WEBVTT 00:00:00.521 --> 00:00:08.376 Hello, everyone! Hallo! Ihr hört das Freifunkradio. You're listening to Freifunkradio. 00:00:09.066 --> 00:00:14.076 Now, today we're going to broadcast in English because this is a pre-production 00:00:14.471 --> 00:00:16.369 from the Wireless Community Weekend. 00:00:17.037 --> 00:00:20.601 And we have a guest from the United States, from New York City. 00:00:21.059 --> 00:00:24.304 Zach is with us, from New York City Wireless. 00:00:24.751 --> 00:00:26.923 Hello, hello. Zach Giles from New York City. 00:00:29.256 --> 00:00:29.993 New York City Mesh. 00:00:31.346 --> 00:00:37.825 Yeah, it's great to have you here and one of the rare opportunities to talk 00:00:37.825 --> 00:00:40.855 to someone from from over the ocean. 00:00:42.114 --> 00:00:47.838 And yes, maybe we mostly start when we're talking with communities. 00:00:48.815 --> 00:00:54.485 What's the state of your community? How many devices, routers, 00:00:54.485 --> 00:00:56.835 nodes do you have deployed and so on. 00:00:56.835 --> 00:00:58.735 Yeah, our network is quite large now. 00:00:59.235 --> 00:01:03.951 It covers a large portion of southern Manhattan, which is kind of the main island in New York City. 00:01:04.468 --> 00:01:08.194 And then we cover, I don't know, maybe half of Brooklyn. 00:01:08.676 --> 00:01:14.301 And we've also jumped up to the Upper West Side in New York City and all the way up to the Bronx. 00:01:14.708 --> 00:01:15.985 And that's kind of important. 00:01:15.985 --> 00:01:19.315 Because we've had a goal of getting to the Bronx for quite a while because it's 00:01:19.315 --> 00:01:22.695 sort of much more low income and generally. 00:01:23.038 --> 00:01:27.565 And it's generally kind of we want to be of use to people in the area. 00:01:27.565 --> 00:01:30.265 So we're serving everybody. 00:01:30.631 --> 00:01:34.685 You know, the rich and the poor, but we want to make sure that we also make 00:01:34.685 --> 00:01:36.981 the network available in low-income areas. 00:01:37.955 --> 00:01:40.265 So, yeah, we have maybe 3,000. 00:01:40.265 --> 00:01:42.792 To 5,000 people using it daily. 00:01:43.135 --> 00:01:44.115 We don't really know how. 00:01:44.115 --> 00:01:49.935 Many people because we don't track the people. We push through maybe about 4 00:01:49.935 --> 00:01:54.275 or 5 gigabits in the evening time continuously out of the network. 00:01:54.655 --> 00:01:56.245 We're in about 800 buildings. 00:01:56.245 --> 00:02:01.071 Which is pretty big, I think. And I don't know, a couple thousand. 00:02:01.466 --> 00:02:02.975 We have about 2,600. 00:02:02.975 --> 00:02:09.105 Routes in our routing table. So the route is roughly like a building or a router 00:02:09.105 --> 00:02:10.376 that has a subnetwork on it. 00:02:10.492 --> 00:02:12.515 So we probably have around 2,000. 00:02:12.515 --> 00:02:13.015 Devices. 00:02:13.335 --> 00:02:16.733 I don't really know at the moment how many, but we're in about 800 buildings. 00:02:18.550 --> 00:02:19.925 Yeah, it's quite sizable. 00:02:19.925 --> 00:02:23.768 We also have done fiber to some buildings. About... 00:02:24.518 --> 00:02:30.294 Maybe six buildings, maybe five or six buildings have fiber to the premise and 00:02:31.908 --> 00:02:35.072 up the riser and into people's apartments even, some apartments. 00:02:35.762 --> 00:02:36.753 Some buildings have all apartments. 00:02:36.753 --> 00:02:38.050 Some have some apartments. 00:02:38.462 --> 00:02:41.695 But yeah, we're both wireless and wired. 00:02:43.123 --> 00:02:48.969 It's all non-profit, donation-based still. So yeah, we're quite big at this point. 00:02:49.404 --> 00:02:53.235 So you expanded since we had one of you with us 00:02:53.832 --> 00:02:57.194 quite a while ago. I think at this point it was just in Manhattan. 00:02:58.514 --> 00:03:00.154 Well, we were always in Brooklyn as well. 00:03:01.371 --> 00:03:04.395 Our first super node was in Manhattan and our second super node was in Brooklyn. 00:03:05.154 --> 00:03:07.934 Eventually that one went away and our third super node is also in Brooklyn. 00:03:08.434 --> 00:03:11.251 So the bulk of our network is actually in Brooklyn. 