Self hosting helps make the internet more decentralized, but at the end of the day someone else owns that series of tubes.
This is probably a pipe dream, but I think it would be cool if we self hosted not just servers but networking infrastructure as well.
I have an extra class amateur radio license and one of the many niches within the ham radio hobby I’m interested in is packet radio and wireless mesh networking.
Packet radio could technically refer to any RF communication that uses packets, including wifi, but I mostly see it used to refer to the AX.25 protocol, which works like an old-school dial-up modem in that it converts data into audio tones that are transmitted using FM or single sideband radios built for voice communication. AX.25 is used mostly nowadays in Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) which is used to report location and status info. There’s a website, aprs.fi, where you can track vehicles sending their location or weather stations reporting conditions and so on.
In the olden days there were tons of bulletin boards hosted over AX.25 all over the globe that you could reach either directly or through repeaters. There are a few hangers on, and I even hosted one for a while but nobody visited. You could by hardware terminal node controllers (TNCs) that had a BBS feature, and nowadays there are a few software TNCs available.
Several Wifi frequency bands overlap with ham bands, and various projects have arisen that modify commercial wifi gear to turn them into mesh nodes forming a wireless wide area network, operating under FCC part 97 rules rather than the unlicensed part 15 rules that they use out of the box. This allows higher power and channels otherwise off limits to wifi stations. The project I’m most familiar with is Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) which uses a fork of openWRT firmware. I’ve tried a couple times to get the other hams in my area interested in setting up a network, but it’s slow going.
There are also ham-adjacent projects like Meshtastic that I’m not as familiar with.
This barely scratches the surface of what’s out there. The ham bands are explicitly non commercial and there are limits on what you can transmit and how much bandwidth you can use, but I dream of a day when everyone’s wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood which is connected to all the other neighborhoods in the city which is connected via repeaters to all the other cities and so on. Sure it would be slow, but we’d be communicating on our own system that only costs as much as the hardware you run it on.
I’m subscribing to self hosted and following you. I don’t have the tech background to sign up to assist at this point, but I do see a world where this will be the only way to send messages digitally — something like what you have described.
The corporations in their consolidation will absolutely break the internet. We have to have community originated back ups of something.
I’ve been going down this rabbit hole myself. Already set up a solar Meshtastic node and MeshCore repeater. Kinda cool, very low bandwidth and pretty unreliable though.
It’s my understanding that encryption is illegal on amateur radio bands. I’m thinking about getting a license anyways; looks fun.
HaLow, BATMAN, Reticulum and stuff like that also look cool, but I haven’t messed around with those yet.
I think radio will always have bandwidth/congestion problems. It’s like everyone within range is using the same “wire.”
I also like overlay networks like Tor and I2P, but it’s possible those will eventually be blocked or made illegal in many countries, if governments keep heading in the direction they seem to be heading.
I didn’t read your entire post (sorry it was long 😅) but have you heard of lorawan? It’s a low powered long distance mesh network technology. I believe that’s what the helium project uses.
Nice dream / project. 😊
There are also ham-adjacent projects like Meshtastic that I’m not as familiar with.
Why don’t you buy a node and try it out?
You can build one for a few $.
There is a solution to own your own IPv6 address. It is called Yggdrasil network. Your address is derived from keypair you need to generate at the beginning. All traffic is end to end encrypted with that keypairs.
There is also decentralized alternative to DNS - Namecoin, DNS based on blockchain.
Why don’t you simply build your own network aswell? https://dn42.net/
Packet radio has such a low bandwidth usually. You should get more out of directional Wi-Fi, as in 60GHz point to point connections. One downside: if it rains you’re out of luck. You’d better run cables ;)
ISPs should be regional users cooperatives everywhere. Rural areas in the US have local ISPs structured this way, but corporate ISPs have been trying to use regulation to make them illegal in normal service areas, which is disgusting.
I predict that point to point private fiber (currently used by high speed traders) will become more and more prevalent as issues with AI impersonation and spoofing become more prevalent, we should use this infrastructure drive to push linking co-op and public mesh networks using the same long-run conduit.
Why not a municipal service?
I always thought that the municipality should own the last mile. FTTP for every unit, then the ISPs could run their lines to a local POP and just cross-connect to the house, apartment or whatever that wants their services. That way it would reduce the infrastructure that an ISP needs and also increases the available choices for a customer.
