mesh networks – Techdirt (original) (raw)

In New York City, We've Taken The Digital Divide Into Our Own Hands During Covid

from the if-you-want-something-done-right dept

Broadband is in a state of disarray in America. This was the case long before COVID-19 brought the world to its knees earlier this year. Roughly a third of Americans have no access to broadband internet, with the majority stating cost as the most important obstacle. Even in highly connected urban areas, such as New York City, a lack of connectivity impacts millions of residents. According to Mayor de Blasio’s Internet Master Plan, 40% of New Yorkers lack access to home or mobile broadband, including roughly 20% who lack access to both.

Many of these internet black out zones are in low income and minority communities. As the coronavirus pandemic set in, internet accessibility became more crucial than ever. However, as schools transitioned to online learning, many children were unable to participate – and continue to face the same challenge today, months later. Our community at NYC Mesh is fighting to bring digital equity to all communities of NY, and our solution is simple: provide internet to everyone. As COVID makes our society ever more digital, I believe our solution provides a meaningful model for how grassroots movements can shape the connectivity landscape.

At NYC Mesh we are developing strategies to improve internet accessibility, by creating an open Wi-Fi wireless and fiber network in three boroughs – and more to come. Since NYC Mesh was founded in 2014, it has nearly doubled in size every year. However, like many other organizations, COVID took a toll on our ability to expand the network and service members.

At the beginning of the year, NYC Mesh had about 500 successful nodes on the network – rooftop antennas connecting residents online and further expanding the reach of our community infrastructure in the city. The network was blanketing lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, with plans to begin connecting residents in Queens. Community meetings were filling rooms and teams of volunteers were at the ready to carry out seven installs a week, update our supporting webpage, participate in hackathons, perform maintenance and keep the network running, or any other of the many tasks involved in bridging community organizing and connectivity.

As with the rest of New York, COVID forced NYC Mesh to adapt, and quickly. We did so by acting locally: the weeks before New York’s shelter in place order entered into effect, volunteers attempted to connect immediate neighbors, anyone in walking distance that we could connect. Ultimately, however, COVID forced the organization to limit its work to only emergency maintenance or circumstances when a new member had no other means to get online.

Despite these limitations there were other ways we could help. NYC Mesh operates almost entirely on the suggested contributions of its members. We don’t speak the language of “service cutoffs,” billing, fees, or other creations of for-profit ISPs. When members of our community lost a job or simply had to prioritize other expenses in their life, they could rest assured that they wouldn’t lose their connection online. Of course, as with groups across the nation, our monthly community meetings transitioned online; PPE became a requirement for all in-person site visits and installations; and we added digital training videos and maintained an extensive online doc to help educate our new members.

We started taking in requests for new installations again in June and the number of install requests have once again reached about seven a week. While some of our regular volunteers have had to step back as a result of the COVID shutdown, new volunteers have stepped forward, who have brought with them amazing contributions to help continue the expansion of the Mesh. While COVID may have slowed down NYC Mesh’s operations, we still continue to pursue our goal of bringing digital equity to all New Yorkers.

Digital learning was an integral part of education long before the coronavirus and its importance is only increasing. As the need for broadband access rises, the gap in internet access has become more evident, and the consequences more severe. Coronavirus provided the perfect example of how the lack of broadband access can put many, especially children at risk. Children, especially children of color, are receiving less days of instructed learning than their more privileged peers. Prior to COVID, a child could go to an after-school program or library to get online. Now, most of these facilities are closed, limiting the options of those without internet at home to receive an education.

NYC Mesh is here to organize, empower, and connect, which is why we’re partnering with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) to expand the mesh network into public housing and enable free, fair, and community-based internet access to residents. The people of these communities face many obstacles, a lack of broadband access being one of the most severe yet overlooked. Having access to the internet at home means it will be easier for residents to apply for jobs online, work remotely, and access safety net benefits. Most importantly, it allows children to receive a full education during this pandemic. With this partnership, some of the most vulnerable members of our population will gain access to the internet, bringing us one step closer to digital equity for all New Yorkers.

