Gadgetory

welcome to reporters roundtable i'm rafe needleman in San Francisco today I'm going to ask you to indulge me in covering one of my favorite technology topics which is mesh networking the connection between your wireless devices in the global communications network is a tenuous thing Wi-Fi links are great when they work but gadgets spend a lot of time out of range and cellular links they're dependent on commercial and surprisingly vulnerable cell towers while few of us in the developed world have experienced a critical lack of connectivity in our lives it can happen at any time and it can be life-threatening during a natural disaster the communications infrastructure can fail due to power outages or panic-driven overuse when a repressive government threatens a population usually the first thing they try to control is their citizens communications with each other and the outside world mesh networks in theory are more robust than point-to-point communications in a mesh network any device with a connection can share that connection with other devices it's hard to shut down or censor a mesh network by strangling it at just one point it's also hard to spy on what's happening on a mesh network which is one reason the technology is used for military communications can mesh networks make our existing Wi-Fi and cellular networks more robust cheaper and safer can they give voice to the oppressed or the sensor today we're looking at the latest mesh technology products and the interesting places they could take the communications industry our guests today are too long time experts in mesh networking technology first three sri krishna whose the founding CTO of the mesh networking company tropos which was just acquired by the power infrastructure company ABB congratulations thank you now that she has left tropos he's trying to bring mesh technology to people around the world we're going to discuss what that means as the show goes on again congrats and welcome thank you also joining us is misha benoliel the CEO and co-founder of open garden a consumer mesh networking company that's trying to bring mesh to a different group of people which is you and me welcome to you and congratulations on your great showing at the TechCrunch event a couple of months ago so I want to do what I like doing here which is start from first principles and then build up from there so let's discuss technically what is a mesh network and why we need it I mean let's start with you mesh networks are a technology that has have been existing for a while now and it's completely timely for mesh networks to improve connectivity for everybody today and when you see the limitations we have with 3g 4g technologies Wi-Fi network access mesh networks can help a lot to improve the situation and bring to every consumer ubiquitous access to the internet but but in a technologically in a nutshell what is it instead of my phone connecting to a tower my phone connects to another phone three how's that that's right so the original mesh networks were designed in the military to for survivable communication so that soldiers could communicate with each other in the most harshest conditions and they have some very powerful radios that they connect to it so that they can communicate our tens of kilometers and get back you know sit and talk and get the data and these are without any infrastructure because the seven soldiers can't have any infrastructure when they're in a battlefield situation so that's what the idea of a mesh network is and so we had since the initial application of mesh networks military they have been many different variations of mesh networks that have been used throughout the world both for cities as well as for small-scale inside buildings you know in for utility core utilities across very large areas so and as well as the peer-to-peer meshes like like open garden where people are trying to connect with each other so I guess the idea here is that one device can connect to touch down to two or connect to the rest of the internet through another device somewhere that is connected to that is that has a touch point and as I understand it when I first heard about this technology many years ago I thought wow this is Magic why aren't we all using this and then I started to talk to guys like you and understood that there are technological challenges of actually building a mesh network that in theory it's great but there are problems with computational overhead and battery life can you talk about that a little bit absolutely so when we started opening Island we had the face many technical challenges first we had to enable devices to recognize themselves seamlessly and avoid processes like discoverability or pairing because if you want a mesh network to be efficient you want to be able to access to someone else device to to have connectivity without any interaction with your own device or the any other interaction for the person who is going to provide you with connectivity so the first this were the first barrier we encountered when we released the whore software before we will install software and we found a way to avoid discoverability and pairing and one use case we can describe here is let's say you are in a space where you have access to a Wi-Fi network I arrived into that space and I don't have access to the Wi-Fi network because it is a password protected my carrier is not providing providing me coverage and I want to access to the internet then if you have open garden software installed on one of your device it can be your phone or it can be your laptop then I will be able through my laptop also my phone access to that Wi-Fi access point so so basically it not only provides me with access to the internet but can also increase the range of access for this Wi-Fi hotspots because I can be hopping onto a device that's then connected to another device that has access to this Wi-Fi this Wi-Fi hotspot wow that sent as a consumer okay so let's dive into open garden a little