[Commotion-discuss] BeWifi lets you steal your neighbor’s bandwidth when they’re not using it

[Dan Staples]

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/bewifi-lets-you-steal-your-neighbors-bandwidth-when-theyre-not-using-it/

When I read it, I was thinking, "hey that sounds kind of like...oh. Ok,
it's mesh."

Proprietary issues aside, it's interesting. Of course, sharing internet
bandwidth is nothing new with mesh networks; any OLSRd-based network
like Commotion provides internet bandwidth sharing from multiple gateways.

What I'm still curious about is *how* BeWifi pools or distributes that
bandwidth. Unless there is some sort of network coding/multipath TCP
functionality (which would require similar capabilities at the
destination), it is presumably just doing optimized gateway selection to
route a user's traffic to the internet. OLSRd's Smart Gateway plugin
does this, sort of, but without bandwidth measurements AFAIK. Although I
hear OLSRd v2 can do this even better.

Also interesting that it's being piloted in Catalonia...I wonder how
Guifi.net feels about it ;)

Dan

-- 
Dan Staples

Open Technology Institute
https://commotionwireless.net
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