From: Saul Albert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Consume-thenet] report from the berlinbackbone
'pologies for x posting this monster... thought it might be widely relevant
I've just got back from berlin where I was *really* impressed by the network they've got set up there.
As soon as I have a minute I'm going to be uploading some photos of one of the many rooftops they have managed to colonise for the 'Berlin BackBone'. There, I've just done it.
http://chinabone.lth.bclub.org.uk/gallery/berlinbackbone
Really, they put us to shame these Germans. After the Berlon
event last year (http://bootlab.org/berlon/) where somehow they got the
impression that *we* (ie. UK free networkers) were the cool kids who had
everything sorted, they really got their shit together and I must say
they make us look really shabby :)
From what Sven and Conny from c-base.org (check out their project, it
http://www.c-base.org
rocks my world) told me, they've done some very simple boxes - no mesh or anything fancy, just something functional to distribute a 35meg line they've sourced (Ok, that must help - it's a hell of an incentive).
- 6 or 7 boxes on *great* sites throughout berlin
- each box (i mean box, not computer) has 2 cheap freenet APs - one running in client mode, one in AP mode, crossover connected and linked to two antennas - one directional helical, one semi-directional 'horn' antenna that sven and conny designed.
- there's a network of groups and spaces - bootlab, c-base, CCC and this great
nightclub called Maria - they're all on the network to some extent -
although there are problems with a few links.
- This really blew me away: Sven, Alex (from c-base) and alex (from
dorkbot.org) and I get into a cab to go to club maria and sven
switches the radio to 101.4 reboot FM (check out the bootlab.org site
for more info on that). They're actually streaming from the club, over
about 6 hops to the bootlab - over about 10km to an FM radio transmitter
where music and talk from the club goes out live. Unbelievable.
- electra and some of the other c-basers are experimenting with mobile
mesh, and expecting to get a shitload of those meshcubes to play with.
mm.
- there were some great ideas about peering and tunelling that would be interesting to explore - also some ideas about syndicating and re-broadcasting radio content. I also think sven and pit were talking about microfm / wifi radio networks - spreading the spectrum use even further and more distributedly.
- there were some social problems to do with promises made about bandwidth and uptime. This goes to show that the provision in the picopeering agreement about 'no quality of service' was wise - and should have been adhered to... ;)
- also, the fact that the berlin backbone wasn't using the picopeering
agreement indicates that it's not really very useful yet, and won't be
until it has a technical function and implementation along with it's
pseudo-legal / symbolic function. Bring on the semantic mesh!
- one really good suggestion that could be added to the picopeering agreement in version 1.1 is that all peer links should be synchronous same upload as download - (although I'm not sure this would work with server/client setups and natted gateways and bandwidth throttling..).
- the example that seemed most encouraging here was that *groups were actually working together*. It was amazing. There were obvious tensions but hey, the fsking thing worked! I got a lot of energy out of this visit - and I'd really like to see something happening here again soon. Julian! What preparations for the London wireless spaz? let's go to the Freifunk summer convention with something to show for ourselves!
The c-base crew were unbelievably hospitable - lots of thanks to sven, coder, conny, alex, wulfie the diceman and the others who made us feel at home. I just hope we can get our shit together to the point where we can contribute to this effort. Great to see Juergen from Freifunk again too! Sorry we didn't have a chance to catch up proper.
I'm up in bristol now so I'm going to see what I can do there to get involved with the bristol wireless lot and other local groups (node going to the cube cinema... again.. on Wednesday night after dorkbot)
I'm also (currently distracting myself from) trying to get some money together for a software development project to get this semantic web business off the ground - which should have some good implications for visualisation / distributed data storage / node annotation, but that's still a good 6 months (and several hours of mind-bendingly-awkward application writing) away.
whew. splurge over, sorry about that, berlin did really cook me up though.
X
Saul.
-------------------------- )extra bit(
I was so impressed by the way the c-base were organising themselves that I'll be preparing a report about collaboration and spectrum usage for the University of Openess' collaborative research / Radio Activity faculty - in due course.
the basis of the report will be that exploitation of radio spectrum resource seems to be a meeting point for otherwise antagonistic groups, which seems obvious really, but the interesting bits will be in the detail I'm sure.
if anyone has expert knowledge of the c-base or other organisations that
operate in a similar way, and you want to help with this, please get in touch.
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