Idea In Case Net Neutrality Is Threatened
Steve L
Idea In Case Net Neutrality Is Threatened
[draft - work in progress]
Are you a proficient C++ and Python coder?
Please pay attention, as you can help protect the internet as we know it today.
As you may be aware, there have been a number of bills that threaten the openness of the internet.
Please freely and openly share the concepts detailed in this document with anyone you may know that may be capable of helping. Credit to the author is not necessary.
Background:
In January 2011 due to protests in Egypt, the Egyptian government ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Which showed to have a crippling effect on a modernizing economy.
Simultaneously, the United States was debating a bill to create an Internet kill switch, also known as the PCNAA bill.
In 2010 it appeared Net Neutrality was adopted after years of debate. In short order Verizon appealed and it was decided in federal court that broadband is currently classified by the FCC as an information service, a category that gives the agency a fairly limited set of regulatory options. If Internet providers were classified instead as common carriers, the FCC's rule would likely stand. Faced with this dilemma, the FCC may in 2014 either choose to argue that its regulations do not fall under the rubric of common carriage, or attempt to reclassify broadband as a common carrier, which will protect net neutrality.
What Can Be Done:
What can we do, besides resort to dial-up BBS’s like Egypt did when their government turned things off?
First; the main internet providers today are either Telco via DSL over a dedicated line or Cable via a Cable modem using RF signaling over shared lines.
I have been into radio for a long time as a ham radio guy, so the focus of this note will be on encouraging the development of an open source modem enabling true decentralized peer-to-peer communication over the shared cable lines.
To explain the differences in simple terms; The wires from your phone/DSL go back to a phone company central office. While your cable line is connected on the pole/underground with a splitter to the same trunk cable that your neighbors are connected to. It is theoretically possible to send signals over their cables directly to other customers without passing through their network filtering etc.
GNU Radio Is Key
If you are not familiar with GNU Radio, I encourage you to look into it, download it and start boning up.
GNU Radio is a free & open-source software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software radios.
Cable television operators distribute television programs and other data to paying subscribers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables or light pulses through fiber-optic cables. Presently the cable companies use the DOCSIS 3.0 signaling protocol.
I have not yet seen anyone working on cracking or documenting how DOCSIS works so that a compatible open modem could exist.
I don’t think that is has to be 100% compatible. Again it is just RF signaling. So it should be just a matter of coding something to modulate a signal on an open/uncongested frequency/time slot, and on the other end, demodulate it. I have read that the DOCSIS 3.0 protocol uses some sort of spread spectrum modulation (S-CDMA). An understanding of of CDMA spread spectrum signaling will be necessary to create a successful decentralized signaling protocol in software.
If approached at an RF level instead of a IP level any, conventional network filtering will not be applicable.
More background to be added here
gnuradio rtl2832
hackrf---------------
While I haven't finished this paper, I think it paints enough of a picture to get some people thinking about and hopefully further reasearching the idea.