in that group.
Now lets say that another node wants to connect to that network, but the group is already 256 nodes: That node will create another group. The first node of a group picks a random 2 digit hexadecimal address for that group. A node knows at least 1 computer’s location address from every group. Untill now addresses are like “D8.01” D8 is a computer’s address in a group and 01 is that group’s address. 256 groups will create a kilogroup, each node knows at least 1 computer’s location address from every kilogroup. Untill now addresses are like “D8.01.8F” , 8F being the kilogroup’s address.
This thing can scale ever more, creating megagroups, gigagroups etc…
If I wanna connect to D8.01.8F then I first connect to a node that I know is in the 8F kilogroup, that node will connect to a node it knows in the 01 group, and that node knows D8 directly so it will connect to him and give him message, this kinda works like a DHT, wich me sending the message to the closer node I know to the destination node
Now this is very very far from perfect or usable, what happens if 2 networks grow independent and when they connect they have the same addresses? What if someone wants to sabotage this with a fake node? The location is also not very private.
Can this get better or even usable? Do you have any ideas or just want to discuss this?
It is a good idea / a good suggestion.
In general, the existing internet protocols actually work that way – they were originally designed as a way for networking organizations to connect their networks to one another, for free, because they wanted to talk to one another. You had your internet connection for free through your school / your work / your user group, and TCP/IP connected you via them to everyone else on the internet. The idea only came in much later that one of those “networking organizations” can be a paid ISP that is selling access to the network to anyone who wants to pay them, and it actually wasn’t widely seen as a good development when that was introduced, and as years have gone by it’s become the dominant model which is a bad thing for many reasons. But the core protocols still don’t care and don’t require an ISP to be part of the equation. TCP/IP and BGP are good places to start if you want to research more about how it actually works on the peer-to-peer protocol level.
There have been people who’ve tried to restart the idea of getting internet connections from other motivated / tech savvy individuals, instead of from Comcast. This is a lot more similar to your suggestion idea details. The key word is “mesh networking”. A quick search will turn up a bunch of people who are working on it or have set up little networks that work that way. Honestly, to me, it seems a little unlikely that that way can be made to work at any scale for any reasonable amount of effort, at the end-user level. I think probably more what you want is something like community broadband/fiber internet - your local government organizes internet for you at a tiny fraction of the cost that you would have to all collectively pay to Comcast in order to get it done, and we go back to the original model where it’s all provided “for free” as a collective, but still centrally organized so it doesn’t take technical skill and lots of effort on the part of every single user on the network.
But it’s a good idea. Those are just my thoughts to fill in some of the details of how it could happen relative to our current dystopia.
The challenge is the physical layer. The how you send the physical signal is where the cost, the telecoms, and regulation steps in. The rest use what we have. Linux and IP stack.
You could for example become a ham radio operator and IP can be used there but you could only talk to other hams and encryption is not allowed plus other rules.
You could use unregulated band used by wifi routers and build a mesh but the range would be small and there are regulations.
You could lay fiber but you’d have to have access to the utility right of way.
You could setup a WiMax like system or point to point microwave links but you would have to have access to the spectrum to do that which costs money and has regulations.
It goes on and on. The short answer is almost anything is not allowed without money and tons of hoops. That is why we have telecoms and how they protect themselves.
You could for example become a ham radio operator and IP can be used there but you could only talk to other hams and encryption is not allowed plus other rules.
TIL.
Yes. Ham is about playing with tech, learning skills, and building a social network all before the internet existed. It was also considered a means if communication in a national emergency and presumably a base of skills. It was not intended to be a service delivery platform.
Plus as the post says, the security apparatus does not universally like the use of encryption by the public. This is a fact not a conspiracy theory. Liked the way the poster said that.
You could do point to point links over say 5 gigahertz or 6 gigahertz for connecting towns and such together and then do more local stuff inside those towns. If I remember correctly, even consumer equipment, over 6 gigahertz, can do 180 megahertz wide channels, and would allow you to get a max throughput of about 1.8 gigabits per second. I have heard talk of 360 megahertz wide channels but have not seen 180 or 360 megahertz in the wild personally. Not from consumer equipment anyway. From cellular networks, I have seen about 200 megahertz or just slightly above.
Edit: even at 1.8 gigabits per second or 3.6 gigabits per second though you would still have to do a lot of localization of content instead of going to say Netflix and asking for the newest movie you’d go to your city hall equivilant to ask for that movie. Why saturate the point to point links when they could be used once to pull down large content and then be shared over the local network more times without saturating that link.
What licensing and cost is needed for the links? I assume one just cannot set it up free and no paperwork?
Thanks.
Since the 5 gigahertz and 6 gigahertz spectrum is free use, there would be no licensing cost, but the equipment would definitely cost some money.
Hi there, wireless ISP engineer here(former)
This wouldn’t work because the spectrum is free. It is almost impossible to get a clean channel for high bandwidth, low latency throughout without using licensed frequencies.
You also have to deal with DFS, which will cause your radios to switch frequencies automatically if they detect certain types of equipment like emergency, aviation, or military equipment, and can totally fuck your backhauls.
