[Bloat] [Make-wifi-fast] [Cerowrt-devel] closing up my make-wifi-fast lab

[bkil]

I've only skimmed through, but as I see it, many points have already been
addressed. TV went digital, large parts of the spectrum freed up for other
purposes while allowing to transmit in local whitespaces where available:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11af#Spectrum_regulation

As a different note, there's also research towards the direction of fully
and efficiently utilizing the TV spectrum everywhere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiB_(Digital_Terrestrial_Television)

They say that CB, despite its numerous channels demised due to overuse and
illegal range extensions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_radio#21st-century_use

Wifi is already pretty crowded in urban areas, but it is only saved by its
poor propagation. Imagine what happened if people got their hands on UHF
that propagates very well even using very cheap transmitters without any
strings attached. Many would definitely attempt to set up their very own
town-wide stations, happily spoiling the fun for everyone else.

It is interesting that a majority of people who I talk to already ask what
needs to be done or bought if one wants to crank up the power on wifi so
every corner in their house gets excellent coverage. It rarely occurs to
them that instead of trying to beef up a router, they could simply buy two
cheap & standard ones and connect them via cable (/wireless) for a stable
AP (/repeater) configuration. This seems to be the nature of human thinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 2:26 PM David P. Reed <dpreed at deepplum.com> wrote:

