Altheamesh

May Community Update

We launched six new Altheahoods communities in early May. An Altheahood community is selected by an organizer as a potential deployment.  Local organizers then work together with the Althea team to get people signed up and “pre-registered” prior to committing to a buildout. One of these organizers, Perri, had been

Altheamesh

Faster, Cheaper Internet in Medellin Colombia

Before the Red Medellin team brought in Althea's innovative technology, options for internet access were limited in Comuna 13, one of the sprawling urban communities on the hills surrounding Medellin Colombia. A few of the homes had low-speed DSL access, but most people relied on expensive cell data

Decentralization

Althea Development Update #69: Decentralization without compromises

Althea has taken the same base software ISPs use and applied some modern advancements. In short we've stacked our advantages and minimized our overhead to such a degree that we come out even with centralized ISP performance.

bug-stories

Althea Development Update #68: Time is relative for computers too

This issue got me thinking about the relativity of time on the routers. Our billing algorithm made the assumption that everyone did billing computations every 5 seconds, what would happen when that didn't hold true?

April Update

Taking a note from Google's rollout of their fiber networks, we are introducing the new Altheahoods program! This program supplies organizers with the marketing tools and internet presence to get end users signed up and on board prior to building out the network. This is a good tool

Althea Development Update #67: Chasing ghosts in the machine

Once you design a distributed system to handle any one point of failure you don't stop having failures, they just get more complicated and interconnected. Beta 3 is finally rolling out, after several weeks of furious QA. Here are some example bugs. 1) Fixed a race condition where

Althea in Medellin

My trip to Colombia Entonces(enˈtonses/, [ẽn̪ˈt̪õnses]) — One of my favorite Spanish words. It means then or so. I like the cadence, how it fills the awkward space in a sentence and how it conveys a sense of time and place. My trip in Colombia was a journey

Altheamesh

March Update

We were so busy building and growing I think we missed an update in February! We now have 23 users in Clatskanie [https://blog.althea.org/tales-from-the-field/], and several relays (a relay is a node that has a connecting antenna and an antenna that broadcasts to neighbors – relays make money

Althea is about building infrastructure

When we talk about Althea's design often the first question comes down to 'why home internet'. Why do we focus on home networks when what people really want is cell data, just cheaper? Mobile data is the major driver of world internet adoption. The majority of

Mesh Networking

Althea Development Update #66: New dashboard, exit redundancy

Althea now supports multihomed exits, meaning a single exit can be run across multiple datacenters and bridged into the mesh like any other alternate route. The other major change is the creation of a 'low balance' mode.

Tales from the Field

It was raining. It always seems to rain just as we pack up the rig with all of the antennas, cables, and tools. My fellow subnet organizer, Shaun, and I were heading to install a new Althea user. A few previous installs under our belt, we are getting better at

Blockchain

Althea Development Update #65: The Quantum Leap

we released payments and then immediately set about doubling the size of our test network. In doing so we had raised the bar for the quality of our features and interfaces.

Blockchain and Broadband

It’s difficult for big telecom to make money selling bandwidth to small rural towns or low income urban areas, otherwise they would already be there. Internet poverty exists because there is little economic incentive for those who build the internet infrastructure to provide service to these areas. This is

Althea Development Update #64: Beta 1 rollout, UI improvements, New blog platform

> Rolled out @AltheaOrg [https://twitter.com/AltheaOrg?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] Beta 1 today in production. Members of the Clatskanie Co-op are loading up their routers with ethereum, which automatically pays my router for bandwidth. Exciting stuff! pic.twitter.com/uCUftWoDDG [https://t.co/uCUftWoDDG] — Deborah Simpier (@DeborahSimpier) January

DevOps

Outage report: 14-Jan–2019

Starting at 8pm Pacific time yesterday through 3am Pacific time today Althea’s exit servers were down. This is our first major (longer than a 15 minute) outage since June of 2018. The technical issue exposed is pretty minor, the real feedback here is about a series of failures in

Blockchain

Althea Development Update #63: Beta 1

Right now Beta 1 rc2 is churning it’s way through the build system Once this release passes QA in a couple of days we will have out first Althea build with feature complete routing and bandwidth payment. Beta 1 will be able to, dynamically route, buy , and sell bandwidth

Tech

Althea Development Update #62: Free tier design and the life of a packet

Since our last update bandwidth payments have been making their way down the stabilization pipeline we’re going to roll out Alpha 12 to…

Internet

Metered Bandwidth on Althea

In this post I’m going to explain Althea’s billing system and how it provides more transparency, choice, and control than the traditional…

Ethereum

Althea Development Update #61: Testnet bandwidth payments

Pragmatic bootstrapping

Blockchain

Althea Development Update #60: Teaching people to setup real gear

Globetrotting and training

Blockchain

Althea Development Update #59: Experiments in real world payments

Check out our new website Althea.org

Decentralization

Decentralized vs federated payment structures in Althea

Me and Deborah Simpier were just talking about the role of decentralized node-to-node payments vs “federated” subnet DAO payments in…

Tech

Althea Development Update #58: Online Port toggling, more payments progress

Deborah and Jehan spent last week in Medellin Colombia helping to setup an Althea network there. You should read Deborah’s blog post about…

Rustlang

Althea Development Update #57: First transactions, DAO payments soon to follow

Update Summary

Raspberry Pi

Althea Development Update #56: Network Organization support

Update Summary