00:03:11.934 --> 00:03:15.074 Most of the high points and the different people who really want to be on the 00:03:15.074 --> 00:03:15.965 network are in Brooklyn. 00:03:16.382 --> 00:03:18.524 It kind of works out because Brooklyn has. 00:03:18.524 --> 00:03:20.887 Generally shorter buildings 00:03:21.021 --> 00:03:24.724 And it's kind of interesting if you think about It's like there's mountains and valleys. 00:03:24.724 --> 00:03:27.969 Some of these networks have like something on a mountaintop when they shoot 00:03:28.114 --> 00:03:29.212 signals down to a valley. 00:03:29.508 --> 00:03:29.974 New York City. 00:03:29.974 --> 00:03:32.894 Has mountains and valleys as well. The mountains are these high buildings and 00:03:32.894 --> 00:03:37.194 the valleys are these neighborhoods. And so we're kind of limited on being able 00:03:37.194 --> 00:03:37.634 To go too. 00:03:37.634 --> 00:03:40.634 Far north without fiber because there's buildings that are in the way. 00:03:40.634 --> 00:03:44.794 There's these giant mountains we can't cross. But in downtown, we can kind of be 00:03:44.794 --> 00:03:45.434 On a few tall. 00:03:45.434 --> 00:03:47.044 Ones and shoot down into the Brooklyn, 00:03:47.457 --> 00:03:48.164 Use some of the. 00:03:48.164 --> 00:03:52.188 Housing authority buildings to get up high again and shoot down again. Yeah. 00:03:52.478 --> 00:03:58.854 So you're allowed to build nodes on government or city buildings? 00:03:59.570 --> 00:04:03.974 Yeah, so we've worked out a couple of ways to do it. In New York City, there's an agency. 00:04:03.974 --> 00:04:08.294 Called the New York City Housing Authority, and they run kind of low-income 00:04:08.294 --> 00:04:12.344 housing for rent. They're one of the biggest landlords in New York City, 00:04:12.344 --> 00:04:15.494 and it's like a pseudo-government thing. And so 00:04:16.074 --> 00:04:16.424 We made a. 00:04:16.424 --> 00:04:19.307 Deal with them at some point that we could be uncertain of their buildings, 00:04:19.702 --> 00:04:22.065 and we are. We're in about maybe five of their buildings. 00:04:22.198 --> 00:04:23.164 Some of those buildings. 00:04:23.164 --> 00:04:25.824 We also serve the residents down below. Other of the buildings, 00:04:25.824 --> 00:04:30.824 we're not allowed to for whatever reason. And so we're in a number of their buildings. 00:04:30.824 --> 00:04:33.930 We're also on Columbia University rooftop. 00:04:35.494 --> 00:04:39.782 CCNY is like the New York State, one of the colleges. 00:04:40.925 --> 00:04:43.514 We're on, we also have some deals where. 00:04:44.214 --> 00:04:49.429 I say deals lightly, but we have some situations where there's some regulations that 00:04:50.446 --> 00:04:53.750 Certain building types must provide internet for their residents. 00:04:53.750 --> 00:04:55.290 They must make it available to the residents. 00:04:55.810 --> 00:05:01.530 And so some of these buildings have asked us to be in the building. And so by doing that. 00:05:01.530 --> 00:05:05.956 We get on the rooftop as well. And so those are some positive ones for us. 00:05:07.785 --> 00:05:10.449 Amazing. And how many volunteers are you? 00:05:11.630 --> 00:05:13.650 A few hundred. A few hundred? 00:05:13.650 --> 00:05:13.910 Down. 00:05:14.230 --> 00:05:17.220 Yeah. Now on a daily basis, or on like a. 00:05:17.630 --> 00:05:18.760 We have a weekly kind of, 00:05:18.760 --> 00:05:23.510 Um, we have a weekly meetup, if you will. Um, we also have like an. 00:05:23.510 --> 00:05:27.104 Office space that we've rented or kind of a workshop space. It's about the size of this room. 00:05:27.231 --> 00:05:32.102 Um, and we, we meet up maybe 20 people per week. 00:05:32.328 --> 00:05:35.910 Okay. Um, if we go on some journey, we'll probably have more people. 00:05:35.910 --> 00:05:36.461 If we, uh, 00:05:37.510 --> 00:05:39.790 Do like one of our monthly bigger meetings. 00:05:39.790 --> 00:05:41.099 We'll probably have maybe 50. 00:05:41.483 --> 00:05:43.530 Okay. But here and there is 200 ish going on. 00:05:43.930 --> 00:05:48.141 That's the big numbers. Amazing numbers. 