"Right," Alan said.
Alan went back to the map, realigning the laptop for optimal reception
again.
"You got a wireless card in that?" a young guy at the next table
asked. He was dressed in Kensington Market crusty-punk chic, tatts and
facial piercings, filth-gray bunchoffuckinggoofs tee, cutoffs, and
sweaty high boots draped with chains.
"Yeah," Alan said. He sighed and closed the map window. He wasn't
getting anywhere, anyway.
"And you get service here? Where's your access point?" Crusty-punk or
no, he sounded as nerdy as any of the Web-heads you'd find shopping for
bargains on CD blanks on College Street.
"Three blocks that way," Alan said, pointing. "Hanging off my house. The
network name is 'walesave.'"
"Shit, that's you?" the kid said. "Goddammit, you're clobbering our
access points!"
"What access point?"
"Access *points*. ParasiteNet." He indicated a peeling sticker on the
lapel of his cut-down leather jacket showing a skull with crossed radio
towers underneath it. "I'm trying to get a mesh-net running though all
of the Market, and you're hammering me. Jesus, I was ready to rat you
out to the radio cops at the Canadian Radio and Television
Commission. Dude, you've got to turn down the freaking *gain* on those
things."
"What's a mesh-net?"
The kid moved his beer over to Alan's table and sat down. "Okay, so
pretend that your laptop is the access point. It radiates more or less
equally in all directions, depending on your antenna characteristics and
leaving out the RF shadows that microwaves and stucco and cordless
phones generate." He arranged the coffee cup and the beer at equal
distances from the laptop, then moved them around to demonstrate the
coverage area. "Right, so what happens if I'm out of range, over *here*
--" he put his beer back on his own table -- "and you want to reach me?
Well, you could just turn up the gain on your access point, either by
increasing the power so that it radiates farther in all directions, or
by focusing the transmissions so they travel farther in a line of
sight."
"Right," Alan said, sipping his coffee.
"Right. So both of those approaches suck. If you turn up the power, you
radiate over everyone else's signal, so if I've got an access point
*here*" -- he held his fist between their tables -- "no one can hear it
because you're drowning it out. It's like you're shouting so loud that
no one else can carry on a conversation."
"So why don't you just use my network? I want to be able to get online
anywhere in the Market, but that means that anyone can, right?"
The crusty-punk waved his hand dismissively. "Sure, whatever. But what
happens if your network gets shut down? Or if you decide to start
eavesdropping on other people? Or if someone wants to get to the printer
in her living room? It's no good."
"So, what, you want me to switch to focused antennae?"
"That's no good. If you used a focused signal, you're going to have to
be perfectly aligned if you're going to talk back to your base, so
unless you want to provide a connection to one tiny pinpoint somewhere a
couple kilometers away, it won't do you any good."
"There's no solution, then? I should just give up?"
The crusty-punk held up his hands. "Hell, no! There's just no
*centralized* solution. You can't be Superman, blanketing the whole
world with wireless using your almighty antennaprick, but so what?
That's what mesh networks are for. Check it out." He arranged the beer
and the laptop and the coffee cup so that they were strung out along a
straight line. "Okay, you're the laptop and I'm the coffee cup. We both
have a radio and we want to talk to each other.
"We *could* turn up the gain on our radios so that they can shout loud
enough to be heard at this distance, but that would drown out this guy
here." He gestured at the now-empty beer. "We *could* use a focused
antenna, but if I move a little bit off the beam" -- he nudged the
coffee cup to one side -- "we're dead. But there's a third solution."
"We ask the beer to pass messages around?"
"Fucking right we do! That's the mesh part. Every station on the network
gets *two* radios -- one for talking in one direction, the other for
relaying in the other direction. The more stations you add, the lower
the power on each radio -- and the more pathways you get to carry your
data."
Alan shook his head.
"It's a fuckin' mind-blower, isn't it?"
"Sure," Alan said. "Sure. But does it work? Don't all those hops between
point *a* and point *b* slow down the connection?"
"A little, sure. Not so's you'd notice. They don't have to go that far
-- the farthest any of these signals has to travel is 151 Front Street."
"What's at 151 Front?"
"TorIx -- the main network interchange for the whole city! We stick an
antenna out a window there and downlink it into the cage where UUNet and
PSINet meet -- voila, instant 11-megabit city-wide freenet!"