Payment for the municipal last mile could either be leveraged via your taxes or a fee that is paid by the ISP (which inevitably would be paid by the customer anyway)
I’m ok with both, but prefer co-ops because the members get direct voting on large decisions by default, rather than a proxy vote via an appointed government worker who answers to the municipal government.
That said, there is no reason these can’t be one and the same, the local government could fund the establishment of a regional co-op and maintain audit and some other limited authority over it.
I also support long-distance fiber infrastructure being built and maintained by worker’s co-ops that would then get paid for service by the regional ISPs. Worker members would be highly motivated to maintain good uptime, and hiring/training members who live local to the fiber lines in remote regions would be possible with the incentive of worker ownership. Once built it is a long term maintenance and security business with steady return, perfect for a worker’s co-op that could be financed with private capital at decent ROI.
It would already help if apartment buildings had an internal network with a single connection point, but I can tell you as someone who worked on this as a volunteer for student dormitories back in the day that ISPs are extremely hostile to the idea.
No thanks, double-NATing is not my idea of fun when it comes to self-hosting.
This. Though theoretically you could do it without CGNAT, maybe some type of complex vlan arrangement? I’m not sure, I’m not a networkologist.
I do know that I just got fiber down my road from a smaller company, still a big multi state company, but not Comcast or charter big. I called them because I was worried about CGNAT for my self hosting. The salesman didn’t know what I was talking about, which is disappointing but not surprising. But they forwarded me to the tech guys, who also claimed to not know what I was talking about… Which was either a downright lie, or they were idiots, either way it’s very concerning.
The price was right though, $5 cheaper per month, for 10 times faster download, and 30 times faster upload. So I gave it a shot. Thankfully I’m not behind a CGNAT, yet 🤞
That is a silly assumption, like why would you assume the worst possible setup? And it would be much easier to talk to the person managing the apartment internet than having to deal with some AI chatbot that pretends to be the support at some shitty ISP.
apartment landlord
why would you assume the worst possible setup?
(/¯ ಠ_ಠ)/¯
Some do, but that means you’re locked in to whoever the landlord chooses for the ISP, and you can’t call the ISP for support if you have issues.
afaik the Ruhr Universiry of Bochum has an intranet that connects the uni and all the dorms. And they selfhost a couple of services, like email, git and pastebin. You can see a line going to the dorms on the graph.
Yeah, German Universities have special direct internet access via the “Hochschulnetz”. We had some pretty fancy 5ghz directional wifi connections over several km connecting to it, but it was fairly slow (shared 10 mbit), which made that impractical for most private internet use.
Universities all over the world own their fair share of regional and national network. They also host a lot of services however in most of study field the student are not educated about it and go for corporate solutions. Professor may know about it but they are not sensibilised enough to understand they should teach to choose these tools
Cuba has their “Snet”, a peer to peer mesh network of routers. It’s pretty cool but it’s gotta be crazy slow
There’s Freifunk as well!
Nice! Thanks for posting this. Does it run on all wifi bands? Is there provision for mesh extension by wired Intranet?
As far as I know it uses the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol. On a channel within the regular 2.4GHz wifi spectrum. So no license needed unless it collides with laws for point-to-point beams. All people communicating to each other obviously need to agree on a channel. It comes with some hierarchy where I’m at. There are local chapters who make up some config and who also operate nodes and exit nodes into the internet. These are necessary because Germany has stupid laws.
Definitely possible, and there is already some tech with the kinks worked out like wimax that could wirelessly serve a whole town. There are also folks who have created their own isps to fill in where the big players don’t bother. It is apparently regulatory hell to get up and running.
The problem isn’t technology, it’s people.
It is apparently regulatory hell to get up and running.
By design, of course.
but I dream of a day when everyone’s wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood
A modern resurrection of the party phone lol. I remember those well.
Man it’s been a hot minute since I was in my ham shack as a kid banging out code on a little 5 watt transmitter/receiver. There are a good handful of repeaters in this area and they are quite invaluable when we have climate related emergencies, or other. During the pandemic I would listen to the chatter. They definitely serve a valuable purpose. The general public doesn’t really realize how these little ham shacks can be quite the boon in hard times and are usually surprised that they even exist.
There is a user here that mentioned he is in funding talks for a local, independent ISP. I’m not really sure I’m ready to be connected to my neighbors intimately. Good fences make good neighbors.
You’re currently connected to your neighbors that intimately. Chances are a good chunk of your neighbors are on the same ISP as you.
What disconnect do you think a non-local ISP is providing that a local one wouldn’t?There is a user here that mentioned he is in funding talks for a local, independent ISP. I’m not really sure I’m ready to be connected to my neighbors intimately. Good fences make good neighbors.
