Tales from the Field: Building Decentralized ISPs – Deborah Simpier

awesome well thanks so much for having me and for all you folks that are here bright and early this morning thank you I am Debra superior I'm one of the cofounders of Althea and I'm really excited to share with you a little bit about what we do and how we've been building decentralized ISPs here in the US and also in Africa so essentially Althea is software that enables anyone to bring high-speed Internet and connect their neighbors it works on consumer routers and you can earn money automatically by adding capacity to the network like hosting antennas or running cables to your neighbor and then you get pay it automatically for adding that capacity so let's start with why decentralize like what's what's wrong with our centralized ISPs right now and I think this is kind of a poignant graph here so there are the percentage of consumers with access to broadband at sixty dollars a month or less it's pitifully low and actually you can see even in Colorado it's at 3% and kind of one of the key features to this graph is I think we all kind of know that you know legacy ISPs are slow they're often expensive there's a lot of problems with customer service but in fact actually cost is the number one reason why people in the US don't have access to to internet and this is actually one of the things that we found to be true is that there's a kind of a large uncounted market of folks that are not able to get access either it's because the monthly cost is too high or it's really inflexible where they might be able to pay $70 a month one month for an internet but then perhaps they get behind in their bill then it goes to collections and then it's a four or five hundred dollar bill to get reconnected and so then they just kind of drop out of that whole marketplace have you been being able to access the Internet and this is because it's highly monopolized 65% of connected US households get internet from just two of the larger cable companies and even if we zoom out there's only 2700 ISPs in all of the u.s. which might seem like a big number but there's 9000 Boost Mobile stores so we have much more choice when it comes to like cell carriers or other like our hamburger stands than we do over our internet service provider and one of one of the things about that is it reduces our choice for cost if he chooses our ability to get faster internet they're not incentive as legacy ISPs aren't incentivized to provide more access more capacity or at a lower cost and one of the things that I found out working in Denver hair is that a lot of folks are even under a contract which doesn't help you it only you know siphons more money to the carriers and then the other kind of big reason here that monopolies are a bad thing is one of the reasons one of the ways that cable ISPs collect revenue which is by collecting our data or by throttling or censoring and that's a that's kind of a big big reason why I am doing what we're doing and why I came to this project in the first place in fact my background is in net neutrality activism and protecting the kind of the open freedoms that we enjoy on the Internet the ability to associate with who we want to ability to be able to see information that we want to see and be able to have a freedom of speech and I had worked for many years on this with the sort of regulatory framework trying to move the needle or protect these things from a legislative standpoint with my Senators and through a turn of traditional means of activism and then I realized pretty quickly though that we couldn't we couldn't protect them that way there was wrote there was always even if we could get legislation passed that was always gonna be precarious and I remember kind of pointedly one example kind of sitting around the table where we were talking about you know net neutrality and protecting those freedoms and I I was talking about how cable companies were moving forward with cementing in their ability to throttle and censor and my one of one of the one of the senators there had said I asked him well what do you what what's the plans and they said they didn't have any that they were going to be reactive they're just gonna react to these things as they came along and so then I knew that there weren't there wasn't in fact going to be any progress made there but perhaps if we could hold the infrastructure of the Internet in a decentralized way that we could all have pieces of that that that they would sort of lock in the democracy and the freedoms that we enjoy and one kind of other example here that I think stays with me and one of the another kind of thing that keeps me going and on this project is I remember a keynote speech from a CenturyLink Talk executive at a broadband conference and he was talking about how lucrative it was in fact to be able to control the experience of Wi-Fi for resorts basically saying hey look if you're a Las Vegas resort or your Disneyland it's really great to make sure people have your Wi-Fi because in fact they could prove that they could shape your experience and keep you spending more money or going to certain restaurants just by what you see on the internet so it's it's very important that we move the needle now that we build these decentralized ISPs that we take back the infrastructure of the Internet so this is kind of how we see the internet now right it's siloed each of the carriers or different colors you're sort of stock up so oftentimes on a contract or even just by the inflexibility of moving from carrier to carrier you have to you know get sign up there's often an installation fee takes time but I'll theaters vision is that you can seamlessly switch from AT&T to essentially link to your local provider on even a second by socket basis that your router in your home is going to make the best and for you based not only on quality of the connection but I'm prized and that you would have control over that and that you could seamlessly I capacity and cell bandwidth and so that's what we did so sort of the key kind of function with Althea is the price aware routing protocol which means that our variant of a biomass routing protocol will not only take into account the quality of the route based on round-trip time it'll also take into account the lower cost so all people can seamlessly add capacity to the network adding a tennis to the roof selling bandwidth to the neighbors their neighbors can also when given more upstream providers easily control on this is a this is a setting right here in their router dashboard where