As we face yet another potential wave of COVID, it is clear that digital equity must be the goal in order to ensure that all New Yorkers can be successful. Employment opportunities, safety net access, and education, will increasingly become dependent on having internet access. Without stable broadband access, the gap between rich and poor widens, and the circle of poverty will continue for the next generation of children of color. Thanks to the efforts of NYC Mesh and other community-run and community-first organizations who have stepped up to tackle this challenge like Silicon Harlem or The Point, we are closer to bringing digital equity to the City of New York and ensuring that no child receives a lesser education, because of their parents’ inability to pay a monthly internet bill.

Terique Boyce is an organizer with NYC Mesh and resident of NYCHA housing. He works towards achieving greater representation of people of color in the tech industry and bridging the digital divide in NYC.

Filed Under: broadband, covid-19, digital divide, internet connectivity, mesh, mesh networks, nyc, nycha
Companies: nyc mesh

Building Large-Scale Mesh Networks Using Ubiquitous Software-Defined Radios

from the distributed,-ad-hoc,-federated,-and-self-organizing dept

A couple of years ago, we noted that one lesson from Snowden’s leaks was that the NSA and GCHQ were listening in to all the major pipes and nodes that go to make up the Internet. Mesh networks seemed one way to make things harder for the snoopers, but they have been slow to develop on a scale large enough to make a difference. A fascinating article on the Wireless Week site offers tantalizing glimpses of a new generation of wireless technologies that could make meshes easy to set up and hard to monitor. The basic technology is software-defined radio (SDR):

> Thanks to inexpensive open source software-defined radios (SDRs), innovators will now be able to design their own wireless protocols. These protocols will be easy to use and effective in solving concrete problems instead of broad generalizations or focusing on exceptional use cases. The Github generation of wireless engineers will be born.

As their name suggests, the big breakthrough of SDRs is that many components that were previously implemented in hardware can be recreated in software. That means they can be easily changed, which allows wide-ranging and continuing experimentation. Couple that with plummeting costs, and we could be seeing SDRs built into practically everything:

> Digital signage, smart light poles, vending machines, ATMs, home appliances, and many more devices can all have an SDR in them and provide mobile broadband or other wireless solutions with licensed spectrum, as well.

From that, it might seem that SDRs are just a superior, programmable form of the Internet of Things. But here’s where things get interesting:

> Any device will be able to be part of a distributed ad-hoc, federated, self-organizing broadband network. Running a mobile network will be less about installing large antennas and more about automating the management of distributed networks that get built on top of third-party owned equipment.

In other words, once SDRs are cheap and commonplace, and can be found in all kinds of everyday devices, they can then be turned into the ultimate mesh network simply by tweaking their software. That avoids the current problem with mesh networks, which is that they are often hard to set up — a barrier to their widespread use.

These SDR-based networks would have another big advantage. Since they could potentially be on a huge scale, with multiple nodes in a single home, there is potential for obfuscatory routing of the kind used by Tor. Another interesting possibility is to build the ultra-cheap SDRs into drones, and use them as part of the ad-hoc mesh networks too. None of these approaches is guaranteed to stop the NSA and friends from spying on everyone, but they certainly offer the hope of making it considerably more difficult.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: ad hoc networks, mesh networks, sdrs, software defined radio

US Promoting Mesh Networks; Reporters Misleadingly Think They Somehow Stop Digital Spying

from the not-the-same-thing dept

A recent article in the NY Times talked about how the US State Department is behind a project to build up mesh networks that can be used in countries with authoritarian governments, helping citizens of those places access an internet that is often greatly limited. This isn’t actually new. In fact, three years ago we wrote about another NY Times article about the State Department funding these kinds of projects. Nor is the specific project in the latest NYT article new. A few months back, we had covered an important milestone with Commotion, the mesh networking project coming out of New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute (OTI).

But the latest NYT article is especially odd, not because it repeats old news, but because it tries to build a narrative that Commotion and other such projects funded by the State Department are somehow awkward because they could be used to fight back against government surveillance, such as those of the NSA. The problem is that the issues are unrelated, and nothing in mesh networking deals with stopping surveillance. As Ed Felten notes, the Times reporters appear to be confusing things greatly:

There’s only one problem: mesh networks don’t do much to protect you from surveillance. They’re useful, but not for that purpose.

