Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (ebook reader that looks like a book txt) 📖

later, one of the boxes on the display winked out. "Watch
this," Kurt said, as the remaining two boxes were joined by a
coruscating line. "See that? Self-healing. Minimal packet
loss. Beautiful."

"That's hot," Lyman said. "That makes me all wet."

They chuckled nervously at his crudity. "Seriously."

"Here," Kurt said, and another window popped up, showing twenty or more
boxes with marching ant trails between them. "That's a time-lapse of the
Kensington network. The boxes are running different versions of the
firmware, so you can see that in some edge cases, you get a lot more
oscillation between two similar signals. We fixed that in the new
version."

The graybeard said, "How?"

"We flip a coin," Kurt said, and grinned. "These guys in Denmark ran
some simulations, proved that a random toss-up worked as well as any
other algorithm, and it's a lot cheaper, computationally."

"So what's going on just to the northeast of center?"

Alan paid attention to the patch of screen indicated. Three access
points were playing musical chairs, dropping signal and reacquiring it,
dropping it again.

Kurt shrugged. "Bum hardware, I think. We've got volunteers assembling
those boxes, from parts."

"Parts?"

Kurt's grin widened. "Yeah. From the trash, mostly. I dumpster-dive for
'em."

They grinned back. "That's very hot," Lyman said.

"We're looking at normalizing the parts for the next revision," Alan
said. "We want to be able to use a single distro that works on all of
them."

"Oh, sure," Lyman said, but he looked a little disappointed, and so did
Kurt.

"Okay, it works," Lyman said. "It works?" he said, nodding the question
at his posse. They nodded back. "So what can we do for you?"

Alan chewed his lip, caught himself at it, stopped. He'd anticipated a
slugfest, now he was getting strokes.

"How come you're being so nice to us?" Kurt said. "You guys are The
Man." He shrugged at Alan. "Someone had to say it."

Lyman smiled. "Yeah, we're the phone company. Big lumbering dinosaur
that is thrashing in the tarpit. The spazz dinosaur that's so
embarrassed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue
us."

"Heh, spazz dinosaur," the East Indian woman said, and they all laughed.

"Heh," Kurt said. "But seriously."

"Seriously," Lyman said. "Seriously. Think a second about the scale of a
telco. Of this telco. The thousands of kilometers of wire in the
ground. Switching stations. Skilled linesmen and
cable-pullers. Coders. Switches. Backhaul. Peering arrangements. We've
got it all. Ever get on a highway and hit a flat patch where you can't
see anything to the horizon except the road and the telephone poles and
the wires? Those are *our wires*. It's a lot of goodness, especially for
a big, evil phone company.

"So we've got a lot of smart hackers. A lot of cool toys. A gigantic
budget. The biggest network any of us could ever hope to manage -- like
a model train set the size of a city.

"That said, we're hardly nimble. Moving a Bell is like shifting a
battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick. It can be done,
but you can spend ten years doing it and still not be sure if you've
made any progress. From the outside, it's easy to mistake 'slow' for
'evil.' It's easy to make that mistake from the inside, too.

"But I don't let it get me down. It's *good* for a Bell to be slow and
plodding, most of the time. You don't want to go home and discover that
we've dispatched the progress-ninjas to upgrade all your phones with
video screens and a hush mode that reads your thoughts. Most of our
customers still can't figure out voice mail. Some of them can't figure
out touch-tone dialing. So we're slow. Conservative. But we can do lots
of killer R&D, we can roll out really hot upgrades on the back end, and
we can provide this essential service to the world that underpins its
ability to communicate. We're not just cool, we're essential.

"So you come in and you show us your really swell and interesting
meshing wireless data boxes, and I say, 'That is damned cool.' I think
of ways that it could be part of a Bell's business plan in a couple
decades' time."

"A couple decades?" Kurt squawked. "Jesus Christ, I expect to have a
chip in my brain and a jetpack in a couple decades' time."

"Which is why you'd be an idiot to get involved with us," Lyman said.

"Who wants to get involved with you?" Kurt said.

"No one," Alan said, putting his hands on the table, grateful that the
conflict had finally hove above the surface. "That's not what we're here
for."

"Why are you here, Alvin?" Lyman said.

"We're here because we're going into the moving-data-around trade, in an
ambitious way, and because you folks are the most ambitious
moving-data-around tradespeople in town. I thought we'd come by and let
you know what we're up to, see if you have any advice for us."

"Advice, huh?"

"Yeah. You've got lots of money and linesmen and switches and users and
so forth. You probably have some kind of well-developed cosmology of
connectivity, with best practices and philosophical ruminations and
tasty metaphors. And I hear that you, personally, are really good at
making geeks and telcos play together. Since we're going to be a kind of
telco" -- Kurt startled and Alan kicked him under the table -- "I
thought you could help us get started right."

