We may soon have city-spanning 900 MHz mesh networks(cheapskatesguide.org) |
We may soon have city-spanning 900 MHz mesh networks(cheapskatesguide.org) |
The last thing I want to see is a bunch of new random consumer junk cluttering it up.
Like wireless phone headsets?
What makes your use of this public band more important than that of others?
The article says Amazon began shipping this feature in its products secretly, so 'junk' in the sense that consumers didn't ask for the feature and it's crowding the medium mainly for Amazon's benefit.
(Ps. This was authored before you edited your comment)
http://f3.to/cellsol/ here's firmware and schematics, add to it! :)
Somebody feel free to disuade my fears, but all I'm able to think about this weekend is the Microsoft Exchange hack that just ravaged "30,000" organizations we're told. And here Amazon is building a publically usable network based on our Ring doorbells and "Hey Alexa devices". What could possibly go wrong?
Quote 2: "...using the LoRa protocol for extending ..."
Based on these 2 points I have a question / proposal. How about RaspberryPi, as mesh network, using its WiFi capabilities and definitely faster than LoRa, which is snail in comparison? I mean RPi's are like ~$30 each, 3 times lower than goTennas and WiFi speed, yes?
Systems for email, notifications, etc.
IRC and Gopher are not. The latency, and potential unreliability, would kill it.
You should be more worried about companies where you are the product not the customer...
That said, it's not stopping me from participating.
(Writing this from my $8/mo 300 Mbps home connection. My 4G is $3/mo.)
I don't normally like pink but I'm loving this black serif text on this shade of pink (#FFD4F5) background.
As long as spectrum fairness is ensured (and I think there are pretty strict rules on duty cycles for the 900 MHz band, i.e. any given device can't be transmitting more than a few seconds every few minutes), I think it is up to the owners of the band to decide what's critical and what isn't: The public.
If you think about it, hours of phone calls every day are probably a more significant use of that spectrum than all lost cats and dogs of a city combined.
If not, maybe icb uses less bw.
EDIT
Also:
Do you mean "trip" rather than trap? If not could you explain what this means?
True, 128kbps wasn't anything that'd compare with 4G, but this was 1999. It wasn't great at handoffs either, but still, I was able to use it on BART regardless. Imagine, connected to the net - on the move!
It's certainly possible to build a 900MHz mesh network, but it can't deliver much bandwidth. Email and SMS, yes. Voice, only on slow days. Today's web, no way. It would be like building a network for Blackberries.
One of the more successful off-grid comm systems is SailMail.[1] This is worldwide email, over 10MHz, for boats. Down at 10MHz, radio can cross oceans. This was a side project of Stan Honey, who invented car navigation systems. He's seriously into sailing and holds records for crossing the Atlantic, sailing around the world, and such. So he developed this for the long-distance sail community. They maintain about 25 fixed stations around the world, and if you can connect to any of them over HF, you can send and receive email.
Then why did we have 900 MHz analog cordless phones in the 1990s?
I believe the maximum speed of LoRaWAN on 900Mhz spectrum is a blazing 27 kbps (that's bits), so the cited 80Kb/s in the linked article for Sidewalk-to-IP communication is several orders of magnitude higher and must contain a lot of (unsurprising) overhead.
LoRa is good for applications where it used, like meter monitoring, control systems (oilfield etc.), and RC airplane control (R9/Crossfire/Ghost). It could certainly be used for the proposed motion detection and lighting use cases. With modern codecs, you could maybe complete 1-2 voice calls at a time over it, maybe. But my guess is that Amazon's play here is "smart home without the WiFi configuration," not "replace your cell phone."
It's not going to replace your cell phone data plan.
A city-spanning mesh network which connected to the internet at peoples home broadband connections couldn't reasonably function. Someone who was downloading a file over the mesh wouldn't be able to have their data use any connection to the internet - they would have to keep using the same gateway from the mesh to the internet, because if they switched gateways their IP would change and existing connections would fail.
