A number of folks have asked me to provide my plenary presentation from the Broadband in Cities and Towns Conference that took place October 30-31, 2007. Better Broadband for Cities and Towns and the Rise of Open Technology explores the explosive growth of community wireless networking around the globe and highlights a half-dozen networks, the implementation of the CAIDA COMMONS Project to interlink participating networks, and emergent open technologies that will shift community networks to a "device as infrastructure" model.

Attached is a copy of the October 15, 2007 COMMONS presentation I gave at the Rural Telecommunications Congress in Springfield, Illinois. The presentation is an overview of the COMMONS Project, a research initiative to provide broadband access to communities in return for networking data for scientists. A more in depth overview of the COMMONS Project can be read here.

I recently gave a presentation on the COMMONS project at the 2007 Telecommunications Policy and Research Conference (TPRC). The presentation is based on the Final Report of the 2006 COMMONS Strategy Workshop which my colleague, kc claffy, and I drafted up.

Here's a new paper that's out in the most recent issue of IEEE's Internet Computing. We required a Creative Commons co-license (attribution, non-commercial, share-alike) with IEEE in order to publish our work, so you can download the paper for free (or buy yourself a subscription if you'd rather).

The (un)Economic Internet?

kc claffy, Sascha D. Meinrath
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis - CAIDA

San Diego Supercomputer Center,
University of California, San Diego

Scott O. Bradner
Harvard University

The Internet Economics track will address how economic and policy issues relate to the emergence of the Internet as critical infrastructure. Here, the authors provide a historical overview of internetworking, identifying key transitions that have contributed to the Internet's development and penetration. Its core architecture wasn't designed to serve as critical communications infrastructure for society, but developed far beyond the expectations of the original funding agencies, architects, developers, and early users. The incongruence between the Internet's underlying architecture and current use and expectations, however, means we can no longer study Internet technology in isolation from the political and economic context in which it is deployed.

Read the full paper: PDF

This week I'm in Washington, DC for the Freedom to Connect Conference and to talk with congressional staff about the need for research projects like COMMONS. I just finished up a panel where I gave a presentation on cooperative networking (AKA the COMMONS Project).

Strategy Workshop to discuss the COMMONS (Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems) initiative

Final workshop report for the COMMONS (Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems) Workshop held in December, 2006, authored by: Sascha Meinrath, CAIDA, sascha @ caida.org kc claffy, CAIDA, kc @ caida.org

Executive Summary

On December 12-13, 2006, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) held a workshop to discuss and ultimately propose a collaboration among researchers and networks to simultaneously solve three acute and growing problems facing the Internet: a self-reported financial crisis in the Internet infrastructure provider industry that poses a severe threat to broadband growth and U.S. competitiveness; a data acquisition crisis which has deeply stunted the field of network science; and a dilemma within emerging community, municipal, regional, and state networks, who need (additional) broadband connectivity but face severely limited provider, service level, and usage options. The Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems (COMMONS) initiative proposes to build or partner with a collaborative national backbone to connect participating community, municipal, regional, and state networks to one another and to the global Internet. COMMONS Peering will be conditionally available to city, county, state, and federal government entities, academic institutions, community Internet initiatives (e.g., community wireless networks), and commercial entities based upon the following three conditions: (1) networks will make select operational data available to COMMONS researchers (under appropriate legal data sharing and privacy guards); (2) the attached networks must agree to develop and abide by COMMONS policies which will be based upon research results of empirical data analyses of network usage; and, (3) participating networks must abide by the Acceptable Use Policies set by the COMMONS project coordination committee.

CAIDA hosted 40 networking visionaries from across North America at the UCSD campus to discuss technical, policy, and operational issues related to the COMMONS initiative. This "COMMONS Strategy Workshop" brought together representatives from industry, community and municipal networks, regional and state networks, as well as Internet researchers, community organizers, and developers building next-generation data communications technologies. Workshop participants also included heads of research, infrastructure, media, and policy organizations, as well as telecommunications lawyers. The diversity of workshop participants helped ensure that all major project stakeholders were represented in the proceedings and provided invaluable insights into the potential pitfalls and opportunities the COMMONS Project faces in coming years.

At a time when research on broadband service provision is desperately needed to help forge new national telecommunications policies and inspire innovation in networking technologies [1], the COMMONS Project is an innovative platform that will provide vital research results for policy makers across the country and around the world. This report describes the findings from the COMMONS Strategy Workshop, outlines a set of relevant open research problems identified by participants, and concludes with recommendations that will benefit the scientific community, network operators and developers, key decision-makers, and the general populace.

Read more...

Lots of folks have asked me for a copy of the presentation I gave at the 2007 National Conference for Media Reform. Beyond LANS, MANS, and Community Intranets: The CAIDA COMMONS Project is available here. The general COMMONS Project website is currently housed at: http://www.caida.org/projects/commons.