Netsukuku Revised

City-nets

In cities, let everyone throw an ethernet cable from roof to roof,

from window to window,

let drill one hole in the roof of his flat, and in the ceil and pass to his neighbour an ethernet cable.

Make thus the city a mesh network.

Plan: in 1 or 2 years develop a working algorithm. Then publish the algorithm and let developers world-wide develop the software in 6 months. Start deploying things in cities like Catania (medium-size metropoli where people are not really happy with institutions and services/costs of commercial companies).

Institutions and the plan

Big problem: neighbours in a city are not friends.

Solution 1: push institution to give grants and authorizations.

Move people and let see that collaboration is better.

With collective donations, one can contract ISPs and mirror important Internet website and resources. This should cost much less than what all citizens currently pay for their Internet connection.

Technology

A list of simple but not trivial points:

• "break out"
  • Ethernet cable are still good to connect flats and buildings. Each flat / building buys and maintains the cable and installs the Netsukuku device, which shall be a Raspberry-Pi-like device (low-cost,

    running Linux, good working power (cpu, memory)). Device + cables <= 100 Euro.

• Utilize an hybrid approach for the problem of routing + automatic network configuration:
  • ad-hoc protocols, link-state algorithms are still good if used
    • with the right intention. link-state algorithms + distributed computations.
  • Content networking
    • If after one year things are still impractical, one can resize the aim of the Netsukuku network to that of being a content network. A content network handles just transfer of contents (files, streams), not real-time data (telnet sessions, voip). Real-time transfers are still possible with encapsulation, however, natively a content network is not thought for such things. With a content network there are still great applications:
      • independent radios made by local communities, minorities, individuals;
      • free exchanges of messages and emails.
      • free exchanges of files.
      • Radios, TV channels, (SOCON) blogs, other forms of media distributions. With the inclusion of all citizens that have access to a Netsukuku device.
        • The device can be made accessible like access points in public places, libraries, etc...
      • Secure social networks, that is Facebook Done Right.

Future Notes

For intra-city connections, put wireless nodes on electricity poles in the country-side. In the country-side poles that sustain high-voltage electricity cables are put in succession. Placing a wireless netsukuku node on top of two subsquent poles creates a wireless link. Placing wireless nodes on each pole create a wireless "backbone" from one city to another. The "backbone" is slow, however it is still good to transfer emails and text-web.