It's the same reason switching from WiFi to Mobile data and back causes a reconnect in video calls.
Good way to confuse both imperialists and metricists
I expect the opposite: for Amazon to sell this as a utility network service to all compatible devices (a la LoraWAN).
If they do, they are likely to quickly eclipse The Things Network and Helium.
Competing using a shared chunk of 900Mhz? Not likely. 5G uses millimeter bands (20Ghz to 60Ghz) that provide up to 20Gbps of bandwidth. A public shared scheme using 900Mhz isn’t going to compete with that.
Spectrum is the pipe and whoever has the biggest pipes wins. It’s a bit like telling the public they can compete with an oil pipeline using a shared straw.
It is a giant mesh network.
Regular wifi would be fine - the vast majority of the world's population lives within 100 yards of another person.
Shorter links actually increases spectrum utilization.
The issue is that wifi never managed to make a decent mesh networking standard. No router you buy today acts as an open mesh node for anyone to mesh with.
What a prospect! Can you even imagine?
Today 802.11s is a great mesh standard, but it isn't trustless - all mesh nodes need to know the network password, and if you shared that password with the world, then someone could join and make the entire mesh stop working (and steal all your data).
Anyone can make the whole mesh stop working today, even without a password.
With a mesh network, the network is much bigger, which makes it important an attacker can only disrupt their small corner of the network.
They are also free for use by businesses and governments. The rules make no distinction (other bands do have eligibility restrictions).
> last fronts for small scale connectivity innovation
Amateur radio operators would beg to to differ. You can do a lot with a relatively easy to get amateur radio license, and it is restricted from commercial use.
Nothing is being gobbled.
I mean, I disagree with your opinion here. It's entirely possible that we end up in a world where corporations use all of the unlicensed spectrum to operate their corporate networks (on "user-owned hardware" that is centrally coordinated and controlled), leaving very little of it to alternative uses. There is only so much unlicensed spectrum so this is very much a realistic outcome, especially if the "user-owned devices" are coordinated and designed to maximize the company's use of the spectrum. I think "gobbling" is a pretty accurate description of this.
What you are saying is that our current legislation around these bands permits that use, in the same way that it might be legal for Amazon to house all of its workers on public land in some states. The question to ask is whether this is actually good.
Something that you can use in the middle of anywhere and send/receive text news, messages and short voice recordings. Maybe a handful of photos per day if you want to point your antenna to the sky manually and follow the satellite for a few minutes for max bandwidth on an upload.
There’s a few projects out there, but still out of reach of the consumer because I guess... they can charge more to a corporate user.
https://www.keplercommunications.com
Iridium is a « live » network... with much high costs of construction and operation.
I like the idea of being able to read the news and maintain comms but can live without live 2-way video.
Also cool to imagine there will be a nano/micro cubesats with a enough gbs in SSDs circling earth every couple hours making that possible.
Could have different levels if priorities to balance supply/demand.
Connectivity has a cost, and none of these networks will amount to anything unless the model can incentivize all aspects of the infrastructure necessary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)
http://daedalus.cs.berkeley.edu/talks/retreat.6.96/Metricom....
It was an idea ahead of its time.
E-mail's in my profile -
Apart from other reasons discussed here on why mesh Networks aren't the go-to choice yet, there's another problem I'm noticing in India; 4G(LTE) Internet is cheaper than any other form of Internet delivery here.
It's well-known that India has the cheapest 4G data plans, So in-spite of innovative startups trying their best to crack into city-wide mesh network they just couldn't compete with the pricing of cellular Internet besides 4G data is the means to Internet in most households here and they are not going to change to WiFi when they leave the house.
P.S. I've been tracking the need gap in 'Non cellular network mobile Internet' & I welcome related resources. Link in my profile.
its got some block-chain hypermegadrive bullshit, but at its heart it looks like a super cheap quite widespread lora network
So, wait, now I get to bear the burden of understanding how my network traffic is being routed and figuring out when I have issues?