00:05:48.512 --> 00:05:50.650 I mean, it's not as much as it could be, but it's, you know. 00:05:51.530 --> 00:05:54.700 I guess, if you think about one of the challenges of probably every community 00:05:54.700 --> 00:05:56.203 network is participation, right? 00:05:56.464 --> 00:05:59.622 You know, what percentage of the users are fully participating? 00:06:00.063 --> 00:06:01.497 And, you know, 00:06:01.851 --> 00:06:03.220 For us it's a very small percentage. 00:06:03.220 --> 00:06:04.707 But it's still a good number of people. 00:06:05.700 --> 00:06:08.439 Yeah, and maybe speaking of 00:06:08.439 --> 00:06:14.001 technology, what kind of devices and firmwares do you use in your network? 00:06:14.401 --> 00:06:18.117 So we used to use the LibreMesh type firmwares and devices. 00:06:18.453 --> 00:06:23.533 We've since moved off of that, not because we don't want it, 00:06:23.945 --> 00:06:28.369 but more because we thought about making a more standards-based approach. 00:06:28.369 --> 00:06:31.809 So even though OLSR and Batman and BMX. 00:06:31.809 --> 00:06:33.691 These are all very nice, well-developed protocols, 00:06:34.138 --> 00:06:37.109 But it means that I can't use a. 00:06:37.109 --> 00:06:39.850 Cisco switch or a Juniper switch if someone gives it to you. 00:06:40.509 --> 00:06:42.929 And maybe that's good, maybe it's bad, I don't know. 00:06:42.929 --> 00:06:45.139 So we've decided to go with OSPF. 00:06:45.557 --> 00:06:49.709 And so we're using OSPF everywhere. There's another network in. 00:06:50.029 --> 00:06:51.122 South Africa that 00:06:51.319 --> 00:06:55.079 Also is using OSPF, and we kind of looked at them and saw how big their network 00:06:55.079 --> 00:06:56.183 was and thought about it. 00:06:56.630 --> 00:06:59.539 And there's some things we liked that they did and some things we didn't like that they did. 00:06:59.817 --> 00:07:01.559 So we took that concept of OSPF. 00:07:01.559 --> 00:07:03.119 And we've kind of tuned OSPF 00:07:03.119 --> 00:07:04.809 And done some nice things with the. 00:07:04.809 --> 00:07:10.295 Costing and the subnetting in order to make it so that it works in our environment. 00:07:10.638 --> 00:07:14.945 So we use a lot of MicroTik, even though they're not open source. 00:07:16.193 --> 00:07:18.916 One of the big reasons we use MicroTik is because, 00:07:19.910 --> 00:07:24.270 It's very easy for people to understand how to do it. I can teach someone very 00:07:24.270 --> 00:07:25.710 quickly how to build a node. 00:07:26.470 --> 00:07:30.275 We have a configuration generator on our website. You can type in your node number. 00:07:30.536 --> 00:07:31.460 We assign node numbers, 00:07:31.460 --> 00:07:35.370 So we can talk about that too. You type in a node number and then the type of 00:07:35.370 --> 00:07:38.170 hardware, the subcategory, the firmware style. 00:07:39.030 --> 00:07:40.004 How you're going to deploy it, 00:07:40.260 --> 00:07:42.630 And it will generate you a configuration which you just. 00:07:42.630 --> 00:07:43.499 Send to the device. 00:07:44.850 --> 00:07:46.255 There's even a UI to do that. 00:07:46.632 --> 00:07:47.486 And you're done. 00:07:47.985 --> 00:07:52.800 And so this is very helpful for engaging people, and it kind of jumps. 00:07:52.800 --> 00:07:56.800 The hurdle of, you know, how do you do a sysimage? How do you do a firmware 00:07:56.800 --> 00:07:59.641 update? You know, where do you click on all these different screens? 00:08:00.837 --> 00:08:02.100 So MicroTik's not the only one. 00:08:02.100 --> 00:08:04.530 We also use a lot of point-to-point antennas, 00:08:04.890 --> 00:08:07.170 Including the 2 gigahertz, 5 gigahertz. 00:08:07.590 --> 00:08:12.058 I mean, sorry, 2 gigabit, 5 gigabit, and 10 gigabit Ciclu antennas. 00:08:12.910 --> 00:08:17.060 We're using Juniper switches, Cisco switches, Linux boxes. We're even using 00:08:17.060 --> 00:08:19.483 VPP with FRR for edge routing. 00:08:21.934 --> 00:08:27.620 Okay, so it's a bit of a different approach. I don't know what OSPF means. 00:08:28.140 --> 00:08:29.740 Open shortest path first. 00:08:30.340 --> 00:08:31.360 It's another routing protocol. 