A mesh network is constructed from a bunch of nodes that connect to each other opportunistically and figure out how to forward packets of data among themselves. This is in constrast to the hub-and-spoke model common on most networks.

The big advantage of mesh networks is availability: set up nodes wherever you can, and they’ll find other nearby nodes and self-organize to route data. It’s not always the most efficient way to move data, but it is resilient and can provide working connectivity in difficult places and conditions. This alone makes mesh networks worth pursing.

But what mesh networks don’t do is protect your privacy. As soon as an adversary connects to your network, or your network links up to the Internet, you’re dealing with the same security and privacy problems you would have had with an ordinary connection.

The whole point of Commotion and other mesh networks is availability, not privacy. The target use is for places where governments are seeking to shut down internet access, not surveil on them. Yes, there is a case where if you could set up a mesh network that then routed around government surveillance points you could circumvent some level of surveillance, but the networks themselves are not designed to be surveillance proof. In fact, back in January when we wrote about Commotion, we pointed out directly that the folks behind the project themselves are pretty explicit that Commotion is not about hiding your identity or preventing monitoring of internet traffic.

Could a mesh network also be combined with stronger privacy and security protections? Yes, but that’s different than just assuming that mesh networking takes on that problem by itself. It doesn’t — and it’s misleading for the NYT to suggest otherwise.

Filed Under: access, commotion, mesh networks, privacy, security, state department
Companies: new america foundation, oti

Wireless Mesh Networks, The NSA, And Re-building The Internet

from the exploring-all-the-avenues dept

One of the bitter lessons we learned from Snowden’s leaks is that the Internet has been compromised by the NSA (with some help from GCHQ) at just about every level, from our personal software and hardware, through ISPs to major online services. That has prompted some in the Internet engineering community to begin thinking about how to put back as much of the lost security as possible. But even if that’s feasible, it’s clearly going to take many years to make major changes to something as big and complex as the Net.

However, there’s an alternative approach to digital connectivity that has been around for a while, and that’s already being used around the world. Wireless meshes allow ad-hoc networks to be set up independently of the Internet’s main wiring by hooking together a local collection of suitable devices. Mesh networks can be thrown up and torn down quickly; devices can join and leave them dynamically; and they can recover from breaks in the wireless links by setting up alternative paths. They can either be run as local area networks, disconnected from the Internet, or hooked into it, allowing single or multiple links to be shared by the entire mesh.

One such wireless mesh comes from The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, which describes itself as follows:

> The Open Technology Institute formulates policy and regulatory reforms to support open architectures and open source innovations and facilitates the development and implementation of open technologies and communications networks. OTI promotes affordable, universal, and ubiquitous communications networks through partnerships with communities, researchers, industry, and public interest groups and is committed to maximizing the potentials of innovative open technologies by studying their social and economic impacts – particularly for poor, rural, and other underserved constituencies. OTI provides in-depth, objective research, analysis, and findings for policy decision-makers and the general public.

Its Commotion project has just reached an important milestone:

> Open Technology Institute (OTI) announced today that it has completed Beta testing and upgrades of its groundbreaking mesh networking toolkit, and is launching Commotion 1.0 in time for the new year. The launch represents the first full iteration of the technology, which makes it possible for communities to build and own their communications infrastructure using “mesh” networking. In mesh networks, users connect their devices to each other without having to route through traditional major infrastructure. > > Commotion 1.0 is an open-source toolkit that provides users software and training materials to adapt mobile phones, computers, and other wireless devices to create decentralized mesh networks so they can connect and share local services. A mesh network can function locally as an Intranet, but when one user connects to the Internet, all users will have access to it as well.