bit in the consumer applications of this and then then we'll get into these other the repressed consumers that sounds to me like paradise like a a communicators paradise where as long as I have access and other people can use it as long as somebody else's access then I can use that but it also sets off alarm bells to me in terms of my devices already have very limited battery power and now I'm could be sharing my connection with other people and using my battery life and then I cannot imagine that the providers of gated connectivity whether it's a paid Wi-Fi hotspot or my cellular carrier are cool with the idea of me repurposing re-enabling people that are not subscribers to use their network so let's talk about first the the consumer device impact and then get into economics so there are batteries obviously an important point when you comes to mesh networks and most specifically when it it is an application like our application that is installed on a mobile phone so we when we arrive in the place where there is density of devices you are the mesh actually can create good opportunities for battery conception and I give you a very simple example let's say your your phone is full on battery and my phone is very low on battery and I want to access to the internet then instead of using my expensive link which will use my 3g or 4g radio interface i will just use a bluetooth link to your phone which is full on battery and then be able to access to the Internet my phone is for you you are French aren't you because this is such a socialist idea so now we take your empty battery in my full battery now we both got half battery life left but I'm the paying customer and I don't know I don't know you so you think that the people will go for this they will they will suffer hidden battery in order to help to be because so first in that scenario I extend my battery life obviously is going to take some of your battery yes okay go ahead and there comes there is a we want to create a system with credits so basically and this will require more iterations it is not implemented yet into how software but the more we advance into the implementation of the features of the software we will test and create credit ecosystem so the more you give whether it's bites or it could be also jewels if we fall for battery usage the more credits you get and those users and energy jewels absolutely okay and then you can use the dis credits when you need connectivity when you don't have access to an available Wi-Fi hotspot or if you are traveling for example and you want to avoid expensive roaming charges and why not also reward users when they give some of their battery to some other users interesting but that we require iterations obviously and we are not there yet but we are that's where we are going now I know you've looked at this from the point the economics in the political perspective from the carriers and Sri I imagine you have as well I mean tropos was it's now doing power infrastructure but it was broader than that yes when you started so so talk about the economic and business angle of sharing network connectivity and this is this issue goes beyond mesh I mean when people started opening up hot Wi-Fi hotspots in their homes the the ISPs began to get really upset that people would be sharing their Wi-Fi with people they didn't know so how does this play out yes I think that's a very good question and vicious points about credits is also very in every spot on and the carrier's actually welcomed the use of Wi-Fi now because their networks overloaded with the data and in fact it's a one of the advantages of meshes it's actually more power efficient and the reason is that when you're communicating with the cell tower that's miles away your cell phone has to burn a lot of power just to send like a voice signal whereas if you're hopping through several intermediate points just to get that cellphone or going through Wi-Fi it's a much closer link and with much less battery power so you can get much longer battery life much less strain on the cellular network and so they're actually welcoming alternate approaches to offload their network and so now the carriers are actually willing to embrace these new sort of off network approaches and I think that's where but you know companies like the do peer-to-peer meshes or do you know a Wi-Fi based solutions will actually benefit the carrier's mmm can use on much inspector have you worked with carriers Misha yes I worked with Cheerios in the past mo in the voice over IP above but for open garden but for been gallon we we started discussions with many mobile carriers we have agreements in place to start test with some of them and what Sri was pointing out is a is very relevant is that today would we arrive to a point where there is a limit with the spectrum that is available and the only way to improve the wireless networks is to increase the density of of Microsoft or hotspots and I think is really under understood that today because what they are now rolling out there that their 4g infrastructure but the next step will be probably to increase the number of microcells to improve connectivity and coverage and what we do is open garden is we fall into that category where we turn every device into a hotspot or micro cell and by multiplying the density of these devices then we improve the network itself becomes more reliable can have impact on the less battery conception has a Sri mentioned mentioned and obviously provide you with better connectivity and faster connectivity how so you launched this product is it in release or beta right now so the product is still in beta it was launched during TechCrunch in New York end of May 2012 and we have a month later a close to 150,000 users now are there any Geographic concentrations so more than half of how users are in the US large cities mainly and the second country now is India and then countries in Europe like France UK and then in South America Brazil any big cities in the US where I