00:08:31.360 --> 00:08:31.930 It's kind of 00:08:32.237 --> 00:08:33.000 A standard one. 00:08:33.520 --> 00:08:35.150 It's a corporate standard one. 00:08:35.150 --> 00:08:38.250 It's for wired networks, basically. So you don't have a radiometric. 00:08:38.250 --> 00:08:40.240 Or did you add a radiometric to OSPF? 00:08:40.280 --> 00:08:41.240 We don't have a radiometric. 00:08:41.240 --> 00:08:45.520 No. So what we did is we made a costing structure. 00:08:45.520 --> 00:08:51.280 So good costs are for point-to-point links that are on a really high-quality 00:08:51.280 --> 00:08:54.080 radio that we know is very unlikely to go down. 00:08:54.527 --> 00:08:58.110 And then the next level is kind of like our point-to-multipoint, 00:08:58.110 --> 00:09:00.181 maybe in the 200 cost range or something. 00:09:00.524 --> 00:09:03.370 And then a poor cost is for the WDS. 00:09:03.370 --> 00:09:05.940 Sort of 802.11s sort of thing. 00:09:06.358 --> 00:09:10.710 And so we have, I can show you on the map various places, where we have nodes 00:09:10.710 --> 00:09:14.880 that are with an omnidirectional antenna only, but they're on the network using 00:09:14.880 --> 00:09:17.110 OSPF. So one thing you have to watch out. 00:09:17.110 --> 00:09:20.069 Is with route flapping. It's probably the same in OLSR and other things, 00:09:20.880 --> 00:09:25.839 you know, route flapping. And so we monitor for route flapping periodically and see, 00:09:26.188 --> 00:09:28.970 You know, how many flaps per second are we getting, how many are per minute. 00:09:28.970 --> 00:09:29.404 You know, and 00:09:29.700 --> 00:09:30.240 We go and. 00:09:30.240 --> 00:09:31.230 Fix those nodes. 00:09:31.230 --> 00:09:37.830 So I think probably in any protocol, you can have some bad edge cases and it's just OSPF can also. 00:09:37.830 --> 00:09:38.274 You know. 00:09:40.015 --> 00:09:43.140 So you're not necessarily doing any mesh networking, Okay, actually, 00:09:43.460 --> 00:09:46.127 you're setting up point-to-point or point-to-multipoint links. 00:09:46.806 --> 00:09:50.713 No, we do with 802.11s, we do WDS, yeah. 00:09:51.270 --> 00:09:54.788 Yeah, so we have many nodes that are within omnidirectional only, 00:09:55.188 --> 00:09:57.203 and they see their neighbors around. 00:09:58.578 --> 00:10:07.077 And you're not using the radio-aware OSR part in 802.11s or the spanning tree 00:10:08.200 --> 00:10:10.040 implementation? No, turn it off. 00:10:11.100 --> 00:10:14.020 You just use it without the internal mesh routing. 00:10:14.020 --> 00:10:14.658 That's right. 00:10:15.458 --> 00:10:18.727 We use it as a broadcast domain only or like as a kind. 00:10:18.727 --> 00:10:19.260 Of like a 00:10:19.586 --> 00:10:20.950 Fake Ethernet cable, you know. 00:10:21.667 --> 00:10:22.797 We do bridge filtering. 00:10:22.797 --> 00:10:28.047 So we turn off all of the... You're not able to go from one node to another 00:10:28.047 --> 00:10:30.191 node through the radio without going through the router. 00:10:31.727 --> 00:10:36.817 So you have to jump node to node in order to get to the far side. Which means, of course. 00:10:36.817 --> 00:10:42.642 It's not going to be very efficient to do the WDS, but it's better than nothing for many people. 00:10:43.077 --> 00:10:48.197 But my guess is that you don't have too much internal traffic. 00:10:48.197 --> 00:10:50.987 Most traffic is probably just going to the next gateway. 00:10:50.987 --> 00:10:51.837 Unfortunately, yes. 00:10:51.887 --> 00:10:53.335 And you have many, many guideways. 00:10:53.439 --> 00:10:54.211 Yeah, yeah. 00:10:54.525 --> 00:10:55.107 Unfortunately. 00:10:55.527 --> 00:10:56.487 As just, you know, 00:10:56.487 --> 00:11:00.267 Over the years we had different internal services. Some went away, 00:11:00.267 --> 00:11:01.787 some came back. We have a few now. 00:11:02.387 --> 00:11:06.867 We have kind of databases, and we used to have a chat app inside and things 00:11:06.867 --> 00:11:09.623 like this. And they come and go depending on what people want to do. 00:11:10.387 --> 00:11:16.897 Of course. Of course. What motivates the volunteers to run such a relatively 00:11:16.897 --> 00:11:23.619 big network and basically be just a free internet service provider, more or less? 00:11:24.002 --> 00:11:25.347 Yeah, we don't like to say free. 00:11:25.347 --> 00:11:28.379 We like to say donation-based because we don't want people to think that they can, 00:11:28.623 --> 00:11:30.287 You know, if you give somebody something for free. 00:11:30.287 --> 00:11:31.407 It has no value, right? 