Since our last update bandwidth payments have been making their way down the stabilization pipeline we’re going to roll out Alpha 12 to our networks shortly after Christmas. At which point all routers will be paying for their internet access in Rinkeby Eth that we will airdrop into existing networks.

The Network DAO Aragon organization has also made significant progress it’s available on Rinkeby here. Feel free to play around with it.

Our next release is going to be the big one. Beta 1, which is by definition feature complete and ready to be used (cautiously) with real money in the real world.

Implementing the free tier

The last major feature we need to implement to reach Beta 1 is enforcement. What you actually do if people don’t pay.

Althea doesn’t ever actually cut anyone off, a free tier with limited bandwidth is provided gratis to help users get setup and generally use the internet. All the routers in the network agree not to bill each other for the free tier level of traffic.

The exact speed of the free tier is decided by the local network organization.

Having the free tier be enforced with a speed limit at all is a little anachronistic for Althea. Like I explained in our billing blog post connection speeds are hardly reflective of internet usage experience.

But it’s much easier to implement a speed limit than it is to make layers of prioritization based on bidding.

The life of a packet in an Althea network