Data Roads Foundation, The Blog

From Community Broadband Networks, and the Institute for Local Self Reliance:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/01/dido_snake_oil_or_saviour/

The Rearden Labs whitepaper on “Distributed Input Distributed Output” (DIDO) wireless technology has disappointed me in many ways.

1. First, it didn’t really talk about the technology used.

Based on the single-antenna description provided, I’m guessing it uses a starter ping in the target frequency to characterize all the local reflections, kind of like sonar. The client antenna may even communicate the reflection pattern seen back via some older wireless technology, like WiFi. Signals after that initial ping are just patterned based on the reflection map, to hit the receiver all at once. Depending on the reflection space size and frequency used, the signal pattern from the source may not even resemble a traditional radio signal, but the result on the receiving end where the reflections converge would be as unmistakable as the Morse Code blip of a telegraph. A MIMO antenna array could use beam-forming to generate a unique reflection pattern in every direction, and each beam individually could fall well below FCC regulated power maximums, yet combine into a powerful (high SNR) signal at the receiver end (and only very near the receiver — within the reception bubble mentioned in the whitepaper).

2. The business model seems opportunistic, not technologically necessary.

If the DIDO processing is so difficult that it needs the old centralized/mainframe computation business model to support it, then how will it ever be cost effective? I think the real answer is that the processing isn’t actually that difficult. A <$500 PC can render realistic 3D environments, and it can probably perform all the same math as any Rearden Lab prototype machine. Investors are just looking for ways to force DIDO “users” into a high-margin subscription (read: perpetual servitude) model, instead of offering any low-margin commodity hardware model.

Hey Rearden Labs: the “low-margin commodity hardware model” worked for 3M! You should be aiming for ubiquity, not punishing your consumers.

3. The “snake oil” fears are easily diffused: tell the whole truth.

The real lie is the one that sustains the whole wireless industry, from AM/FM radio to cell phone subscriptions — the claim that radio interferes. Radio is just a form of light outside human visible range. We know light does not interfere, otherwise that camera obscura inside your head (the eye) wouldn’t work. Light passes through distinct points in space unperturbed — including your own pupils — every single day! If light interfered, you couldn’t read these words right now. The problem isn’t radio — it’s your stupid antenna. Take a single rod or even cone out of your eye’s retina, stick it outside its protective enclosure, and it will see just as badly as any TV antenna. Light doesn’t interfere, but dumb antennas don’t know any better.

If DIDO helps rid humanity of the myth of interference, I welcome it wholeheartedly. The whitepaper makes no attempt. This is in service to its writers’ goals: monopolizing all the counter-myth benefits.

The Register writer Richard Chirgwin is right to be suspicious, but this article is suspicious for all the wrong reasons.

These articles are all related:

Radio frequency is just light outside of human visible range. Light does not interfere.

The myth of interference.

Mapping light does not require a lens.

Compound eyes

Phased Array Optics

Researchers develop lens-free, pinhead-size camera.

Wireless, single antenna, data technology that does not “interfere” with neighboring signals on the same frequency is already in early stages of development.

DIDO: snake oil or wireless salvation?

Each wireless “access point” can also serve as a core router.

Netsukuku

The Internet does not belong to the corporations.

In Defense of the Internet Craftsman

The US Postal Service is failing in its core mission: affordable national communications.

Deliverance 

Why I started DataRoads.Org

As with most truly new endeavors, this one took a path that no one could predict or intend. I really thought there would already be something like this out there, somewhere. I was surprised the DataRoads.Org domain name was even available. Even after setting up this web site, I thought all that we would have to do is promote existing network standards for deployment by land and home owners, making the Data Roads Foundation more like an Auto Club and less like a civil engineering firm.

In fact, I thought I already knew of a couple Data Roads routing software candidates, via my research for the NELA-ISC.Net project. The main projects I had in mind were CUWiN and PERM, both wireless mesh projects of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Unfortunately, most of the updates and action on these projects seem to have ended in 2008, due to students graduating, and Ph.D. candidates finishing their theses. They are two great open source projects to work from, but thorough research made it obvious that I would be fairly alone in updating them to the latest hardware. It also seemed like these projects were limited to small communities in scope, because of the use of IPv4 addressing. ICANN is running out of IPv4 numbers this year, because they are insufficient for seamless global routing compared to IPv6.

