Sick of government spying, corporate monitoring, and overpriced ISPs? There's a cure for that.
JOSEPH BONICIOLI mostly uses the same internet you
and I do. He pays a service provider a monthly fee to get him online.
But to talk to his friends and neighbors in Athens, Greece, he's also
got something much weirder and more interesting: a private, parallel
internet.
He and his fellow Athenians built it. They did so by linking up a set
of rooftop wifi antennas to create a "mesh," a sort of bucket brigade
that can pass along data and signals. It's actually faster than the Net
we pay for: Data travels through the mesh at no less than 14 megabits a
second, and up to 150 Mbs a second, about 30 times faster than the
commercial pipeline I get at home. Bonicioli and the others can send
messages, video chat, and trade huge files without ever appearing on the
regular internet. And it's a pretty big group of people: Their Athens
Wireless Metropolitan Network has more than 1,000 members, from Athens
proper to nearby islands. Anyone can join for free by installing some
equipment. "It's like a whole other web," Bonicioli told me recently.
"It's our network, but it's also a playground."
Indeed, the mesh has become a major social hub. There are blogs,
discussion forums, a Craigslist knockoff; they've held movie nights
where one member streams a flick and hundreds tune in to watch. There's
so much local culture that they even programmed their own mini-Google to
help meshers find stuff. "It changes attitudes," Bonicioli says.
"People start sharing a lot. They start getting to know someone next
door—they find the same interests; they find someone to go out and talk
with." People have fallen in love after meeting on the mesh.
The Athenians aren't alone. Scores of communities worldwide have been
building these roll-your-own networks—often because a mesh can also be
used as a cheap way to access the regular internet. But along the way
people are discovering an intriguing upside: Their new digital spaces
are autonomous and relatively safe from outside meddling. In an era when
governments and corporations are increasingly tracking our online
movements, the user-controlled networks are emerging as an almost
subversive concept. "When you run your own network," Bonicioli explains,
"nobody can shut it down."
THE INTERNET may seem amorphous, but it's at heart
pretty physical. Its backbone is a huge array of fiber-optic, telephone,
and TV cables that carry data from country to country. To gain access,
you need someone to connect your house to that backbone. This is what's
known as the "last mile" problem, and it's usually solved by large
internet service providers such as AT&T and Comcast. They buy access
to the backbone and charge you for delivering the signal via telephone
wires or cable lines. Most developed nations have plenty of ISP's, but in
poor countries and rural areas, the last-mile problem still looms
large. If providers don't think there's enough profit in household
service, they either don't offer any or do it only at exorbitant rates.
Meshes evolved to tackle this problem. Consider the Spanish network
Guifi, which took root in the early aughts as people got sick of waiting
for their sclerotic telcos to wire the countryside. "In some places you
can wait for 50 years and die and you're still waiting," jokes Guifi
member Ramon Roca.
The bandwidth-starved Spaniards attached long-range
antennas to their wifi cards and pointed them at public hot spots like
libraries. Some contributed new backbone connections by shelling out,
individually or in groups, for expensive DSL links, while others dipped
into the network for free.
(Guifi is a complex stew of charity,
free-riding, and cost-sharing.) To join the bucket brigade, all you had
to do was add some hardware that allowed your computer's wifi hub to
pass along the signal to anyone in your vicinity. Gradually, one hub at a
time, Guifi grew into the world's largest mesh, with more than 21,000
members.
In some ways, a community mesh resembles a food co-op. Its members
crunch the numbers and realize that they can solve the last-mile problem
themselves at a fraction of the price. In Kansas City, Isaac Wilder,
cofounder of the Free Network Foundation, is using this model to wire up
neighborhoods where the average household income is barely $10,000 a
year. His group partners with community organizations that pay for
backbone access. Wilder then sets up a mesh that anyone can join for a
modest sum. "The margins on most internet providers are so ridiculously
inflated," he says. "When people see the price they get from the mesh,
they're like, 'Ten bucks a month? Oh, shit, I'll pay that!'"
In other cases, meshes are run like tiny local businesses. Stephen
Song, the founder of Village Telco, markets "mesh potatoes," inexpensive
wifi devices that automatically mesh with each other, allowing them to
transmit data and make local calls. In towns across Africa, where
internet access is overpriced or nonexistent, mom-and-pop shops buy
backbone access and then sell mesh potatoes to customers, offering them
cheap monthly phone and internet rates. Song hopes this entrepreneurial
model will lead to stable networks that don't have to rely on donations
or tech-savvy community volunteers. He set up a mesh himself in Cape
Town, South Africa. "The primary users of that tech were grandmothers,"
Song says. "Grandmothers are really dependent on their families, and
visiting is hard—it's a really hilly area. So if you have an appealing
low-cost alternative, they go for it."
WHILE MESH networks were created to solve an
economic problem, it turns out they also have a starkly political
element: They give people—particularly political activists—a safer and
more reliable way to communicate.
As activism has become increasingly reliant on social networking,
repressive regimes have responded by cutting off internet access. When
Hosni Mubarak, for instance, discovered that protesters were using
Facebook to help foment dissent, he ordered the state-controlled ISP's to
shut down Egypt's internet for days. In China, the Communist Party uses
its "Great Firewall" to prevent citizens from reading pro-democracy
sites. In the United States, authorities have shut down mobile service
to prevent activists from communicating, as happened a couple of years
ago during a protest at San Francisco subway stations. And such
reactions aren't only prompted by dissent. Some of the big phone and
cable companies have begun to block digital activities they disapprove
of, like sharing huge files on BitTorrent. In 2009, the recording
industry even persuaded France to pass a law—since declared
unconstitutional—that canceled the internet service of any household
caught downloading copyrighted files more than three times.