> Baran: I got the year wrong. I remember it as 1993, but it was 1994 CNGN
> speech he made, which is resurrected here:
> https://www.eff.org/pages/false-scarcity-baran-cngn-94
>
> Paul was educated in EE, as was I. So radio made sense to him. Unlike kids
> brought up on the idea that bits are and must be physically discrete
> spatial and temporal mechanical things.
>
> You know, one can have 1/10 of a bit of information, and store it in 1/10
> of a bit of storage. Or transmit a symbol that passes through local noise
> and comes out the other side uncorrupted.
>
> But kids trained in fancy CS depts. assume that bits require clear, empty,
> noiseless, pristine paths. Pure Bullshit. But CS and now many EE depts. and
> the FCC all proselytize such crap
>
> So scarcity is inventedand sustained.
>
> There is a reigning Supreme Court opinion, the law of the land, that says
> that there is by law a "finite number" of usable frequencies, and only one
> transmitter can be allowed to use it at a time. Like legislating that pi =
> 3 in a state, to make math easier.
>
> Except it is totally designed to create scarcity. And the State/Industry
> Nexus maintains it at every turn. It's why lunatic economists claim that
> spectrum is a form of property that can be auctioned. Like creating
> property rights to each acre of the sea, allowing owners to block shipping
> by buying a connected path down the mid Atlantic.
>
> We live in a Science Ignorant world. Intentionally. Even trained pH D.
> Engineers testify before the FCC to preserve these lies.
>
> Yeah, I sound nuts. Check it out.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Dave Taht" <dave.taht at gmail.com>
> Sent: Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 5:22 pm
> To: dpreed at deepplum.com
> Cc: bloat-announce at lists.bufferbloat.net, "bloat" <
> bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net>, "Make-Wifi-fast" <
> make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net>, cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> Subject: Re: [Cerowrt-devel] closing up my make-wifi-fast lab
>
> On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 1:04 PM David P. Reed  wrote:
> >
> > WiFi is a bit harder than IP. But you know that.
> >
> > I truly believe that we need to fix the phy/waveform/modulation space to
> really scale up open wireless networking capability. LBT is the basic bug
> in WiFi, and it is at that layer, melow the MAC.
> >
> > I have tried for 20 years now to find a way to begin work at that
> project, by the way. There is also no major donor anywhere to be found for
> that work. Instead, any funds that seem to be appearing get attacked and
> sucked into projects that miss the point, being controlled by folks who
> oppose openness (e.g. WISPs wanting exclusive ownership of a market, such
> as so called SuperWiFi or whitespaces). I did once come close to a useful
> award when I was at MIT Media Lab, from NSF. But after the award, the
> funding was cut by 90%, leaving just enough to support a Master's thesis on
> co-channel sharing, using two 1st Gen USRPs. Using my own funds, spare
> time, and bubblegum and baling wire, I've slowly begun work on extra
> wideband FPGA based sounding-centric sharing in the 10 GHz Ham band. (500
> MHz wide modulation), where I can self certify multiple stations in a
> network.
> >
> > But the point is, I've failed, because there is less than zero support.
> There is active opposition, on top of cluelessness.
> >
> > Paul Baran tried in 1993 to push forward a similar agenda, famously. 99%
> of his concepts died.
>
> Cite?
>
> One of the things that bothers me about packet processing is that
> Donald Davies (the oft uncredited other founder of the concept) wrote
> 11 volumes on this subject. So far as I know, those have vanished to
> history.
>
> Periodically, when I get stuck on something in this field, I fantasize
> that scribbled in the margin of volume 9 was the solution to the
> problem.
>
> > Thanks to Apple, and lots of others, we got WiFi, barely. Industry hated
> that, and vow never to let that ever happen again.
>
> It really was a strange convolution of circumstances that led to wifi.
> When i first got it working in 1998, metricom ruled the world. They
> failed. After that, nobody thought it was feasible at scale until the
> concept of a mac retry emerged to fix the packet loss problem, and APs
> to provide a central clock (best we could do with the DSPs then).  So
> a window emerged (and yes, hugely driven by apple, but also by huge
> popular demand for "wireless freedom") to put "buggy" wireless tech on
> the crap 2.4 band in the hands of the people, it got established and
> made the coffee shop a workplace, and bigcos attempting to wipe it out
> (and largely, in the last few years, succeeding in dislodging it) have
> had an uphill battle.
>
> If metricom had succeeded, or the celluar folk got their
> implementations working only a few years faster, it would be a very
> different world.
>
> (this history is all covered in my MIT preso here:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wksh2DPHCDI&t=2007s - david was at
> that one)
>
> >
> > So Dave, I salute you and Toke and the others. I salute Tim Shepard, who
> also moved the ball in his PhD thesis, only to hit the same wall of
> opposition.
>
> Soooo many others involved, felix feitkau in particular comes to mind.
>
> Still, I think fixing the "wifi anomaly" is the greatest achievement
> of my career... and toke's hasn't even officially started yet! Someday
> perhaps that will be worth a medal, or an small entry for us in
> wikipedia.
>
> > It's so sad. We get shit like the "Obama band" proposed by PCAST, and
> are told to be thankful.
>
> Let's not get started on that or whitespaces today.
>
> > UWB failed miserably, too.
>
> I wish that could be resurrected.
>
> > My advice to any young smart innovator: don't touch wireless unless you
> are working for an incumbent. Expect the incumbents and governments to
> close and destroy wireless innovation.
>
> I agree. Well, I do have some hope and interest in spacex's
> constellation, but I remember teledesic's failure too well.
>
> >
> > Really. You will be in a world of hurt, and NO ONE will support
> anything. Not even VCs.
> >
> > Very sorry to say this. I had hoped Make WiFi Fast would have gone
> somewhere. I mourn its passing.
>
> It's not dead, I'm just closing my lab.
>
> In the document I cited for more wifi fixes, things like dynamically
> scaling down the announced txop under contention, lowering retries,