00:11:32.327 --> 00:11:36.286 So we want them to value the network by, you know, wanting to be part of it. 00:11:36.529 --> 00:11:37.917 They can pay nothing if they want to. 00:11:37.917 --> 00:11:40.730 But, you know, we don't usually say free. 00:11:41.282 --> 00:11:43.636 Uh, but anyway, um. 00:11:43.636 --> 00:11:44.606 I don't mind if you say free, 00:11:44.606 --> 00:11:48.416 You know, um, but it's just that, yeah, so we, we, what motivates them? 00:11:48.416 --> 00:11:50.176 Um, you know, in New York city. 00:11:50.176 --> 00:11:51.456 The ISPs used to be, 00:11:51.456 --> 00:11:58.261 And sometimes are still very bad. And so kind of our original motivation was to bypass the ISPs. 00:11:58.714 --> 00:12:02.426 Um, also, if you look into what has happened, there's many kiosks on the road 00:12:02.426 --> 00:12:09.267 that have a wifi and, um, many different of the main ISPs have got purchased by other ISPs. 00:12:09.709 --> 00:12:11.996 and they're all tracking everything. 00:12:11.996 --> 00:12:12.986 They're all, you know, 00:12:13.306 --> 00:12:16.656 We were even approached by some company that said they'll give us $1,000 a month 00:12:16.656 --> 00:12:19.043 if we give them all of our DNS logs forever. 00:12:19.362 --> 00:12:22.296 And we're like, no, we're not going to do that, you know. So, but they're all. 00:12:22.296 --> 00:12:25.864 Doing that and they say they're doing it and it's kind of evil. 00:12:25.997 --> 00:12:31.239 So we like it because it's kind of a clear network which you can have, 00:12:31.704 --> 00:12:32.846 you know, you can have a public IP. 00:12:33.166 --> 00:12:36.516 You can have bidirectional traffic. We're bypassing these 00:12:37.246 --> 00:12:42.604 Poor quality ISPs in many cases where we're sort of better than many of them at different times. 00:12:42.883 --> 00:12:43.886 In terms of availability. 00:12:43.886 --> 00:12:47.406 Sounds good like Berlin in the 2000s. Yeah, sounds like early Berlin. 00:12:47.406 --> 00:12:48.186 Yeah, sure. 00:12:48.926 --> 00:12:54.980 How does it, why do they suck so badly? How do they mess it up? 00:12:55.276 --> 00:12:58.216 So it's a good question, and the story has changed a little bit. 00:12:58.216 --> 00:13:01.453 So I was kind of telling you more of the story of a handful of years ago. 00:13:01.859 --> 00:13:02.886 It's still a story now. 00:13:02.886 --> 00:13:03.189 Though. 00:13:04.605 --> 00:13:11.292 Maybe if you look 10 years ago, a lot of people in three to six-floor buildings only had DSL. 00:13:11.873 --> 00:13:15.797 Right? And the DSL in New York City is from cables that are from long ago. 00:13:16.169 --> 00:13:21.166 It's not a current-maintained system. Verizon, the main telephone company, 00:13:21.506 --> 00:13:26.060 since their early 2010s, had said they were going to run fiber to every building. 00:13:26.513 --> 00:13:29.265 And they began running fiber to every building, they say. 00:13:30.126 --> 00:13:33.032 But it meant that they were no longer going to put any more copper in the ground. 00:13:33.363 --> 00:13:35.428 And so they basically abandoned the copper plant. 00:13:35.730 --> 00:13:36.938 Even if people were still using it. 00:13:37.721 --> 00:13:39.490 Meanwhile, the cable company, in the U.S.. 00:13:39.490 --> 00:13:42.680 You usually have two providers. You have the telephone company and the cable 00:13:42.680 --> 00:13:43.956 company before Internet. 00:13:44.391 --> 00:13:46.970 And now both can provide telephone and Internet. 00:13:46.970 --> 00:13:51.822 And TV and everything, right? But still in the regulations, there's two main entities. 00:13:52.176 --> 00:13:59.190 So the cable company in New York City has been purchased three times or more in the last 10 years. 