Not keen on that honestly. I might be technically capable, but that doesn't mean I'm interested or have the time to spend on it.
impressive map: https://www.nycmesh.net/map
I'm not sure about latency...
NYC Mesh is built from discrete, high bandwidth (very high relative to LoRA) point-to-point radios. Assuming all the links in a path are healthy, latency should be excellent.
It was inevitable we'd reach this point—if not because of mesh networking, then because of ever cheaper cellular radios. And modern cars are already here. But we're fast losing control and visibility over which of our consumer electronic devices are allowed to talk to the outside world.
“smart home without the WiFi configuration” is exactly what Amazon’s network is for, but it won’t be anything more than that. The bandwidth and latencies required for content rich applications is simply not there. Sidewalk is cool enough without trying to sell the magic mesh network pipe dream.
That’s not several orders of magnitude, that’s only 3×. Both figures are kilobits per second.
I would also mention that the Amazon Sidewalk thing is for a hybrid of Bluetooth Low Energy and 900 MHz, and it’s quite plausible that that 80 Kbps could only be achieved over the close-range Bluetooth and not in the long-range 900 MHz frequency. As an outsider to the industry with no specific knowledge of what actually caps LoRaWAN’s speed, I’m going to wildly guess that this 900 MHz band, in whatever guise, may be more likely to yield 10–20 Kbps speeds in good conditions.
[0] https://pycom.io/products/supported-networks/#lora [1] https://docs.pycom.io/pymesh/
[1] https://dash7-alliance.org/ [2] https://tech-journal.semtech.com/making-the-most-of-the-unli...
I would expect most residential broadband TOS would explicitly prevent reselling their network bandwidth/access. That's what you are doing with networks like Helium, even if it is in the form of a token instead of dollars. Amazon has gotten around this by just not paying. You buy the Amazon device, you provide the network access, Amazon gets the revenue.
I wonder if ISM band will provide dedicated spectrum for LoRa with unlimited airtime.
I thinking mostly on stuff build on scruttlebutt or Gemini.
The first one is build for on/off crappy connection. The second is basically gopher on steroid.
Any input would be welcome
HN frontpage seems to be about 50 kB so it would take about 3 s to load on a 128 kbit link.
It's the TCP that doesn't handle it. Unfortunately HTTP and most other protocols are on top of TCP so suffer from the same problem.
[1]: https://mosh.org/
If I roam from network A to network B, then someone else cannot send me an IP packet till they know my address on network B.
I can only send out a "Hey, I'm now at this address" message to them if I know they will be wanting to contact me, and I know my own address has changed. Neither of those is guaranteed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP
For example, Apple already uses it when you ask Siri a question on an iOS device. Hopefully this standard gains more usage.
It might make sense to use something similar to MPLS that can encapsulate IP, to hide the details of the mesh network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Communications_Protocol_...
This used to be true, but new apps like Duo handle it like a champ. Uninterrupted switchovers between mobile data and wifi.
In the waterfall, the strong wideband bursts have a red colored center frequency. The narrowband bursts are just vertical lines.
A mesh network is a completely different beast, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of nodes, spread around, and a good chuck of bandwidth being used for forwarding data between nodes.
Those 900MHz analog phones were also usually low power, low distance, analog only devices with a few number of channels. Try having dozens of those phones all in the same room and see how useful they all are at once.
There is a load balancing issue, but I don't think it's any worse than http/3 which also allows for peers to change IP (http/3 has a much limited scope of changes).
There is no concept in IP of a "user", "client", or other party that exists beyond the lifetime of that packet. IP is basically a stateless logical address sitting on top of some physical address with a few delivery options to facilitate traffic flow (like congestion handling).
Any connection state or concept of user/client/server/etc is held at either the TCP level, or for UDP-based protocol higher up the stack (commonly at the application level).
If you still insist on IP being at fault here, let's consider an analogue. If a user sets up an Amazon subscribe-and-save, and then moves to another city and has a different physical address, but the user does not inform Amazon by updating their address in Amazon's system (the higher level protocol), would you say that the postal service is at fault when the delivery ends up reaching the an incorrect party?
