Occupy Wall Street Catalyzing a Cooperatively Owned Communications Infrastructure?

Posted by on Tuesday, October 18, 2011 · 14 Comments 

What would a cooperatively owned and operated communications infrastructure look like? One that used peer-to-peer technologies to create a global network which is immune to censorship and resistant to breakdown? It appears The Free Network Foundationis building one.I noticed a few people bouncing this idea around on the Next Net google groupearlier in the year, and now they seem to be moving forward quickly, with Occupy Wall Street a convenient catalyzing event to get things shipped.Their vision is to create a global communications infrastructure that is owned and operated by participants in the network, rather than by for-profit network operators.

They currently have a prototype FreedomTower up and running at Occupy Austin, with a second one set up in Liberty Park at Occupy Wall Street in NYC. The towers are providing internet access to the occupiers, and will be used to establish an occupation-to-occupation Virtual Private Network.

For the more technically inclined, the foundation has published a bill of materials and how-to. The total cost of a tower comes in at $1500. The tower consists of an uninterruptible power supply, two wimax modems, a nettop computer, a network switch, three 2.4GHz sector antennas, and three 5GHz sector antennas. The computer runs software for routing and terminating VPN tunnelling.

If you’d like to contribute to this effort, visit freenetworkfoundation.org. There you can find a link to donate, and contact information if you wish to participate. The FNF has put the call out for occupiers everywhere to raise funds, read up, and get to work building resilient communications infrastructure for the movement.

members of the Free Network Foundation will be exhibiting their project this week at the Contact Summit!

Category: next net · Tags: , ,

venessa miemis

(253 posts)

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=16909101 Nitin Gadia

    Fantastic.
    I’ve been dreaming of something like this for a long time. With communication infrastructure, people can decentralize it down to the devices people use for P2P communication. A community can own all their infrastructure in fact (a site I’m building: http://www.everybodyandnobody.org/), allowing people to govern themselves far more directly.

    Some basic questions:
    *How many people and what kind of range can an antenna serve?

    *If something puts something online, like, say, to give extreme examples – pictures of someone being raped, or how to build a DIY nuclear bomb… what’s to stop that? I know much can’t be done now still… there’s always a way that people can share information… but is there any way to ensure privacy, safety and accountability to a reasonable degree? Or does it really matter, and we need to create a new culture around all of the above?

    • http://www.thefnf.org Charles Wyble

      We can easily serve a few hundred users. Stop by in Austin or NYC and see how the network is performing. Well we are doing some maintenance on it in NYC as we bring it into our VPN.

      Coverage is easily a half mile radius given proper height and such. We are providing full coverage all around Austin City Hall and all over liberty park.

      Charles Wyble
      Co founder and Technical Director FNF

  • http://twitter.com/peoplecentred Jeff Mowatt (@peoplecentred)

    I think a few more people should read the synopsis for people-centered economic development. It warned that capitalism and debt would disenfranchise people to such a point that they would rise up in violence. 5 years after delivery to the White House, 9/11 arrived..

    The proposed solution was based on people-centered local economies which would be empowered by access to information networks and a social business model investing at least 50% of profit .in community objectives.

    “Top-notch education is leaving the confines of physical campus and four walls. A student in remote Zaire, given an Internet connection, can become a Duke-educated Master of Business Administration, while remaining mostly in his or her home village to the village’s benefit. The prospect of such decentralized localization of education and economic activity allows a great deal of autonomy, freedom and self-determinism in the village’s own character and identity. It need not be a risk to cultural heritage and integrity to benefit economically; the means by which such benefit will occur, how local citizens can have food, shelter, health care, and a basic sustaining human standard of existence can be determined at the local village level and then communicated at the regional, national, and global level simultaneously at virtually no cost via the Internet and a web site. It is this basic level of human sustenance which I use to define sustainable development, which is just another way of saying “people-centered” economic development.”

    http://web.archive.org/web/20020805061509/http://www.p-ced.com/page2.html

  • http://twitter.com/karensd Karen SchulmanDupuis (@karensd)

    Not knowing a lot about the Free Network Foundation, coming from a technical perspective, although they’re tunnelling their messages via VPN, they’re still fundamentally utilizing the network backbones of carriers right across North America to create those VPNs. The question is, can this ever really be “free”. A network only exists when there’s more than one carrier…

    • http://www.thefnf.org Charles Wyble

      This is very true. One piece at a time. We are getting people to own the access solution. Have enough network points of presence and some radio links and you can get a pretty decent backbone going.

      Feel free to help out! :)

    • http://thefnf.org Isaac Wilder

      The VPN is creating a virtual overlay of the network we are building, using upstream transit providers for backhaul. The idea is that over time, we will be able to replace those upstream routes with routes that are owned and operated by everyone, collectively, using a profit-as-investment model.

  • David Bruner

    This is a great development. And I’ll bet there are many others brewing to make Occupations more resilient.

    It’s a worry that so many of the kids at OWS rely on Verizon, ATT & ETC. And quite disruptive if they ever pulled a BART!

    David

    PS Great gig at Beahive in Beacon today, Venessa!

    • Venessa Miemis

      thanks david, glad you enjoyed it. looking forward to continuing the conversation

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  • http://gpgale.wordpress.com gpgale

    In last several weeks Im advocating network of forums that would enable common public space for articulation of common goals and methods. The problem Ive noticed is that only several people are ready to act in non-conspirative way. In general, there is many more of those who are actually not ready for open, transparent and public communication, nor articulation of common. Many more are those who are trying to fake their own agendas as common ones and such tool as we are advocating is actually no,no thing.

    Anyway, we have big problem of political legitimation of such thing even before we start creating actual solution for the problem weve noticed.

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  • http://www.slystone.legtux.org/blog Slystone

    It is a very interesting post indeed! :-) I translated it into French and posted the text on my blog (and cited your name of course).

    • Venessa Miemis

      awesome! thanks for spreading the word!

      • http://www.slystone.legtux.org/blog Slystone

        Pleasure! ;-)