00:13:59.190 --> 00:14:01.679 It's gone bankrupt and got repurchased and bankrupt and repurchased. 00:14:02.062 --> 00:14:03.040 The name keeps changing. 00:14:03.040 --> 00:14:07.071 I think it's now called Spectrum. It used to be Time Warner. It used to be RCN. and um 00:14:08.190 --> 00:14:08.970 In many areas the. 00:14:08.970 --> 00:14:13.080 Cable infrastructure is very poor the cables are not dry they get wet coaxial 00:14:13.080 --> 00:14:14.838 cable gets wet and water inside 00:14:15.181 --> 00:14:18.000 People go outside and they kind of like jiggle the cables on. 00:14:18.000 --> 00:14:20.560 The wall because they their tv is not working so the 00:14:20.560 --> 00:14:21.650 Couplers are coming loose and. 00:14:22.397 --> 00:14:26.140 You know many places i was in at least two or three places that i lived in i 00:14:26.140 --> 00:14:32.770 think six or eight places in new york city uh in the last many years and a couple 00:14:32.770 --> 00:14:35.930 of them the internet cable internet was down more often than it was up right 00:14:37.090 --> 00:14:37.630 I had a friend that. 00:14:37.630 --> 00:14:42.962 Had barely one megabit dsl and that was less than 10 years ago okay maybe it's about 10 years ago 00:14:43.537 --> 00:14:46.140 So yeah it's not great the stories change a little bit. 00:14:46.140 --> 00:14:48.510 Now because verizon does have fiber 00:14:48.910 --> 00:14:49.354 In many buildings. 00:14:49.789 --> 00:14:50.579 And so 00:14:50.985 --> 00:14:52.260 You can get a high. 00:14:52.260 --> 00:14:55.250 Quality fiber optic internet for a pretty 00:14:55.250 --> 00:14:58.930 Good price um so in that sense then it's. 00:14:58.930 --> 00:14:59.760 Not as well 00:14:59.760 --> 00:15:02.136 Needed for for our network right. 00:15:02.630 --> 00:15:04.180 But in many places it's still very poor 00:15:05.416 --> 00:15:14.560 So and your perspective if eventually the commercial isps uh get up their gear 00:15:14.560 --> 00:15:18.477 and put fiber everywhere what would that mean to your network 00:15:18.872 --> 00:15:21.970 I don't know um you know on one angle we could. 00:15:21.970 --> 00:15:25.650 Become more of a community is a community network community isp that just kind 00:15:25.650 --> 00:15:31.028 of um is for fun you know, more of a real, true community, as opposed to, 00:15:31.328 --> 00:15:33.041 you know, trying to serve people with something. 00:15:34.835 --> 00:15:39.191 We could also be a participant in that. For example, many cities in the U.S. 00:15:39.191 --> 00:15:44.401 Have tried to do kind of a municipal fiber idea, with Chattanooga, 00:15:44.401 --> 00:15:47.501 Tennessee being like the number one successful option on that. 00:15:48.581 --> 00:15:51.054 I think New York City is probably going to try to do that as well. 00:15:51.588 --> 00:15:55.471 And if we could be one of the providers that is through that, 00:15:55.849 --> 00:16:00.284 we might have an option for people besides, you know, the main telephone companies. 00:16:01.261 --> 00:16:03.971 So that makes it a little bit different of a system than what we have. 00:16:03.971 --> 00:16:09.791 But, you know, you really need to provide whatever that environment needs. 00:16:09.791 --> 00:16:12.661 Whatever that area needs. It's a little bit different than, like, 00:16:12.661 --> 00:16:13.821 in a jungle or something like that. 00:16:14.314 --> 00:16:21.021 But I guess the problem with families or people with low income still exists, 00:16:21.021 --> 00:16:27.251 and they maybe still can't afford Internet access, and that's where you will still be able to help. 00:16:27.251 --> 00:16:32.140 Yeah, about 25% of households only have no Internet in them in New York City. 00:16:32.941 --> 00:16:41.219 and maybe 15% are mobile only they only have a cell phone 25% 25-26% yeah 00:16:43.814 --> 00:16:46.964 Hard to believe. It's one of the main capitals of the planet. 00:16:46.964 --> 00:16:52.492 Yeah, it's a problem of aging infrastructure combined with growth and regulation. 00:16:52.916 --> 00:16:54.960 It's hard to provide new wires in the ground. 