[p2p-research] peer net on the blog

[M. Fioretti]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 15:12:56 PM +0100, Sepp Hasslberger wrote:
> Marco,
>

> would you agree that a consumer driven open source massive mesh
> network could take some worries off the providers of connectivity
> (bridging the "last mile") and allow them to maintain or increase
> revenue as more and more people get connected, while constructing a
> solid base for p2p interactions at the grassroots level?

I would need to do some research, or to have quantitative research to
elaborate upon to give you a definitive answer - however, at a first
glance, I suspect this wouldn't work:

- competition from consumers for consumers _creates_ worries for
  providers, rather than taking them off: it encourages people to do
  by themselves, it reduces their revenues (less direct subscribers),
  it may create *lot* of potential technical problems quite epxensive
  to manage (I believe already spoke about amateurs creating lots of
  radio interference and who knows what other issues) and legal
  problems too ("Your honour, I didn't upload that child porn from my
  computer: the mesh made my computer do it"). If things were as you
  hope, providers would already _encourage_ today their subscribers to
  bring in their neighbours through home wi-fi access points. Reality,
  instead, is that most contracts explicitly forbids this, for the
  very concrete reasons I just listed, or provide it for an extra
  price.

> My thinking now goes more in that direction - where we would have a
> win-win situation both for the users who gain increased connectivity
> and the providers who maintain or increase business without having
> to do all the expenditure of constructing the last layer of the
> network.

The implicit assumption behind this proposal is that the quality of
the last layer is the same in both cases, for all the involved
parties.

Besides that, the last layer of the network already exists: is the
phone or cable TV lines. When it doesn't, that is when we're talking
wireless access, the last mile is a mesh of antennas over roofs: are
you sure, again, that just delegating it to professionals would be
more expensive and that the quality and reliability would be worst
than with that mesh?

Think pullmans versus many cars on a highway, even if the analogy
isn't completely fitting: what's more reliable, cheaper, safer,
environmentally sound to move people back and forth from their homes
to the city station? A few pullmans ran by professional drivers or
hundreds of cars more or less poorly maintained, with the possibility
that one of them breaking clogs the whole street?

I'm not 100% sure of everything I said, but due to my professional
experience I am pretty confident that things stand more or less in
this way. More investigation in this area would need concrete analysis
of both actual results out of the first community networks and of
figures from traditional connectivity providers.

Regards,
     Marco
-- 
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