Well, for point to point links, you’d be using extremely narrow band antennas and not omni-directionals, so most other frequencies shouldn’t interfere because of being cancelled out by the antenna lobes. As for the DFS, that is only part of the band in the middle, so you could either put your link above it or below it, or up on 6GHz.
It really doesn’t matter how narrow you go in loud RF environments. 5ghz spectrum is maxed out pretty much everywhere other than very rural areas, and can only get so narrow. Even that is starting to change with WISPs hanging tons of cambium and ubiquiti 5ghz APs.
A point to point link over 5ghz will encounter interference no matter how hard you try, trust me. Unless you’re there first.
6ghz works extremely well over very short distances, but even something like tree cover will reduce its connection quality dramatically
Fair enough. The other option is to go up to 60 gigahertz, but then rain fade starts to kick in real badly. I think there must be some set of frequencies where rain fade causes problems because for example weather radar uses 24 gigahertz if I remember correctly to measure rain and so that would obviously be a no-no. However, I am not aware of any other free use spectrum that would fall between 6 gigahertz and 60 gigahertz.
Thanks. Interesting.
Is there power requirements? Usually free use is limited to low power because otherwise you’ll get interference with other local users. That’s microwave, so you could get pretty directional. Then again, it might not work so well in rain.
It’s a good bet that if it was practical and just as good as what we have, ISPs would do it.
I’m not sure if there are any power requirements or not. I know that it’s obviously not better than cable or fiber because ISPs are not doing it. Fixed wireless is very similar, but not for everybody, at least not right now.
Yea there are power and frequency limitations depending on where you are. .
Well, definitely frequency. Things are always regulated by band globally.
Honestly that was half-rhetorical, because it wouldn’t make sense otherwise. For microwave devices like wi-fi access points it’s on the order of 1 watt, sometimes being a mere fraction of a watt. A quick look indicates 5 GHz literally is one of the bands used for wifi, so OP is basically talking about just connecting to a hotspot over in the next town directly.
If you got up into millimeter wave or close regulations are a bit more permissive, but that’s exactly because they don’t travel through stuff very well; For short range use, that’s fine (enter some versions of 5G) but for a backbone that’s pretty useless.
Yeah so you just reinvented a less robust form of IP addressing.
Network infrastructure is hellaciously expensive to build, and absolutely cost prohibitive for individuals. You can’t just drop your own cable from “the internet” to your house and call it a day. You would have to have someone independently managing every switch, router, and cable upstream. That just wouldn’t work.
Your best bet would a distributed wireless network, which people can and have done, especially in cities.
If you don’t have special information or skills every idea you come up with will have already been thought of many times. This is a great example.
That’s not to say it’s bad to play around. Just that you should expect it to be a learning experience more than anything.
What you just described is roughly exactly how the internet actually does work. There are some additional details as you suggested, to make it usable. But that’s the basic foundation.
Like other people have said, this is very similar to how the Internet already works. All you need to do to connect to the Internet is connect to a single router that’s a part of it, at least in theory. The Internet is already decentralized on the backend, it’s just that only big players get to be a part of it for the most part.
A fundamental problem with your decentralization idea is that on a mesh network, you become reliant on your upstream(s) for your connection. You think Comcast is annoying, or your connection is slow? Imagine trying to troubleshoot your Internet connection and having to go deal with your neighbor instead, but he’s at work so you have to wait for him, but oh he’s too tired so he’ll help you tomorrow…
Not to mention that this severely limits speeds. No longer can your connection go from your house, to the street, to the backbone, and then straight to Google’s servers, now it has to go bounce around between a number of potentially unreliable consumer connections, run by non-professionals.
In a system like this, inevitably local organizations or companies will pop up to take the burden off individuals, which would provide massive QoL improvements, and we’d end up with ISPs again.
That said, there’s a lot of people doing hobby network stuff out there. I know some hackerspaces have their own local hobbynets, that then connect to each other over the open Internet using VPN tunnels. This solves some of the reliability problem, plus it’s just a hobby thing so it isn’t a problem that it’s slow and kinda bad. Then there are even individuals who get their own routers (or VPSes) and plop them in datacenters to participate in the internet alongside big companies and ISPs. Neither of these require new protocols, everything can be done with TCP/IP and BGP. (Plus a splash of VPN protocols here and there.)
It feels like you just described dial up Internet and using IP addresses.
Dial up still required ISPs, the extra steps are to remove that
BBS dial up, where it’s some local like server, that might have access to others via menus. Old school stuff.
Unfortunately not possible. The internet only exists as we understand it due to large corporate having the resources to run billions of dollars of cable
Well, I’m not sure what you make of crypto (or what I make of it) but there was a crypto project that was intended to be a decentralized wireless network. Participants were (are?) incentivized to maintain a wireless repeater of some sort. But the premise sounded semi-plausible to me at the time. I won’t name the p[project since I don’t know how people feel about crypto, but it’s easy enough to search for if you are interested.
These are also available without crypto. For example look at the freifunk project from Germany. Granted, these are all volunteers that donate their energy and/or bandwidth to the project.