means the New York San Francisco the usual suspects or they're like weird pockets or not the usual suspects ok now I want to get on to 32 you just one second here open garden is available on OS 10 so in window so for laptops and on Android but it's not available yet on iOS which which strikes me as kind of the obvious place where we want this there what when are we going to be able to get the bypass ATT verizon on our for cellular for data on an iOS so obviously we want to go on iOS and we started with an open platform and Android is perfect to build the disciplic ation and to arrive to a point where we have a really great user experience completely polished user experience and when we arrive to that point then we will start working and figuring out how we can release the application for your iOS we have a lot of demands already from users on iOS and we want to do it when the timing is right and we believe we still have to work and improve the product but I mean it can happen next year yeah but it's obviously we want to go on iOS yeah cool all right well let's from the first world problem of going to a conference or not being able to get a solid connection to the real world of people who need to communicate in order to save lives or perhaps their entire country I want to talk about what what you've been working on since you left troppo so you sent me this paper about about using mesh net working as a way to route around intentional blockage of communication that's right talk talk to us more about that yes having built about 850 cities across the world at her post networks using Wi-Fi meshes I've learned a lot about what makes them work and where they don't work and and so the there are certain physical limitations to the current Wi-Fi based mesh networks which the reason Wi-Fi is great is that the cost is so low it's everywhere and that's one thing that's made it so successful around the world it's also available in unlicensed spectrum which is available in much all every country around the world so anybody can be free to operate without any license and the the challenge of Wi-Fi is that it is it doesn't actually so users really want to take this and then spread it all over the world but they can't because of the limitations of the physical layer that the links can only go so far and they require a lot of power it for a battery-powered device to actually communicate over distances greater than 500 feet even 500 feet is a lot for a Wi-Fi device battery-powered Wi-Fi device and what I've been looking at is that you know I see the energy that people have to build these these meshes and what they really want is something where they can just employ a network anywhere in the world and start communicating over large distances like the military like the military does in fact the military has been doing this for decades in fat for troops for over 10 kilometers getting you know a voice and video and and they they operate from 20 megahertz to 2.5 gigahertz or twenty-five hundred megahertz they have radios that scale all that that spectrum and then essentially have complete freedom of operation these are called small unit operations situational awareness radios and and that you can look it up on the internet and they have a tremendous flexibility however that's because they're the military they don't they can you know pretty much in a time of need they can operate in any in anything and so the what they also have is they have techniques where their radio techniques that that can if we applied in the unlicensed bactrim can actually go ten times as far and ten times as fast and so compared to Wi-Fi and in many kids so 10 times the coverage area of Wi-Fi because of the sequence spread spectrum in the frequency hopping in the way that they've the techniques they developed however that's not part of the Wi-Fi standard and they can scale down to very large long links and so that I think the taking that kind of military or thinking and and combining it with the biggest trend in the world right now and technology is the smartphone that you know the smartphone is intimate even impacting everyone including the military they're having to adapt to the smartphone that they're there now realizing that their radios are you have to somehow connect with with the smartphones and because everyone has one and and so but the limitation of the smartphone is that it requires a cellular network is that there in the many parts of the world don't have either they don't have a free cellular network or they don't have a cellular network at all so many countries there's three hundreds of million people just don't have access to cellular networks it's hard to imagine in this world where you know we carry yourself we're always in with text messages and with video and so on but there are hundreds of million people in world that don't have access to that and there's another even there's over a billion people who don't have access to basic websites that we all take for granted the United States so they can't get information because of government censorship so in all these sort of situations i think the a new kind of radio layer that supports the social mesh concept which could really make a tremendous impact in the reach of these networks and so a lot of the problems we see right now could be just solved with the technology and what's been limiting it so far is that these technologies that the military use have been very expensive they've been you know maybe perhaps several thousand dollars per per unit and now with the smartphone in our hand we have so much processing power in these devices compared to 10 years ago that we can actually put we can actually build very powerful mesh networks from a processing standpoint and you combine that with them the Wi-Fi radio concept is actually 20 years old the basic standard is 20 years old there are much better with the new processing capabilities and with the the new cost of RF chips coming down so much for the cost of a for tens of