> offering a little less protection for packets when overloaded, a "tx
> is almost done" interrupt, etc, are all things I expect vendors and
> open source folk to try. I keep hoping minstrel-blues will land. Etc.
> Outside the US there's still a lot of positive activity. Products like
> eero and google wifi continue to sell like hotcakes, as well as tons
> of cheaper gear, and iot, etc, etc.
>
> And there's some good progress in 802.11ax.
>
> fq_codel for wifi + these mods will make wifi continue to be more than
> competitive with the upcoming 5G stuff.
>
> But i don't need to be the one to implement or test them. I should
> have shut things down when the shuttleworth grant didn't come through.
> When you can no longer get up in the morning to work, nor able to hold
> the wifi standard and related code in your head, it's time to move on.
>
> It is bothersome to me that the ISPs don't seem to realize that their
> business will fail unless they have good wifi, but the big ones are
> out there merging with the LTE folk and don't care either.
>
> Wifi's had a great run. I think here - with 5 years of work - we've
> extended its life another 5 years - at least. Still, unless
> applications emerge again that need good low latency (like vr) over
> wifi, nothings going to drive those down further to compete with 5g.
>
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: "Dave Taht"
> > Sent: Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 4:10 pm
> > To: bloat-announce at lists.bufferbloat.net, "bloat" , "Make-Wifi-fast" ,
> cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> > Cc: bloat-announce at lists.bufferbloat.net, "bloat" , "Make-Wifi-fast" ,
> cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> > Subject: [Cerowrt-devel] closing up my make-wifi-fast lab
> >
> > All:
> >
> > It is with some regret that I am announcing the closing of my
> > make-wifi-fast lab at the end of this month.
> >
> > Over the years we have relied on the donation of lab space from
> > ISC.org, georgia tech, the LINCs, and the University of Karstadt and
> > elsewhere - but my main base of operation has always been the
> > "yurtlab", in a campground deep in the los gatos hills where I could
> > both experiment and deploy wifi fixes[0] at scale. CeroWrt, in
> > particular, was made here.
> >
> > During the peak of the make-wifi-fast effort I rented additional space
> > on the same site, which at peak had over 30 routers in a crowded
> > space, competing. Which I (foolishly) kept, despite the additional
> > expense. Having heat in the winter and aircond in the summer was
> > helpful.
> >
> > With ongoing donations running at $90/month[1] - which doesn't even
> > cover bufferbloat.net's servers in the cloud - my biggest expense has
> > been keeping the lab at lupin open at $1800/mo.
> >
> > I kept the lab going through the sch_cake and openwrt 18.06 release
> > process, and I'm now several months behind on rent[3], and given how
> > things have gone for the past 2 years I don't see much use for it in
> > the future. Keeping it open, heated and dry in the winter has always
> > been a problem also. I'm also aware of a few larger, much better
> > equipped wifi labs that have thoroughly tested our "fq_codel for
> > wifi"[4] work that finally ends the "wifi performance anomaly". it's
> > in multiple commercial products now, we're seeing airtime fairness
> > being actually *marketed* as a wifi feature, and I kind of expect
> > deployment be universal across all mediatek mt76, and qualcomm ath9k
> > and ath10k based products in the next year or two. We won, big, on
> > wifi. Knocked it out of the park. Thanks all!
> >
> > Despite identifying all kinds of other work[5] that can be done to
> > make wifi better, no major (or even minor) direct sponsor has ever
> > emerged[2] for the make-wifi-fast project. We had a small grant from
> > comcast, a bit of support from nlnet also, I subsidized what I did
> > here from other work sources, toke had his PHD support, and all the
> > wonderful volunteers here... and that's it.
> >
> > Without me being able, also, to hire someone to keep the lab going, as
> > I freely admit to burnout and PTSD on perpetually reflashing and
> > reconfiguring routers...
> >
> > I'm closing up shop here to gather enough energy, finances, and time
> > for the next project, whatever it is.
> >
> > The make-wifi-fast mailing list and project will continue, efforts to
> > make more generic the new API also, and hopefully there's enough users
> > out there to
> > keep it all going forward without the kind of comprehensive testing I
> > used to do here.
> >
> > If anyone feels like reflashing, oh, 30 bricked routers of 8 different
> > models, from serial ports (in multiple cases, like the 6 uap-ac-lites,
> > via soldiering on headers), I'll gladly toss all the extra equipment
> > in the lab in a big box and ship them to you. Suggestions for a
> > suitable donation target are also of interest.
> >
> > The yurtlab has been an amazing, totally unique, unusual (and
> > sometimes embarrassing [6]) place to work and think, but it's time to
> > go.
> >
> > Perhaps I'll convince my amazingly supportive landlord to let me leave
> > behind a plaque:
> >
> > "On this spot bufferbloat on the internet and in WiFi was fixed,
> 2011-2018".
> >
> > Sincerely,
> > Dave Taht
> >
> > [0] https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ "How we made wifi fast again"
> > [1] https://www.patreon.com/dtaht
> > [2] Like adrian chadd's infamous flameout - I too, give up on wifi.
> > There's gotta be some other tech worth working on. What we shipped is
> > "good enough" to carry a few years though.
> > [3] This is not a passive-aggressive request for help making rent next
> > month, given all the other problems I have, it's best to close up shop
> > while I look for a new gig.
> > [4] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.00064.pdf "ending the wifi anomaly"
> > [5]
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Se36svYE1Uzpppe1HWnEyat_sAGghB3kE285LElJBW4/edit#
> > [6]
> https://www.cringely.com/2012/10/01/clothing-may-be-optional-but-bufferbloat-isnt/
> > _______________________________________________
> > Cerowrt-devel mailing list
> > Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
> >
> >
>
>
> --
>
> Dave Täht
> CEO, TekLibre, LLC
> http://www.teklibre.com
> Tel: 1-669-226-2619
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Make-wifi-fast mailing list
> Make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/make-wifi-fast
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