00:16:57.363 --> 00:17:01.374 The underground cabling is owned by the telephone company, but it's a subsidiary and so on. 00:17:01.394 --> 00:17:03.514 There's a lot of things that are very challenging with New York City, 00:17:04.054 --> 00:17:06.764 which is why we kind of go over the top of it with wireless. 00:17:06.764 --> 00:17:08.644 So you're not putting wires into the ground? 00:17:08.644 --> 00:17:11.604 We don't put wires in the ground. We have some fiber, but we lease fiber. 00:17:11.604 --> 00:17:13.854 Dark fiber, from various friendly companies. 00:17:13.854 --> 00:17:20.534 Yeah, so you're releasing it. Okay, but so to the largest part, your wireless ISP? 00:17:20.654 --> 00:17:21.554 Yes, all wireless. 00:17:22.411 --> 00:17:25.374 And where do you get your internet uplinks? 00:17:25.374 --> 00:17:27.224 It's a good question. We don't pay for any internet. 00:17:27.654 --> 00:17:28.546 Everything is donated. 00:17:29.474 --> 00:17:33.204 We have a couple donated 40 gigabit links from a company called Pilot Fiber. 00:17:33.204 --> 00:17:36.304 They're very nice to us. We also have some dark fiber from them. 00:17:36.304 --> 00:17:37.735 But they don't charge us for the internet. 00:17:38.954 --> 00:17:41.305 We also are on a couple of internet exchanges. 00:17:42.154 --> 00:17:44.724 And we have some donated internet from other local companies. 00:17:44.724 --> 00:17:48.444 So it's all donated. We have about, if you were to use it all at the same time. 00:17:48.444 --> 00:17:53.904 About 120 gigabits of internet connectivity. And we don't think we can use it all at the moment, 00:17:53.904 --> 00:17:58.064 But it's wired into our supernodes. 00:17:59.713 --> 00:18:02.423 Way cool it's really interesting to 00:18:02.423 --> 00:18:03.653 Hear there's still a lot of work to do. 00:18:03.653 --> 00:18:08.129 But we have a lot of resources that are working well and we found some favorable 00:18:08.913 --> 00:18:12.993 kind of tier 2 ISPs that are very friendly to us because they're commercial 00:18:12.993 --> 00:18:15.914 only and they don't need any home activity 00:18:16.854 --> 00:18:25.513 And maybe I think I won't travel to New York City the next 2.5, 3 years for reasons 00:18:26.925 --> 00:18:32.723 but after that can I see your SSID and just use it? 00:18:32.723 --> 00:18:32.813 Yeah, 00:18:35.017 --> 00:18:40.513 we have an open SSID with no password. This SSID restricts some control plane 00:18:40.513 --> 00:18:44.456 access within our network so that you can't get on and then access some of the 00:18:44.781 --> 00:18:47.550 internal control plane pages and such. 00:18:48.433 --> 00:18:51.276 But there's another one that has a password which everybody knows, 00:18:51.619 --> 00:18:54.873 and this is more open. So everybody can just use it. 00:18:55.193 --> 00:18:58.623 And if you have a wire from the rooftop into your apartment, 00:18:58.623 --> 00:19:01.703 you can have your own home network with your own whatever. 00:19:01.703 --> 00:19:06.363 And it's not our problem. But yeah, you can just use it. There's many parks 00:19:06.363 --> 00:19:07.739 you can just go into and use it. 00:19:08.553 --> 00:19:11.923 Many of these grounds where we have fiber into the building, 00:19:11.923 --> 00:19:15.965 we also light up the entire ground with access points. 00:19:16.973 --> 00:19:18.270 Many of the buildings are kind of like in 00:19:18.624 --> 00:19:19.293 A square block. 00:19:19.293 --> 00:19:24.636 And a building is not a square. So there's many different pieces of green grass that people go to. 00:19:25.533 --> 00:19:28.079 Yeah, so many parks were in a bunch of different parks and such. 00:19:29.385 --> 00:19:30.970 Did you have any legal issues? 00:19:31.765 --> 00:19:35.685 Not really, no. We formed a proper non-profit. 00:19:35.685 --> 00:19:38.441 So we have all of that. We have a board. 00:19:39.295 --> 00:19:41.485 We accept donations legally and everything. 00:19:41.485 --> 00:19:45.801 We file our non-profit disclosure every year. We do all the right things with that. 00:19:47.200 --> 00:19:48.485 We're not registered as an ISP. 00:19:48.485 --> 00:19:52.525 There's a form you put in the FCC. We're not an ISP, and so we're not subject 00:19:52.525 --> 00:19:53.534 to any of those regulations. 