dollars you can actually build a much more powerful radio that sits you know just like this battery pack here you know if you connect it to your my phone and you have this very powerful radio that can connect just like the military videos and now when we talk about this first you talk about using this in instances where governments are actively trying to deny people access to the internet too so they so to prevent another Arab Spring for example by blocking access to twitter or shutting down the cell towers or firewalling a country right and you think that this technology can route around that yes I think what these so for example if you look what's happening in Syria there are a small number of activists that are using satellite connections and they they happen to be the satellite which is a very costly very low speed and for a very few number of people and as a result what's happening is that the government's are going in and trying to target the machines that are running on these satellite connection so they're very vulnerable because there's so few of them but when you have a technology like Wi-Fi at that Wi-Fi scale but much more powerful the scale there's no way to stop that many radios out there and so you know it's just sort of it there's a security in numbers if you have much larger proliferation of the devices you know you can you can overcome any pretty much no no government will be able to stop it so you're working on a new up-to-date radio hardware technology hardware software networking technology it's all kind you can't really separate yes are you guys competing know so I'm actually what I did is I wrote the paper so we haven't we're not building it yet and so it was just paper and i typically communications magazine so we're looking at to see how this is gonna I think there's a technological inevitability I don't know exactly how it's going to unfold but the the power of these smartphones combined with the RF technology that's been developed the last ten years at some point is going to change the way we do networking and go ahead I think I mean Sri and I are sharing the same vision and the reason why we launched open garden is because the original vision was to take advantage of the density and the proliferation of smartphones like Sri said which is a big difference like 10 years ago from from now is every smartphone every form is a is a computer is a router and has the capability to support mesh networking that's right and with the ecosystem of the apps on smartphones today you just transform your phone into a mesh device just by installing an app and when you install open garden on your smartphone it turns your smartphone into into a mesh device and has long has you have another device with open garden running at close distance or in proximity then these two devices we start to interconnect now as I said at the top of the show I've been fascinated by this technology for many many years and and over time I have seen businesses experiment with shared infrastructure shared resources the one that springs to mind his phone fon which was a shared telephony Network it would replace your router in your house with one that was phone enabled and you know you could share that there's another one one of my favorite companies from a launch event I think it was called space monkey where they're building a storage mesh where they'll sell you one gigabyte of storage and a hard drive that you put in your on your network in your house but it's actually two gigabyte drive and the other gig is shared with the mesh with the other users fascinating idea over the years I have seen none of these technologies get critical traction as there always seemed to be the province of geeks now Surrey in your case you're talking about routing around that particular problem by making it in literally life or death from people but me showing in yours how do you break out of wow that sounds really cool and it solves but it only solves a problem I have once in a while and make this a really broad consumer technology to the extent that the carrier's sit up and take and take notice so if you take the two examples you mentioned the phone and the space monkey phone one of the things they have to overcome was the the hardware basically they tried at the beginning to work on it with a software solution but i think the the hardware was not ready to for this solution at that time and the phone still has to deploy a number of hardware devices to be able to deploy the network and that actually Martin is doing a great job and icing now they reach like four million hotspot over the globally and I believe that the work that he is doing and basically Wi-Fi networks are very good complementary solution to to the peer-to-peer mesh application we are we are developing because when you create a mesh network you always need aflam to the internet whether it is through a carrier with a cell tower whether it is through a Wi-Fi infrastructure and in her case why we launched and we think it is timely it's because of the density of smartphones today and we are not a hardware solution and we don't want to be a hardware player we are a software solution and when it comes to software and to mobile apps I mean just you are just two clicks away from getting your phone or your device because it can be also a smartphone a tablet or a laptop to become part of the mesh network and be an emission networking device so it's a very easy process there is no more barrier of the hardware mm-hmm sorry sure yes I think as you pointed out and make sure that the the big change that's happened in the last five years is the smartphone and availability smartphones that people are carrying on there you know with them all the time and and so that opens up a new opportunity for Wi-Fi and within the constraints of Wi-Fi these Wi-Fi these meshes these peer-to-peer meshes will actually begin to become more and more available throughout the world and and that i think the the complementary the thing is that