<div dir="ltr"><div><div>Quoting details about the actual hardware being built:<br><br>"The way Telefonica has made this happen in a practical way is to build
its own routers that can be installed in houses within a neighborhood.
So far these have had to be installed by engineers, but the next
generation are plug-and-play, and eventually all that will be needed is
an over-the-air software update to customers' existing routers.
According to Rodriguez, the software 'creates a mesh to aggregate the
capabilities [of the routers].' Pooling all of the bandwidth from these
routers allows anyone within the network to take advantage of it at
home, and they can also connect to any BeWifi network they come across
on their mobile devices when out and about."<br><br></div>It could very well be the Telefonica routers would do some sort intelligent repeating or meshing wirelessly, although I'm guessing much of the bandwidth optimization may be accomplished by ensuring adjacent access points do not overlap channels or broadcast with excessive TX power. (This is because I'm assuming Telefonica provides its broadband service nominally via conventional wireline, e.g. DSL or cable, and actual wireless backhaul in such a scheme would be used seldom.)<br>
<br></div>My question: would Telefonica subscribers then be <i>required</i> to use the router provided, with its stock firmware, per revised ToS? And likewise they would be given very limited admin permissions on that device (e.g. change the SSID and WPA key, but little else)? I can understand the need to compel subscribers as such to ensure uniform bandwidth management, but it still seems like this walks in opposite directions of what community mesh advocates are seeking.<br>
<div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 9:07 AM, Dan Staples <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:danstaples@opentechinstitute.org" target="_blank">danstaples@opentechinstitute.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/bewifi-lets-you-steal-your-neighbors-bandwidth-when-theyre-not-using-it/" target="_blank">http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/bewifi-lets-you-steal-your-neighbors-bandwidth-when-theyre-not-using-it/</a><br>
<br>
When I read it, I was thinking, "hey that sounds kind of like...oh. Ok,<br>
it's mesh."<br>
<br>
Proprietary issues aside, it's interesting. Of course, sharing internet<br>
bandwidth is nothing new with mesh networks; any OLSRd-based network<br>
like Commotion provides internet bandwidth sharing from multiple gateways.<br>
<br>
What I'm still curious about is *how* BeWifi pools or distributes that<br>
bandwidth. Unless there is some sort of network coding/multipath TCP<br>
functionality (which would require similar capabilities at the<br>
destination), it is presumably just doing optimized gateway selection to<br>
route a user's traffic to the internet. OLSRd's Smart Gateway plugin<br>
does this, sort of, but without bandwidth measurements AFAIK. Although I<br>
hear OLSRd v2 can do this even better.<br>
<br>
Also interesting that it's being piloted in Catalonia...I wonder how<br>
Guifi.net feels about it ;)<br>
<span><font color="#888888"><br>
Dan<br>
<br>
--<br>
Dan Staples<br>
<br>
Open Technology Institute<br>
<a href="https://commotionwireless.net" target="_blank">https://commotionwireless.net</a><br>
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</font></span></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Ben West<div><a href="http://gowasabi.net" target="_blank">http://gowasabi.net</a><br><a href="mailto:ben@gowasabi.net" target="_blank">ben@gowasabi.net</a><br>
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