[MLB-WIRELESS] Internet or Intranet

[Matthew Chipman]

Hi all, i am a newbie here, i happened upon an article in "The Age" dated
October 2001 (will scan and post to those who have not seen it)  in a pile
on newspapers i had from back then and got all excited about the
possibilities because this is just an awesome project.


After reading through all the messages recieved over the last few days, i
see everybody talking about IPV6 and DNS and NAT and real Internet addresses
and NAT'ed addresses.

I believe the real question which should be debated is, "Is the network
always going to be an Intranet or will it eventually *be* the Internet?"
There are pro's and cons for each but let me outline what i can see through
*my* crystal ball.

My personal favorite is the "Stay as an Intranet" design or SAI.  I can see
x100's of Access points feeding x1000's of nodes delivering high speed
freely available content to the members of the Wireless Network.

Each of these nodes that has an Internet connection of some sort be it cable
or modem or other, then installs (if they are able) a (squid) proxy server
which caches all their local downloaded content.  Each User of the WN then
sets their proxy server to request off the nearest parent in a pyramid
fashion.  Before you realise what has happened, there is gigabytes of cached
Internet data flowing between nodes for a very low cost @ 400K!  (Lawyers
permitting)

With this scenario and using the private address range, it becomes very
appealing for carriers such as small ISP's or VIX or anyother caching
network to inject large amounts of cached content into the network to be
transported from Melbourne to Darwin (or anywhere else in Australia) for a
relatively low cost.  These fees can then be used to "stabilize" the network
at certain points using high quality equipment at certain key areas or
nodes.

Regarding the ip's, my suggestion is allocate a class for each state and
then in the DNS structure, make the AP have a resolved name of the suburb
they are in.  You do a trace to a particular ip address and like magic you
have a string of suburb names the data is going through.

Connecting to the Internet
If you have real Internet addresses, you become the Internet and have the
benefits and the problems that it brings.  The main stumbling block being a
single point of connection to the Internet via a very fast (and expensive)
link to the wireless network.

Obviously anyone with a poofteenth of networking knowledge will tell you one
link is not enough because there is no redundancy.  So how do you get and
pay for these links?  You ask for a membership fee to use the service.  This
immediatly gives less incentive to join and the network suffers.  Nodes are
not added quickly and the thing doesnt grow to the potential.

IP addresses cost money and they are (or arent) running out (no debates
please!) is there money to pay for ip addresses? I didnt think so :)

My suggestion is make a private network modelled on the Internet using NAT
and any other technologies available to us using freely available IP
addresses.

regards


-Matt







--
To unsubscribe, send mail to minordomo at wireless.org.au with a subject of 'unsubscribe melbwireless'  
Archive at: http://www.wireless.org.au/cgi-bin/minorweb.pl?A=LIST&L=melbwireless
IRC at: au.austnet.org #melb-wireless