Wi-Fi itself as a standard is very limited and so and there's nothing we can do about that it's a great thing about it is it's the cost is so low it's everywhere the problem is that the limitations of the physical layer prevent it from really communicating at a long distance and so there it is technologically possible to build radios and unlicensed that have 10 times the coverage area now with new technology and and so eventually that will make its way into consumer devices at some point for example cordless phones use on licensed spectrum and they have much longer ranges and that's just an example of how what's possible you know but I think you can do much better using the military approaches that have been designed for military radios and and that it remains to be seen how that will unfold fascinating stuff so if we want to get mesh networking technology in our lives right now there are a couple ways to do it let's talk about that obviously you can download and run open garden on your laptop computer or on your Android smartphone and it sounds like kind of a no-brainer you were telling me that you know if you're not if you're just running in the background it actually doesn't impact your battery life very much at all yes did the impact of the application itself is very low you don't you don't you don't perceive it on your phone alright so let's let's give it a shot and build a cooperative Network I sounds totally cool to me now when you were at atropos you were involved in building these metro scale mesh networks and power companies are using these right now correct is that correct so how is mesh being used right now kind of behind the scenes that we don't see yes so for example smart meters are being deployed across the world in two meter your residential usage and those have to go they'll have to communicate back to a power company and the way that's happening is over mesh networks so they're connecting to networks that where the mesh nodes are powered on the street lamps or powered on fixed areas where they have power and they they communicate relay from hop hop to hop back two to the power compute the computers that the server's of the power of the power company and then the the new home control automation products I think zigbee mm-hmm those are actually little ultra-low power mesh network that's right that's right and those are designed for very long battery life to convey small amounts of information repeatedly over a long time like 10 years right and so those are in the home and low-power devices so you wrote this paper on kind of new technologies and mesh in as a tool for providing more people with connectivity and a touchdown to the global net what's your prognosis what he thinks can happen first of all do you think there could be another Arab Spring given what a potentially repressive leaders know about technology today I you know it's it's a great question and I can't answer definitively one way or the other that's a very own people but I think there's a lot of things pointing to the answer being it quite quite possible because the technology is moving now in a direction where everybody can get very powerful communication resources in their hand and and I think I'm looking for the next ten years to see how that's going to make it make it possible where and so when we wrote the paper in a Sherpa communications we were just asking the question can you build a network that cannot be that's indestructible I wireless mesh network that everybody can have access to you know I think a lot of the problems in the world can be solved if you can have ustream everywhere in the world you know without being blocked so Wi-Fi or cellular networks or anything a government can take a very powerful transmitter and just jam the networks that none of it can operate and that's that's just the vulnerability of commercial radios right now is that they can be shut down similarly the Internet can be shut down by by limiting by filtering the packets at any point in the entry point of network so many countries like Iran or or other countries are they can they can control the communications such that they only let the things that they want in and out going in but technologically that that opportunity seems to be the limit very limited because if you have the power to communicate with everyone all the time and there's that one of the advantages mesh networks as you can set them up and there can be thousands of different links there's no way for a government to control that many independent wireless links they can just you know so so it they may want to control these links but they may be facing a sort of an unstoppable technological trend where there would be thousands of ways alternate routes in and out of these countries and and there's no way for them to stop it it's fascinating stuff sri sri krishna founding CTO of tropos tell me tell people where we can find this paper what should we Google to find it sure you can google my name and social mesh social my social mesh yeah and it's published a night Ripley communications magazine check it out in June June June okay awesome thank you for coming in thank you and amisha benno Li L is the founder and CEO of open garden a mesh networking technology you can get today for your laptops and for your android phones and the iphone later thanks so much for joining us that's the luck to you thank you are so interesting to go to open gallon com yeah and we will direct you to the to the right software to install on your on your laptop or your Android phone great thanks guys very much for coming in thanks for watching reporters roundtable our next episode coming up will be on aerial drones we've got chris anderson the editor-in-chief of Wired and Daniel Suarez the author of a new book called kill decision about aerial drones than the previously the author of damen which I'm sure everybody here has read don't miss that show thanks for watching reporters roundtable thanks to you for producing we'll see you next time