Seamless jumps from mobile networks to wifi were in our grasp.
(STRIP was actually in the linux kernel, though I assume long gone or defunct -- the only things I still have talking via Ricochet are 2.4-era)
I have a couple of the lightpole radios (they listen for the modems on 900MHz and speak amongst themselves on 2.4GHz) and scored a single tower radio (talks to the lightpole radios and has an ethernet downlink) and have gotten them to speak with each other, but haven't had time to figure out the route mapping steps -- IIRC the deal is that the packet routing path information is stored upstream and delivered to the downstream radios. No idea if anyone ever decoded that format.
I messed around with this a lot in the immediate post-Ricochet era in between flashing silver WaveLAN cards to gold... fun times. It seems like it would be entirely possible now to run a simulated node using SDR.
Even dropping outside of the highly restrictive LoRaWAN specification and going with the fastest physical parameters available for LoRa on the 900Mhz bands (on-time restrictions aside), BW500 (500kHz bandwidth), Spreading Factor 6, Coding Rate 4:5, you end up with 35700 baud.
You can drop these modems into 2FSK mode and increase speed, but at that point the range isn't particularly appealing.
Regardless, the point stands: not a mesh network WAP internet redux, an IoT tool.
Correction here, you meant 21900 bits per second (21.9 kibibits per second in SI terms), not kilobits per second.
If you follow the rules. Presumably an attacker wouldn't care about that, and would be happy to dump a few orders of magnitude extra power into their jamming signal.
I think FCC still cares about jamming signals, although they might make an exception for inexpensive mesh networks...
Or if you have a couple old Ricochet E-radios and want to do some packet hacking, they'll do 1Mbaud at whatever modulation you ask.
Manufacturers include FreeWave, GE MDS, XetaWave, 4RF, and others. These are typically ~$1000 radios, so not great for hobbyist use.
I'd be surprised if you can't easily find both on eBay.
So for Amazon's (or any) system to swamp the ISM band(s) they would need to absolutely saturate an area with their radios. That would end up running at cross purposes with their network since their own base stations and user devices would end up interfering with each other.
While I don't trust Amazon to do the "right" thing I do trust them not to step on their own toes.
Why does there need to be a distinction? What's the difference between amazon's sidewalk network compared to an at&t wifi router?
(I had thought that ISM referred specifically to the 2.4 ghz band, but I guess there is actually more than one band. I do find it funny that that one of the most heavily used spectrum bands is the one where we put all the unintentional radiators like microwave ovens and industrial and medical devices, and then the FCC decided that we might as well let people do unlicensed transmission on that "junk band" because it wouldn't be interfering with anything "important". It's sort of the policy equivalent of the common phenomenon where over time the most important services eventually often end up running on the oldest, slowest computer.)
I’ve never encountered non-integral bases in real life, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-integer_base_of_numeration tells me they are sometimes used. Fun stuff!
We are both commenting on an article that describes how a massive corporation (Amazon) might be deploying large-scale mesh networks on this band, and using this to drive huge numbers of devices at near the maximum feasible bitrate. This is obviously a speculative article and maybe none of this will come to pass. But within the bounds of speculation, this seems qualitatively different than what's happened (as of today) on the 2.4 and 5.8 GHz bands.
Looking at my WiFi network right now, I have 2 APs and 25 clients connected (8 of which are amazon-). When I turn on my TVs, those power up a few additional clients (Chromecasts and FireTVs) on WiFi. I can see between 12 and 18 other networks depending on when I scan (plus who knows how many that aren’t broadcasting SSIDs).
Is Amazon likely to be able to put more devices on Lora than I have on WiFi now? More concentrated than NYC or Paris WiFi is today?
The maximum bitrate the article references is not a Shannon-Hartley bitrate limit, but rather a fairness-limited maximum transmission duty cycle to ensure other, also unlicensed users can access the spectrum.