"Where do you get the money for that?"
"Who said anything about money? How much do you think UUNet and PSI
charge each other to exchange traffic with one another? Who benefits
when UUNet and PSI cross-connect? Is UUNet the beneficiary of PSI's
traffic, or vice versa? Internet access only costs money at the *edge*
-- and with a mesh-net, there is no edge anymore. It's penetration at
the center, just like the Devo song."
"I'm Adrian," Alan said.
"I'm Kurt," the crusty-punk said. "Buy me a beer, Adrian?"
"It'd be my pleasure," Alan said.
#
Kurt lived in the back of a papered-over storefront on Oxford. The front
two-thirds were a maze of peeling, stickered-over stamped-metal shelving
units piled high with junk tech: ancient shrink-wrapped software,
stacked up low-capacity hard drives, cables and tapes and removable
media. Alan tried to imagine making sense of it all, flowing it into The
Inventory, and felt something like vertigo.
In a small hollow carved out of the back, Kurt had arranged a cluttered
desk, a scuffed twin bed and a rack of milk crates filled with t-shirts
and underwear.
Alan picked his way delicately through the store and found himself a
seat on an upturned milk crate. Kurt sat on the bed and grinned
expectantly.
"So?" he said.
"So what?" Alan said.
"So what is *this*! Isn't it great?"
"Well, you sure have a lot of *stuff,* I'll give you that," Alan said.
"It's all dumpstered," Kurt said casually.
"Oh, you dive?" Alan said. "I used to dive." It was mostly true. Alan
had always been a picker, always on the lookout for bargoons, even if
they were sticking out of someone's trash bin. Sometimes *especially* if
they were sticking out of someone's trash bin -- seeing what normal
people threw away gave him a rare glimpse into their lives.
Kurt walked over to the nearest shelving unit and grabbed a PC
mini-tower with the lid off. "But did you ever do this?" He stuck the
machine under Alan's nose and swung the gooseneck desk lamp over it. It
was a white-box PC, generic commodity hardware, with a couple of network
cards.
"What's that?"
"It's a junk access point! I made it out of trash! The only thing I
bought were the network cards -- two wireless, one Ethernet. It's
running a FreeBSD distribution off a CD, so the OS can never get
corrupted. It's got lots of sweet stuff in the distro, and all you need
to do is plug it in, point the antennae in opposite directions, and
you're up. It does its own power management, it automagically peers with
other access points if it can find 'em, and it does its own dynamic
channel selection to avoid stepping on other access points."
Alan turned his head this way and that, making admiring noises. "You
made this, huh?"
"For about eighty bucks. It's my fifteenth box. Eventually, I wanna have
a couple hundred of these."
"Ambitious," Alan said, handing the box back. "How do you pay for the
parts you have to buy? Do you have a grant?"
"A grant? Shit, no! I've got a bunch of street kids who come in and take
digital pix of the stuff I have no use for, research them online, and
post them to eBay. I split the take with them. Brings in a couple grand
a week, and I'm keeping about fifty street kids fed besides. I go diving
three times a week out in Concord and Oakville and Richmond Hill,
anywhere I can find an industrial park. If I had room, I'd recruit fifty
more kids -- I'm bringing it in faster than they can sell it."
"Why don't you just do less diving?"
"Are you kidding me? It's all I can do not to go out every night! You
wouldn't believe the stuff I find -- all I can think about is all the
stuff I'm missing out on. Some days I wish that my kids were less
honest; if they ripped off some stuff, I'd have room for a lot more."
Alan laughed. Worry for Edward and Frederick and George nagged at him,
impotent anxiety, but this was just so fascinating. Fascinating and
distracting, and, if not normal, at least not nearly so strange as he
could be. He imagined the city gridded up with junk equipment, radiating
Internet access from the lakeshore to the outer suburbs. The grandiosity
took his breath away.
"Look," Kurt said, spreading out a map of Kensington Market on the
unmade bed. "I've got access points here, here, here, and here. Another
eight or ten and I'll have the whole Market covered. Then I'm going to
head north, cover the U of T campus, and push east towards Yonge
Street. Bay Street and University Avenue are going to be tough -- how
can I convince bankers to let me plug this by their windows?"
"Kurt," Alan said, "I suspect that the journey to University Avenue is
going to be a lot slower than you expect it to be."