"Advice," Lyman said, drumming his fingers. He stood up and paced.

"One: don't bother. This is at least two orders of magnitude harder than
you think it is. There aren't enough junk computers in all of Toronto's
landfills to blanket the city in free wireless. The range is nothing but
three hundred feet, right? Less if there are trees and buildings, and
this city is all trees and buildings.

"Two: don't bother. The liability here is stunning. The gear you're
building is nice and all, but you're putting it into people's hands and
you've got no idea what they're going to do with it. They're going to
hack in bigger antennae and signal amplifiers. The radio cops will be on
your ass day and night.

"What's more, they're going to open it up to the rest of the world and
any yahoo who has a need to hide what he's up to is going to use your
network to commit unspeakable acts -- you're going to be every pirate's
best friend and every terrorist's safest haven.

"Three: don't bother. This isn't going to work. You've got a cute little
routing algorithm that runs with three nodes, and you've got a model
that may scale up to 300, but by the time you get to 30 thousand, you're
going to be hitting so much latency and dropping so many packets on the
floor and incurring so much signaling overhead that it'll be a gigantic
failure.

"You want my advice? Turn this into a piece of enterprise technology: a
cheap way of rolling out managed solutions in hotels and office towers
and condos -- building-wide meshes, not city-wide. Those guys will pay
-- they pay a hundred bucks per punchdown now for wired networking, so
they'll gladly cough up a thousand bucks a floor for these boxes, and
you'll only need one on every other story. And those people *use*
networks, they're not joe consumer who doesn't have the first clue what
to do with a network connection."

Kurt had stiffened up when the rant began, and once he heard the word
"consumer," he began to positively vibrate. Alan gave him a warning
nudge with his elbow.

"You're shitting me, right?" Kurt said.

"You asked me for advice --" Lyman said, mildly.

"You think we're going to bust our balls to design and deploy all this
hardware so that business hotels can save money on cable-pullers? Why
the hell would we want to do that?"

"Because it pays pretty well," Lyman said. He was shaking his head a
little, leaning back from the table, and his posse picked up on it,
going slightly restless and fidgety, with a room-wide rustle of papers
and clicking of pens and laptop latches.

Alan held up his hand. "Lyman, I'm sorry, we've been unclear. We're not
doing this as a money-making venture --" Kurt snorted. "It's about
serving the public interest. We want to give our neighbors access to
tools and ideas that they wouldn't have had before. There's something
fundamentally undemocratic about charging money for communications: It
means that the more money you have, the more you get to communicate. So
we're trying to fix that, in some small way. We are heartily
appreciative of your advice, though --"

Lyman held up a hand. "Sorry, Alan, I don't mean to interrupt, but there
was something I wanted to relate to you two, and I've got to go in about
five minutes." Apparently, the meeting was at an end. "And I had made
myself a note to tell you two about this when I discovered it last
week. Can I have the floor?"

"Of course," Alan said.

"I took a holiday last week," Lyman said. "Me and my girlfriend. We went
to Switzerland to see the Alps and to visit her sister, who's doing
something for the UN in Geneva. So her sister, she's into, I don't know,
saving children from vampires in Afghanistan or something, and she has
Internet access at the office, and can't see any reason to drop a
connection in at home. So there I was, wandering the streets of Geneva
at seven in the morning, trying to find a WiFi connection so I can get
my email and find out how many ways I can enlarge my penis this week.

"No problem -- outside every hotel and most of the cafés, I can find a
signal for a network called Swisscom. I log on to the network and I fire
up a browser and I get a screen asking me for my password. Well, I don't
have one, but after poking around, I find out that I can buy a card with
a temporary password on it. So I wait until some of the little smoke
shops open and start asking them if they sell Swisscom Internet Cards,
in my terrible, miserable French, and after chuckling at my accent, they
look at me and say, 'I have no clue what you're talking about,' shrug,
and go back to work.

"Then I get the idea to go and ask at the hotels. The first one, the guy
tells me that they only sell cards to guests, since they're in short
supply. The cards are in short supply! Three hotels later, they allow as
how they'll sell me a 30-minute card. Oh, that's fine. Thirty whole
minutes of connectivity. Whoopee. And how much will that be? Only about
a zillion Swiss pesos. Don't they sell cards of larger denominations? Oh
sure, two hours, 24 hours, seven days -- and each one costs about double
the last, so if you want, you can get a seven day card for about as much
as you'd spend on a day's worth of connectivity in 30-minute increments
-- about three hundred dollars Canadian for a week, just FYI.

"Well, paying 300 bucks for a week's Internet is ghastly, but very
Swiss, where they charge you if you have more than two bits of cheese at
breakfast, and hell, I could afford it. But three hundred bucks for a
day's worth of 30-minute cards? Fuck that. I was going to have to find