00:19:55.078 --> 00:19:57.731 Once in a while, the police will email us and say. 00:19:58.462 --> 00:20:03.983 Can you tell us who this IP belongs to but we can't because it's all shared and so we reply 00:20:04.302 --> 00:20:05.525 We're sorry we can't we're a shared. 00:20:05.525 --> 00:20:06.845 Network and they say okay no problem 00:20:07.268 --> 00:20:08.168 And you're not logging 00:20:08.812 --> 00:20:09.579 We don't log 00:20:10.444 --> 00:20:11.117 We don't log anything. 00:20:14.217 --> 00:20:15.668 Okay, 00:20:17.984 --> 00:20:23.446 if I want to get part of your network, I should come to one of your meetings 00:20:23.446 --> 00:20:26.106 or can I just buy a router and install the firmware? 00:20:26.426 --> 00:20:32.146 Yeah, so we very much support DIY. You can buy, you know, you can follow our documentation. 00:20:32.906 --> 00:20:35.235 You know, you can buy the antenna from whoever you want. 00:20:35.594 --> 00:20:40.276 You can buy whichever model you feel like and you can go and ask for a node 00:20:40.276 --> 00:20:42.346 number. We are assigning no numbers. I can talk about why. 00:20:42.671 --> 00:20:44.926 And then you just type it into the configuration generator. 00:20:44.926 --> 00:20:46.456 You generate config. You put it on the device. 00:20:46.456 --> 00:20:50.816 And if you are in range of another one that has the same class of antenna. 00:20:50.816 --> 00:20:51.802 Then you're on. 00:20:52.666 --> 00:20:55.186 You can even go point to multipoint with DIY. 00:20:55.186 --> 00:20:56.191 You don't have to ask us. 00:20:57.006 --> 00:20:59.796 But, you know, we welcome you to come to the meeting. 00:20:59.796 --> 00:21:00.926 We encourage you to come to the meetings. 00:21:01.446 --> 00:21:05.626 You know, we do volunteer-led installations as well. 00:21:05.626 --> 00:21:08.079 So a team of a few people, 00:21:08.230 --> 00:21:11.876 One of whom maybe knows more about how to do it and a couple who know less, 00:21:12.183 --> 00:21:14.958 they go along and they install your rooftop with a new member. 00:21:15.347 --> 00:21:17.489 And then the new member also learns how to do it. 00:21:17.901 --> 00:21:20.346 And other people are learning how to do it as well. 00:21:20.346 --> 00:21:22.796 And we have different skills, drilling in the wall. 00:21:22.796 --> 00:21:27.736 Running the cable outside, clamping things to rooftops, all kinds of different things, right? 00:21:27.736 --> 00:21:31.582 And so, yeah, you can do it yourself or you can come to a meeting. 00:21:32.186 --> 00:21:32.470 Okay. 00:21:33.386 --> 00:21:38.706 So let's come back to the node number. as it was mentioned twice now. 00:21:40.906 --> 00:21:46.906 In my home community in Weimar, we also use a construct called node number, and 00:21:49.226 --> 00:21:55.206 the node number is the basis for calculating IP addresses and configuration and so on. 00:21:56.006 --> 00:21:58.066 And so maybe it's... 00:21:58.066 --> 00:22:03.126 It's the same, yeah. We do that because we don't want to take up the entire 00:22:03.126 --> 00:22:07.701 10-slash-8 block and we also don't want, I mean, 00:22:08.928 --> 00:22:12.218 It could be fine to do it, but we found some trouble with kind of using. 00:22:12.218 --> 00:22:13.297 Like, the MAC address 00:22:13.639 --> 00:22:14.198 And then just. 00:22:14.198 --> 00:22:17.767 Using these couple hex digits and using that for deriving something. 00:22:18.069 --> 00:22:22.851 It becomes very frustrating when you're trying to debug a medium-sized network 00:22:23.176 --> 00:22:27.535 and you're like, well, where? Well, node FC7-2 over there. 00:22:27.901 --> 00:22:29.588 Well, they replaced it with something else. 00:22:29.588 --> 00:22:30.408 It's called something else. 00:22:30.408 --> 00:22:37.247 You don't really know where it is anymore. And so we use these to generate the IP addresses and such. 00:22:37.555 --> 00:22:38.578 It makes it very easy for. 00:22:38.578 --> 00:22:41.856 Us to maintain nodes. There's 00:22:42.048 --> 00:22:42.378 A lot of. 00:22:42.378 --> 00:22:45.368