Why do you think an independent ISP would operate any differently at the networking level on a per-customer basis? This is basic network segmentation, and my home gear can do that pretty easily. Throw each customer on their own vlan that’s a /30 and they can’t do anything more than talk from their node to the central router.
Good firewalls make good digital neighbors, and an independent ISP isn’t going to survive long if Alice can access Bob’s home network over the ISP without having something specifically configured in Bob’s network to allow that.
Oh I get how it would all work, I’m not into sharing my network. lol I did have to provision a separate vlan for my lady friend when she comes over so she can get her fill of all the advertisements she wants, but, there are direct benefits of such a compromise in this instance. ;)
Oh I get how it would all work, I’m not into sharing my network.
See, I’m struggling to think that you do. You’re not sharing your network with anyone. You’re just hooking your uplink into someone else’s network, who will take as much (or more, given how fucky current ISPs are) care to keep you and your neighbors from talking to each other without your own config letting it happen.
At the risk of being a contrarian, why would I want to hook my uplink to someone else’s network, or vice versa?
I think you might be misunderstanding something here, because this is already how every ISP works - including the one you are using right now. Just on a bigger scale.
why would I want to hook my uplink to someone else’s network
Well, the biggest reason I could think of is that you want to access the Internet.
Your local network is only as good as the services you run, and most people don’t self host. If you choose not to hook your uplink to your ISPs network, you’re not gonna be able to do all that much.
From the OP (emphasis mine):
but I dream of a day when everyone’s wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood which is connected to all the other neighborhoods in the city which is connected via repeaters to all the other cities and so on. Sure it would be slow, but we’d be communicating on our own system that only costs as much as the hardware you run it on.
I already hook my uplink to a network called my ISP. It’s fast, it delivers everything I need, that’s why I pay for it. Why would I want to hook my uplink to BillyBob’s network a mile up or down the road either way? Now, I realize there is no ‘I’ in team, but there is a big ass ‘ME’, so the idea first has to pass the ‘me’ test as selfish as that may sound. Reduced speeds don’t sound like a selling point, at least to me. Communal communications doesn’t sound like a selling point, at least to me.
Yes, I get it. At this point, 80%+ of 8.4 billion people are inexorably tied together via the internet, no matter what ISP you use. However, the current system delivers fast speeds and access to more data than I could consume in many lifetimes. So, I’m still left struggling with the ‘why’ part.
So, if you would, help me out with the ‘why’ part.
So, if you would, help me out with the ‘why’ part
It eliminates a single point of failure, can be used to bypass censorship, and allow for community support/engagement in a way that is harder to track and suppress (in that there’s no ‘central’ hub and you have to go after nodes individually. From an opsec point of view, you’re still broadcasting a signal that someone in range can pick up). Obviously it requires many devices to make a good mesh work, but short of DOSing every channel or just blowing out the signal space, it’s gonna be hard to take that down.
I see it as something like tor or i2p, not something for general use at the moment, but definitely has good uses.
Can someone give me a “explain to me like I’m five” to the debate here? I’d like to learn 😀
This is an example of what an Internet service providers network might look like.
They use many different types of specialized computers and devices to connect your house (one of the grey rectangles) to the greater Internet (the yellow rectangle in the middle).
One person is arguing that instead of the Internet service provider owning all of the red green and blue computers… Other people would own them. And maybe the red computer for your neighborhood would physically be inside your neighbor’s house, instead of in a small building or box on the side of the road somewhere nearby.
Functionally, it’s the same Internet, regardless of who owns the red box. Though theoretically, it could be less safe to give random people, potentially bad actors, access to the physical computer that is the red box, because they could do something malicious with it. But the point is, if the technology is working correctly, it doesn’t matter who owns it, everyone’s private home networks (everything downstream of your grey rectangle), are kept separate.
Just like normal Internet, you can’t print on your neighbor’s network printer, just because you both have the same ISP and share the same red computer upstream somewhere. The red computer won’t let it happen.
Does that make sense?
Now, the concern of the other guy, it seems, comes from not understanding this. Not understanding that the red computers are specially configured by the ISP, or whoever owns it, to keep the grey rectangles separate.
What he might be thinking, is something similar to sharing your Wi-Fi password. Or maybe running an Ethernet cable over the fence and plugging your neighbor’s router into your router. Things start to get complicated here, so I’ll gloss over a lot of things, but essentially… Your home router is not configured like the red computers are. So all of your neighbors data would be going through your home network, and you could very likely see what he’s doing, and he could potentially see what you’re doing (provided there’s no double NAT, but even then I’m not sure, maybe).