Of course, neither Commotion nor other wireless meshes are proof against the NSA’s huge array of tricks and tools that we have recently found out about. Indeed, OTI provides an explicit “warning label” for its mesh:

> Commotion > > Cannot hide your identity > Does not prevent monitoring of internet traffic > Does not provide strong security against monitoring over the mesh > Can be jammed with radio/data-interference

But it’s important to remember that Commotion and the other wireless mesh systems were designed in a more innocent time, before we knew the extent to which we were being spied upon, and how much the basic protocols of the Internet had been compromised. Now that we’ve learnt about all those things, it would be good to use that knowledge to spur the creation of the next generation of wireless mesh systems with high levels of security and privacy, so that we can add them to our own collection of tools and tricks in the fight to build a surveillance-resistant Net.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: commotion, infrastructure, mesh networks, privacy, security, wireless, wireless mesh networks
Companies: open technology institute, oti

Paper Suggests Letting The Government Use Your Router In An Emergency

from the not-as-crazy-as-it-sounds dept

Jon Brodkin, over at Ars Technica, has an interesting discussion about a paper from some researchers suggesting that we could augment first responder communications efforts by letting them make use of the public’s WiFi routers. Basically, if I understand the proposal correctly, if turned on, it would make use of your router to try to form an ad hoc mesh network with other, similar routers in the area that, in theory would only be used by those public safety first responders. It’s no secret that there are efforts underway to make sure that emergency personnel have better access to communications spectrum, and this is, at the very least, a creative way of attacking the problem.

The theory is that this doesn’t impinge on anyone’s security, because it would effectively carve out a separate service on the router, not unlike home WiFi routers that offer up different logins for residents and “guests.” Of course, theory and reality aren’t always one and the same, and Brodkin reached out to Bruce Schneier who raised his concerns:

“The problems are the same,” Schneier told Ars. “Once you build such a system, you have to build the security to ensure that only the good guys use it. And that’s not an easy task. It is far more secure not to have the capabilities in the first place.”

That said, if such a system were purely voluntary, and individuals were able to offer up such connectivity for first responders (or even for anyone else), would that necessarily be so bad? I’ve been skeptical in the past of attempts to create truly comprehensive mesh networks building on people’s home WiFi routers, and there hasn’t been much success there. But, perhaps there’s something interesting in special use cases, such as one involving first responders. I agree with Schneier that there could be some risks, but I’m not sure how they would be much different than running a basic guest access WiFi network that doesn’t involve a password. As long as you’re not using that network for sensitive and unencrypted info, it seems like a similar level of risk.

Filed Under: first responders, government, mesh networks, privacy, routers, security, sharing

Developers Keep Cracking Away At Mesh Networks

from the maybe-you-can-hear-me-now dept

Mesh networks have been talked about for many years as a wireless networking technology for the future. The basic idea is that instead of having every individual access point or cell site backhauled to a larger network (like the internet or the PSTN), access points can talk to one another, and traffic can hop from one AP to the next, until it reaches one with a backhaul connection. This sounds great, in theory, since it makes it much easier to deploy wireless networks, but mesh networks haven’t proven easy to get going in the real world. Still, researchers continue to push forward, with the latest development coming from a Swedish company that says it’s got a way for mobile phones to communicate directly with others up to a kilometer away, bypassing a centralized mobile network. While the direct range is limited, the mesh functionality can expand the coverage area.

Assuming the technology actually works well in the real world, it could be a useful way to allow communications in remote areas without mobile networks, while the company behind it says it could also be used to allow for free calls. It doesn’t sound as if they have things completely sorted out on the technology front yet, but the bigger problem with getting the technology adopted in the developed world, where traditional mobile networks are common, is that coverage can’t be guaranteed. Instead of plunking down a base station (or WiFi access point, etc.) and knowing it will cover a certain area, this sort of mesh network requires that there be a chain of users, each no more than 1km apart, between the two people who wish to communicate. If any part of that chain breaks, the network has to try route around it and hope that there’s another way to connect the two parties. This can be a problem, particularly when networks are first launching and there aren’t a lot of users around. It’s also a hurdle that users in developed nations, where mobile networks are already plentiful — and relatively cheap — won’t be very willing to overlook.

Filed Under: mesh networks, wireless
Companies: terranet