And no, I’m not talking about pirating on the internet, I’m talking about getting your internet connection to the outside world without paying or having a subscription or license. Something like a mesh network with your neighbors with the exit node being one person’s high-speed fiber line, or even an exit node through a free public wifi network that you’ve hidden a little repeater device within range of… something like that could be interesting. I’ve been thinking lately of a world where decentralized networks become more common, and where people can freely use the internet without paying an ISP. What are your thoughts?
way back in the early days of Wifi (802.11B was the cutting edge magic future technology) I had a large antenna hooked up to my laptop PCMCIA wifi card and could pick up some open networks from a few neighbours away. I used to set it up and leave winmx running on my laptop to download all sorts of garbage.
My home internet at the time was up-to 512Kbps satellite downlink (usually around 200k and lots of packet loss and very high ping) with a ~56k dial up uplink which was also the failover when the satellite was too weak, so it was very asymmetrical and unreliable.
This is semi-rural Australia in 1999/2000 and was the best we could get until we got a 3G connection that usually got 1.5meg down and 500k up on a weak HSPA connection, that place didn’t get 8/1 ADSL a couple of years later around 2005/6. A couple of streets away there were already on cable and better DSL lines were available so I assume I was connecting to one of those.
Over the weak long range Wifi connection with a makeshift “cantenna” that probably wasn’t quite right I usually got around 250k symmetrical if I recall correctly, which was really nice compared to the satellite link despite the lower maximum speed.