Basically, if two or more neighbors want to share Internet, but don’t know how to do it safely, then they can expose their private network activity to each other and open each other up to a decent amount of risk.
The solution, is to configure your router in a similar way to the red computers. It’s complicated, but not that difficult in practice. You could Google VLANs to get an idea of what would need to be done. Honestly you’d need more than that, some good firewall rules, and more things that I’m not qualified to comment on. I’m not a networkologist. But it can be done.
The debate/argument stems from a basic misunderstanding of how these systems work. Or perhaps they both understand how they work, but the guy who doesn’t want to do it is just worried about his neighbors being untrustworthy with the hardware being in their house, worried they’ll be nefarious, but he’s just bad at communicating that idea to the other guy.
At any rate, it doesn’t matter who owns the red computers or the green or blue, if they’re configured correctly, you’re safe. Unless you don’t trust whoever owns the computers 🤷♂️
Hopefully that makes sense! Let me know if you have any questions!
There’s not really too much of a debate, just a lack of deep understanding of how the infrastructure works under the hood.
The other person (rightly) doesn’t want to share their local network (what’s behind your wifi router) with their neighbors. My only point was that, much like current ISPs, you don’t share any networking with your neighbors. The only thing remotely close to ‘shared’ would be the individual uplinks (your ISP connection) from each residence to the (shared) networking gear of the ISP.
A local ISP and a Telco aren’t (shouldn’t) going to be handling the base networking layer any differently. They’ll all have individual connections between them and subscribers, and the only way that I could get into your network is to setup services and configure either side to talk to the service on the other.
To actually ELI5 (which I am exceptionally bad at with actual 5yos), Alice and Bob both get their toys from Charles (Telco ISP) who charges a lot of money, and doesn’t treat them well when they try to use the toys they got. Dan comes a long and works with Ed and Fred to set up a local toy store and try to treat customers better. Bob (irmadlad) is concerned that the new local toy store means he’ll have to share the toys he bought with Alice, not realizing neither store makes you share your toys.
You mention meshtaatic. There is also halow on the consumer side now. One of my goals for the next year is to set up a few open halow nodes in a mesh. As a local anarchist community network of sorts. With little or no intention of bridging it to the internet. Outside of connecting to other similar remote network segments or maybe an email/xmpp bridge. Mostly a separate local network with separate local resources.
Like every protocol in the unlicensed 900mhz range, 802.11ah has a very limited transmission rate in the 50 to 100 kbps range.good for occasional data like sensors or a few bytes of message, but not for any modern comma like AV, mass file transfer, etc.
It will of course varry by environment, topology, and configuration. As everything does. But even a megabit, 125KB/s leveraging modern technologies. Would be very usable. Capable of pushing DVD level streams of AV1 and opus though at saturation. More than easily able to push basic websites. High traffic probably not. But I wouldn’t expect neighborhood/village traffic to be too heavy.
I’ve been watching halow for a while, I haven’t yet seen any sustainable, real-world examples beyond a few hundred kbps (not bytes). I have seen the 1Mbps results, and they’re promising, but most places with any other traffic in the free band is busy. If you have any successful and repeatable tests hitting at usable speeds, I’d love to see them.
After getting into meshtastic and a few other lorawan projects, I’m a bit concerned that tests for these are always high and visible, which doesn’t work well in the mountains, even at shorter ranges.
I used to be more hands-on with these new standards, but I’ll wait for better tests to come from halow before I try it out.
I’ve seen one. Not a great sample size. A YouTuber who also does a lot of mesh-tastic videos. Demonstrated live streaming from an ESP32 camera module in a large public park. High resolution low frame rate. As well as in a bridge configuration streaming YouTube from their apartment close to practical range limits. Roughly line of sight, minimal obstruction, of course.
Guaranteed success? No. But definitely something worth looking into investigating and replicating. Devices like these are much more accessible to your average person than ham certification and equipment.
I appreciate the response.
I’m still keeping an eye on these technologies and I hope we can set some decent standards for alternates to WiFi and LTE narrow band.
No worries. And I remembered the youtubers name. Data Slayer. He’s got a few halow videos. 1Km and several Mbps is just about the baseline to be interesting. Lorawan range is great. But the data rate really is far too low for anything outside iot or im.
Some of the heletech modules look very promising and not unaffordable.
