A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at TEDxUSC, in which I laid out the basic argument for MondoNet, a new project I'm working on with a few of my grad students at Rutgers. My basic point is that, despite the many amazing cultural, economic and political uses to which it's been put, the Internet has a fundamental flaw preventing it from being an effective tool for democratic political action and cultural innovation.
The flaw lies in its centralized architecture and hierarchical governance; no matter how much people resist against institutional power through innovative cultural forms, and no matter how much we lobby against oppressive and exploitative uses of the technology (e.g. the current battles over net neutrality), the network provides its operators with an excess of power that will necessary be exploited.
We propose to remedy this situation with an architectural intervention: namely, using ad-hoc, mesh networking technology to create a global network that is fundamentally resistant to censorship, surveillance and exploitation, because no single individual or institution can control the information flow on any significant scale.
Clearly, there is a lot to discuss here; we plan to publish a full-length academic article in The Information Society in July, and a pre-publication copy can be read at MondoNet.org. But we're still working on developing funding and fleshing out the engineering, so I welcome your feedback, criticisms and offers of help!
The cloud is opening up as more open-source alternatives to proprietary players emerge.
While open source itself is nothing new — and doesn't need grand promotion — open source in the cloud is taking a fresh approach to the cloud model, and it's a space that has potential to shape the future of the cloud.
Currently, there are a handful of big-name, open-source cloud players out there: Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, and Open Nebula among them. Perhaps the most attention-getting open-source cloud is OpenStack, a joint open-source project between cloud player Rackspace and NASA that provides a full-cloud stack. And just last month, VMware pulled the curtain off of its Cloud Foundry open source platform-as-a-service project.
From BSA listserve: Excellent article on integration of 3G, LTE, Wifi and land lines i.e.- 5G networking. The only thing missing is this article is the 5th “G” – green networking. With so much overlapping coverage from the different wireless and wired nodes you don’t need five nines reliability for each node. Individual nodes can therefore be powered with small solar panels and micro wind mills. This is also great opportunity for R&E networks to partner with carriers like Vodafone and others who are building integrated Wifi/LTE networks and use Eduroam to extend reach of their networks for personal health research applications, sensor networks built around smart phone etc. For more details please see http://goo.gl/W9mla and http://goo.gl/a1Lpz – BSA]
21st Century Triple Networks: Ubiquitous 4G, WiFi, & Wires
The best engineers on the planet are coming to the same conclusion: a hybrid 4G/WiFi/landline network is the way to meet mobile demand. Folks like John Donovan of AT&T and Masayoshi Son of Softbank in Japan
had this vision around 2007-2008. As the iPhone/iPad/Android made the coming demand clear, networks planners around the world evolved similar strategies.
• 4G gives wide coverage but is limited in capacity.
• WiFi actually provides far more capacity, because the range of perhaps 100 meters means the spectrum can be reused thousands of times in a major city. (China Mobile is putting 20,000 WiFi hotspots across
Beijing.) A network builder tells me “WiFi is a solution to off load ‘portable' traffic where possible and rely on 3G/4G for ‘mobile' traffic.” Femtos and perhaps small cells will play a significant part.
• Landlines effectively have 10x the capacity of a similar wireless network and are already ubiquitous from both telco and cable. A top engineer tells me “The general rule is the quicker you can get the byte of information onto a hard facility (copper, fiber) the cheaper it is to operate the network.” Randall Stephenson of AT&T explains “You're always going to have to have a fixed line capability to offload this traffic.”
[…]
So cell tower 3G/4G ideally is supplemented with local WiFi/femto. Cell towers cover large areas, allowing comprehensive coverage except for a few dead spots. They offer limited bandwidth over that entire
area, with a network like Verizon's LTE offering perhaps 35 megabits to share. WiFi is much lower power, limiting range to a typical 100 meters or so, less with obstructions. Within that range, the capacity is high; 3×3 MIMO 802.11N can carry 100's of megabits in a small area. Locally, 802.11 uses spectrum more efficiently, incorporated a limited set of “spread-spectrum” type features.
WiFi was in few phones two years ago because it ran down batteries too quickly and cost too much. Moore's Law now enables low power, low cost WiFi. The latest chips from RALINK/Trendchip, for example, cost
less than $5. Off mode power consumption is 0.012 mw, transmit power is 19dBm, and the chips are 5 to 7 mm square. Easily 3/4ths of the phones sold by a carrier like Verizon will soon have WiFi as do just
about all tablets. As Qualcomm, Broadcom and others include WiFi on their primary cellphones chips it will become ubiquitous.
[…]
Carriers are choosing different strategies to get from where they are today to triple networks. Vodafone, Europe's largest wireless company, is adding millions of DSL customers through unbundling and giving them
femto+WiFi gateways. Sky in Britain is buying a WiFi network named “The Cloud.” Free.fr enables WiFi on their millions of DSL connections and bought a wireless license. AT&T is putting WiFi hotspots from Times Square NY to San Francisco with expansion plans. China Mobile is adding 1,000,000 hotspots.
——
Tip of the Hat to original poster Bill St. Arnaud.
Phi Beta Iota:Gordon Cook thinks very highly of Bill St. Arnaud, and observes that Mr. Arnaud is a consultant for Surfnet in the Netherlands working out their wireless cloud for the research and education community in that country of some 1,000,000 out of 16,000,000 people. He is describing some of what he is building that is based on the Netherlands national fiber backplane.
Initially, a place to store all your photos and artwork that’s as
awesome as, if not more awesome than, existing network services (Flickr, DeviantArt, SmugMug, Picasa, etc)
Later, a place for all sorts of media, such as video, music, etc hosting. Federated with OStatus!
Customizable!
A place for people to collaborate and show off original and derived
creations. Free, as in freedom. We’re a GNU project in the making, afterall.
There is plenty of radio spectrum laying fallow everywhere for many reasons. One principal reason is regulatory capture by communications oligopolies/monopolies around the world (artificial scarcity), which leads to a lack of investment in alternative (competitive) infrastructure. This implies there is also vendor capture.
What has changed just over the past five years is the availability of more powerful chips and components. Today, systems can be designed and built at competitive prices relative to other access and middle mile infrastructures. But, it requires R&D and a lot of courage to get it out into the world. But once out, it can't be put back in the box.
Cognitive radio is a paradigm for wirelesscommunication in which either a network or a wirelessnode changes its transmission or receptionparameters to communicate efficiently avoiding interference with licensed or unlicensed users. This alteration of parameters is based on the active monitoring of several factors in the external and internal radio environment, such as radio frequency spectrum, user behaviour and network state.
Distinctions are made between Full Cognitive Radio, Spectrum Sensing Cognitive Radio, Licensed Band Cognitive Radio, and Unlicensed Band Cognitive Radio. Not to be confused with Intelligent Antennas.
