Let’s throw out some more use cases for Outernet.
Today I was thinking about the average “internet cafe” in the developing world. (My experience was Gulu, Uganda) You have users lined up to pay for dreadfully slow internet access and a business owner who pays high prices for a terribly oversubscribed internet connection, often ISDN. Wouldn’t both ends of that situation love to have Outernet available? Crazy fast page loads for the user (remember our first broadband experience around Y2K) and diversion of internet traffic for the owner to lower his internet costs. Maybe someone could identify the most relevant content desired by cafe users? Yes, that’s pretty broad to cover the world, but who knows.
What are some other use cases you guys see?
Software downloads come to mind. When I was on slow Internet, those were the most annoying things.
I believe news reports covering developing events transcribed or copied from various internet and print news sources would be a welcome addition to the short Breaking News Tweets currently sent out. Ken
@Burdick In Uganda, for example, how much do you think a cafe owner would pay for a proper edge caching server? That’s basically what you’re talking about, right? How do we enable that customer to save money and also provide a better experience for his users? Is this a content problem or a hardware problem?
I’ve always hated doing anti-virus or OS updates.
Still wish they would go out as rss torrent feeds for archives where you can select the files you want to download. especially for hard to find packages depending on the server you are using and its distance from you. It would be nice to be able to do those kinds of updates over outernet.
This type of thing is best if customers talked to their vendor of choice and tried to convince them to deliver over Outernet.
I could see a cafe owner dedicating a PC (~$300?) to the task of being a caching server, but the network configuration would have to be simple. This might be achieved with an x86 linux firewall that includes a transparent proxy. My comment was based on a more simplistic approach of adding a lighthouse to an internet cafe LAN and setting the start page on the PC’s to librarian. Users learn that anything on librarian is very fast to load and they only visit the larger web when they need to. This reduces the bandwidth load on the internet connection and potentially saves money by delaying a bandwidth upgrade. The greater benefit is being the 1st cafe in a market that offers great content with instant page loads (as opposed to 1-5 min page loads). The reality is that a cafe’s reputation for speed and power stability determines their business potential. The easier it is to browse (not search) relevant content, the more users would tend to stay on librarian. With the cost of entry being so low, the “middle-class” users of the internet cafe may decide to get their own receiver for home/neighborhood.
I spent a week reading and reviewing the various ways that CDNs and their edge caching software works, but you know what? Your suggestion to just set Librarian/Outernet as the homepage is by far the most elegant solution.
Tangent: Can you believe that a 1TB SSD only costs $200 now?
If you have a router that can be flashed with dd-wrt.com firmware you can set it up as a firewall to handle sending network users to your oouternet unit on the LAN. You can set the outernet unit as the IP in the ‘services’ section as the http forward location if that is the only service you want available when using another device to handle dhcp requests since wifi only takes 5 clients at most.
But other functions exist for a more advanced setup.
https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Tutorials
FAQs
…
Access Restrictions
Access To Modem Configuration
Ad blocking
Afterburner/Speedbooster
Chillispot hotspot (now very simple)
Client Bridged
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Configuration settings for UMA enabled phones
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DNSMasq as DHCP server
Easy SSH tunnels (securely surf the web anywhere / bypass firewalls)
EoIP Routing (Link two routers over the Internet)
Firewall
Firewall Builder
Google Chromecast
Guest WiFi + abuse control for beginners
HotSpot HTTP Redirect
Itunes remote
Insufficient RAM (make 8MB RAM devices stable) / Router Slowdown
Linking Routers - WDS, Repeaters, OLSR, etc.
MAC Address Clone
Milkfish Setup
Modem - Connection to Router
Multiple WLANs - Add additional SSID’s
My Page
Networking 101 for Dummies
Network traffic analysis with netflow and ntop
Network Time Protocol (NTP)
NoCatSplash
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OpenVPN Remote Access by Static Key (The Simple Way)
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A great use would be for weather. You could have a national radar and radars for local regions along with current conditions, forecast and severe weather alerts.
Check out SATNOGS - https://plus.google.com/+SatnogsOrgProject/videos
Main website: https://satnogs.org/
SatNOGS is an open source ground station and network, optimized for
modularity, built from readily available and affordable tools and
resources.
I think they will be more relevant to our cubesats, as ground stations are usually used to control or uplink to satellites. But good find. Definitely worth reaching out when the time is right.