The last-mile problem, it turns out, isn't just technical or
economic: It's political and even cultural. To repurpose the famous A.J.
Liebling statement, internet freedom is guaranteed only to those who
own a connection. "And right now, you and me don't own the internet—we
just rent the capacity to access it from the companies that do own it,"
Wilder says.
So now digital-freedom activists and nonprofits are making mesh tools
specifically to carve out spaces free from government snooping. During
the Occupy Wall Street actions in New York City, Wilder set up a local
mesh for the protesters. In Washington, DC, the New America Foundation's
Open Technology Institute is developing Commotion—"internet in a
suitcase" software that lets anyone quickly deploy a mesh. "We're making
infrastructure for anyone who wants to control their own network," says
Sascha Meinrath, who runs OTI. In a country with a repressive
government, dissidents could use Commotion to set up a private,
encrypted mesh. If a despot decided to shut off internet access, the
activists could pay for a satellite connection and then share it across
the mesh, getting a large group of people back online quickly.
Meinrath and his group have tested Commotion in American communities,
including Detroit and Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood, where locals
used it to get back online after Hurricane Sandy. Now OTI is working on a
mesh that will provide secure local communications for communities in
Tunisia.
Even voice calls can be meshed. Commotion includes Serval, software
that lets you network Android phones and communicate directly via wifi
without going through a wireless carrier—sort of like a high-tech
walkie-talkie network. Created by Paul Gardner-Stephen, a research
fellow at Australia's Flinders University, Serval also encrypts phone
calls and texts, making it extremely hard for outsiders to eavesdrop.
When OTI employees tested it this spring using external "range
extenders," they were able to text one another from nearly a mile away
on the National Mall. Hopping onto the DC Metro, they found they could
trade messages while riding six cars apart. "We now know how to make a
completely distributed phone system," Gardner-Stephen says. Despite the
modest ranges now possible, there are plenty of potential uses. After an
earthquake, he notes, Serval could help citizens and aid agencies make
local calls instantly. In an Occupy-style scenario, police may try to
shut down texting via Verizon and AT&T only to discover that
activists have their own private Serval channel.
In an Occupy-style scenario, police may try
to shut down texting via Verizon and AT&T only to discover that
activists have their own private Serval channel.
Granted, Meinrath points out even encrypted systems like Commotion
aren't a privacy panacea. Encryption can be broken, and if the mesh
hooks up to the regular internet—via satellite, for instance—then you're
sending signals back out to where the NSA and others have plenty of
taps.
Even so, alternative networks are a pretty subversive idea, one that
has attracted some strange bedfellows. The State Department recently
ponied up almost $3 million to support Commotion, because officials
think it could help freedom of speech abroad. But given the revelations
about NSA spying (Commotion's developer, OTI, is considering joining a
lawsuit to challenge the agency's surveillance program), the software is
likely to gain traction among activists here at home. "It makes all the
sense in the world," Meinrath says.
THE RISE OF community meshes suggests a possibility
that is considerably more radical. What if you wanted a mesh that
spanned the globe? A way to communicate with anyone, anywhere, without
going over a single inch of corporate or government cable? Like what
Joseph Bonicioli has in Athens writ large—a parallel, global internet
run by the people, for the people. Could such a beast be built?
Down in Argentina, meshers have shot signals
up to 10 miles to bring together remote villages; in Greece, Bonicioli
says they've connected towns as far as 60 miles apart.
On a purely technical level, mesh advocates say it's super hard, but
not impossible. First, you'd build as many local mesh networks as you
can, and then you'd connect them together. Long-distance "hops" are
tricky, but community meshes already use special wifi antennas—sometimes
"cantennas" made out of Pringles-type containers—to join far-flung
neighborhoods. Down in Argentina, meshers have shot signals up to 10
miles to bring together remote villages; in Greece, Bonicioli says
they've connected towns as far as 60 miles apart. For bigger leaps,
there are even more colorful ideas: Float a balloon 60,000 feet in the
air, attach a wifi repeater, and you could bounce a signal between two
cities separated by hundreds of miles. It sounds nuts, but Google
actually pulled it off this past summer, when its Project Loon sent a
flotilla of balloons over New Zealand to blanket the rural countryside
with wireless connections. There are even DIY satellites: Home-brewed
"cubesats" have already been put into orbit by university researchers
for less than $100,000 each. That's hardly chump change, but it's well
within, say, Kickstarter range.
For stable communications, though, the best bet would be to snag some
better spectrum. The airwaves are a public resource, but they are
regulated by national agencies like the Federal Communications
Commission that dole out the strongest frequencies—the ones that can
travel huge distances and pass easily through physical objects—to the
military and major broadcasters. (Wifi uses one of the rare
public-access frequencies.) If the FCC could be convinced to hand over
some of those powerful frequencies to the public, meshes could span huge
distances. "We need free networks, and we need free bandwidth," says
Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University and head of the
Software Freedom Law Center. But given the power of the telco and
defense lobbies, don't hold your breath.
The notion of a truly independent global internet may still be a
gleam in the eye of the meshers, but their visionary zeal is contagious.
It harkens back to the early days of the digital universe, when the
network consisted mostly of university scientists and researchers
communicating among themselves without corporations sitting in the
middle or government (that we know of) monitoring their chats. The goal
then, as now, was both connection and control: an internet of one's own.
