[Starlink] regional isp meeting fridays 8AM

[Dave Taht]

If anyone here has an ISP or WISP background, especially in the third world or rural areas… we’ve got a meeting this friday 8AM PDT. If you want in on it, please ask sasha off-list to invite you in. This might become a regular meeting.

…

Probably a lot of folk here don’t know my background. I’ve been kicking around the internet since it was called the arpanet. In 1993 I founded an ISP, and sold it in 1999. Worked on embedded linux routers from 1993, many forms of wireless tech since 94. I got tired of running sustaining engineering for mediaplex in 99 - I quit the day they went public - and had made linux wifi work for us in 98 ( http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/wireless-connection.html ) so I then worked on making embedded linux a reality for a couple years at montavista, and on various wifi related devices in the very early and exciting days while wifi swept the coffee shops of the world.

In 2006 I tried to retire in nicaragua, where my fantasy was to duplicate my friend john ackley’s ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-ackley-690053b/ ) success in spreading the Net through the virgin islands - my business plan was simple: buy a couple mountain tops, erect towers, do comms of all sorts, turn a profit, help OLPC support the local school systems and libraries, and surf a lot.

That’s a really long and now-funny story (it ended with a mexican standoff between myself and the survivor tv show), but along the way my second deployment went down *for months* with what turned out to be bufferbloat in rain. Some of that story is encapsulated in this MIT talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wksh2DPHCDI

where I also go into an early version what became the flent tool and rrul tests. 

My efforts in the last decade to solve the bufferbloat problem worldwide were in part driven by the urge to provide internet to schools and communities throughout the world that hadn’t been reached yet, and also extend a line to the solar system itself. The good parts of the internet - like wikipedia - not the bad parts! and: to make up for a huge mistake I’d made in 06 in not understanding how 802.11n wifi aggregation was going to screw up the world. 

(which is now fixed by the APIs in “ending the anomaly”, but there are many other problems left to fix in wifi, encapsulated in this later talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o

)

Ironically I don’t want to move back to Nicaragua - it’s become too civilized, and I’ve grown enamored of my sailboat, but I do really want to see the edge of the internet grow to cover the whole planet and would like to be able to discuss more often, with like-minded others as to how best to go about it.  see ya friday!