Globetrotting and training

This update is coming a little late; it’s been a travel filled couple of weeks.

We held Altheapalooza, a small conference in Portland featuring the Althea team and Graham from startyourownisp.com.

I also presented at the Nashville Blockchain Developers meetup

The goal of Altheapalooza was to create video content about every detail of setting up an Althea network, from antenna selection to spectrum planning. This is also our first experience trying to teach all of this in a more formal setting rather than ad-hoc lessons in the field.

This was a great opportunity to get the team together, visit the network in Clatskanie and start to tackle one of the fundamental challenges of setting up an Althea network, can we effectively train people to setup real world wireless gear?

Where on the sliding scale of a two day in person course all the way down to a 15 minute video clip do we need to be?

Althea can automate every other part of the process, but point to point wireless gear is the only way to provide incumbent ISP competitive (and often superior) performance at a low cost. We need to be very effective at teaching people to use it.

We’ll let you know how this experiment progresses and once the videos of Altheapalooza are ready.

Visiting the tower in town, it’s not even fully extended yet!

Update on bandwidth payment experiments

As expected once we started paying close attention to bandwidth payment amounts we found a few bugs. Now fixed in Alpha 11, rolling out over the next few days.

What’s New in Alpha 11

Separate default WiFi names to prevent issues with client devices being dumb about frequency selection

New logarithm based route selection weighting prevents realistic prices (hundreds of thousands of Wei per byte) from causing routing issues

Tools in Rita for price setting and quality adjustment, updated to work with more realistic price values

Fixes to client and exit billing to properly account for nat traffic

Crash watchdog for Rita should restart Rita on crash automatically

more robust automated update script to handle some common failures we’ve seen

Our next major step is to figure out how to very prominently show people info about how much they are spending. People we’ve talked to so far are universally confused about how much data they use and the lack of certainty is a problem.

What we’re trying right now is presenting them with weekly or daily updates on their usage and integrating this info into the front page of the Althea router dashboard.