I looked all over the current Internet for router projects that would meet some simple criteria: IPv6 subnet with a 64-bit minimum for geographic numbering, efficient mesh topography routing in any medium (wired or wireless), and open source software support for configuration and upgrades. I looked at all available geographic and mesh routing systems mentioned in Wikipedia. I studied several University projects like those mentioned above. I looked into router firmware projects like OpenWRT, DD-WRT, and Tomato. I read about peer-to-peer network software of all types. Nothing out there  completely fit our overall goals. Projects that approximate our needs are still in the IT experts-only phase, making it too difficult to get regular people to install it for themselves.

ThePoint.com Challenge

I studied a lot of different options for getting nonprofit startups bootstrapped. I bought a Nolo legal book on the subject, which is specifically written for California based nonprofits, but it’s applicable to most United States. I found new contacts through my Internet activism research — most helpfully Christopher Mitchell at MuniNetworks.org, and Sascha Meinrath at the Open Technology Initiative of the New America Foundation (he is also one of the co-founders of the CUWiN project mentioned above). I even joined the board of my local neighborhood council, even though it’s a Los Angeles City Chartered municipal organization, and thus not really a nonprofit. Based on research and advice, I tried to get an existing nonprofit to accept DataRoads.Org as a sponsored project. I found a few nonprofits in the Open Source and Community Network fields that seemed like good matches, but none of them are interested. I also looked into the Tides Foundation, and they required $5000 minimum in donations before they would accept any application for sponsorship. If I had that kind of money to put into this on my own, the nonprofit would already be incorporated.

So I started a challenge on ThePoint.com, which is a great service for all-or-nothing challenges. Either the challenge gets completely funded to the point where it will be sustainable, or nothing happens at all, and everyone keeps their pledge money. If you really want something to happen, but don’t have all the money needed to fund it on your own, this is a way to pledge money in a way that insures it will either happen when all resources are ready, or you keep your money.

I have already put a lot of my resources into this web site, but I have already pledged even more to ThePoint.com challenge. So if you really want to see DataRoads software and hardware created, and eventually have the chance to install your own home Data Roads, please help fund ThePoint.com challenge. I’ll try to make sure you never regret it.

Although “The ‘One True’ Fallacy” may eventually qualify for a list of logical fallacies, I don’t have the Ph.D. nor time required to present all the reasoning behind adding it. I really just want to talk about data files.

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Recent developments in small renewable power sources (like solar and small wind), as well as infrastructure destruction during recent tragedies (like Hurricane Katrina), have led some brilliant minds to rethinking the way we distribute and manufacture electrical power. Many of these studies all lead to the same conclusion: data networks allow us to carry enough information about diverse power sources and uses, so that they can be efficiently coordinated at small scale, over a simple grid of neighbor-to-neighbor transmission lines. These small power grids are generally called microgrids. These “smart power” grid networks function at fairly low data bandwidth, so smart grids can be built on top of (or to extend) normal network data lines.

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I’ve rarely been accused of being too terse, or not technical enough. In the interest of brevity and clarity, I have created a visual representation of how it looks to flip the Internet upside-down, as suggested solely via text in an earlier post.

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These legislative propositions came to me as ideas that would ease Data Road equipment deployment in the future, but I think they could have a good (but more subtle) effect on their own, and with Network Neutrality legislation in general. Let me know if you agree.

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I want to eliminate the need for ICANN — the group that decides all the Internet names! Did that get your attention? That’s good, but please note that I would like to have ICANN around for a very long time. The operative word in that first sentence is ‘need.’ I want to eliminate the need for ICANN, in the same way I want to eliminate the need for any world atlas when I’m only travelling just a few blocks away. While an atlas may be detailed enough to be useful for such a short trip, it’s definitely more cumbersome than necessary. I don’t even need to know the name of the city I’m in, if I’m only travelling along 1 street, just 2 blocks to the south. I could change city borders during that trip, and I wouldn’t need to realize it, unless there happened to be a wall at the city border line. In that strange case, the wall should have a plaque or guard that tells me about the city border. I don’t need the atlas if I can just read the plaque when I get there.

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I read the news too often. I say that because it’s too often depressing, which is not healthy for me. The prime example I have at the moment is this news from various sites, best summarized at BroadbandReports.com: the government is outsourcing Fourth Amendment violations to private industry. Some of the facts discussed here were not new to me, such as the old partnership between NSA and AT&T, as revealed by a courageous whistle-blower in San Francisco, Mark Klein. Inquiries over projects related to the NSA codename ECHELON have been public since 2000. Our defenders at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are still fighting for our rights to privacy from these corporate-government collaborative invasions.

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