they can control on a second-by-second basis that they want cheaper bandwidth or higher quality connection so how does it look like in the real world so here's our kind of first network and you're gonna see kind of a lot of pictures here this is a rural Oregon network that we built is our first proof of concept and where I live I've lived in this town for about 13 years and definitely seen the pain points that people have around getting access to the Internet I mean we before our network came to be most folks had megabit per second internet it's $60 a month or more this is pretty common and it wasn't like there was no other option options that were had been proposed and other solutions that had been proposed and tried but they had all primarily failed in fact there was even a million dollar grant for a community of around 2000 people for a fixed wireless and fiber infrastructure and the ISP who got that grant did build some some fiber a 10 megabits per second and some fix Wireless and then they sold all that infrastructure to a larger ISP who had no incentive to sustain it there's not enough of a market the basin see there and they didn't they're not gonna spend their own capex so we ended up shortly after spending a million dollars of taxpayer money and very much the same situation so what's really exciting to see is our solution working in the real world and that the community and facts holds the infrastructure of this network in a very decentralized way and that the revenue produced in this network stays in Oregon in this in this network so you'll see here kind of the this example right here is what what a relay looks like so this is a kind of what most folks will have the eye capacity to the network that top antenna will connect to the main network and in this case that top antenna and this is at Matt's house is connecting to what we call a gateway in town and that gateway has an access to a wholesale fiber connection in this case is 500 megabits per second oftentimes it's going to be a gigabit per second and then the antenna down below they see the kind of tall skinny one is a sector antenna and that connects about four of his neighbors and then those are both wired to just like an Althea router in his home this real simple commodity hardware that splashed with our software and then our software does all of the the routing the billing and provides internet for his home just like a normal router would you so what happens here is that Matt makes money automatically first for connected neighbors and we can see the sort of viral network effect that happens in fact Matt every Saturday will take a bottle of wine go knock on his neighbor's door and say hey you want to get connected to some internet so so the the the network grows sort of organically and naturally and another kind of key part of our incentive structure is that not only do the routers provide automatic compensation for those folks who are providing infrastructure capacity we do also realize that Matt does not want to be woken up at 3 a.m. in the morning from a call from one of his neighbors that the Internet's not working so we have a monthly prorated like daily reoccurring classic its remitted to a group of what we call organizers so what this looks like is a business or nonprofit or in the case of class tonight it's a member on cooperative and those are the folks that helped install antennas who provide customer service who helped make manage the radios and so for Matt the experience is very much just passive he just has the gear in his house he gets paid automatically and about every couple of months he'll cash out his you know he makes about 40 a month so he'll cash out about a hundred bucks every two months and what this does to is it allowed us to build in a place where fixed wireless had failed before so instead of renting expensive towers that were you know fifteen hundred dollars a month to rent we're able to utilize private property in a really agile agile way as you can see kind of from this graph so this is pretty early on in the network we've since grown quite a bit since since this but the different colors represent you know sort of different relays here and as you can see the geography is very challenging in this area so in order to really if we were gonna do a centralized network we'd be spending you know between three and five thousand dollars a month just in having enough tower capacity to reach behind all of these sort of hills and large Douglas fir trees and this kind of thing but with with Althea we were able to actually you know bounce from home to home in a really sort of agile way and then everybody makes sort of money automatically another sort of key component of our infrastructure is what we call an exit node which is it's just the VPN or server the data center that does all of our kind of a network addressing it also I'm just about verification so someone doesn't advertise too cheap of a router and route all the traffic through that node and it also absolves the network organizers from having to deal with the legal complications of running an ISP which is in the United States isn't really too bad but they can just simply set up a local area network and it also gives people choice right now we are Alethea is running the exit nodes that are that show up on the the list of in the in your router dashboard but we eventually hope that you know they'll be maybe differ a lots of different kinds of exit nodes so people have more choice over where their traffic is actually peering out to the Internet and this actually an example from our Abuja Nigeria Network came into play we we were building in Abuja and we had everyone set to you know the routers came kind of default selected to our Leggo's African exit node and when one day we were building with it the hey there's there's no there's I guess isn't showing I was having problems and so we just switched everyone over very seamlessly to our South American exits and everybody had internet we came to actually find out that the submarine cable had been cut to Nigeria so much of the much of Nigeria's Internet infrastructure was dark but in fact our network there and diplomat Parkin division Nigeria was going strong being able to easily with you know just a click of a button switch over to a different you know exit nowhere a way of peering out to the Internet and then of course our networks are paid in in crypto currencies we have two selections aetherium or x dye which is a stable currency so the and for most of our networks that are using ax die although we do realize that aetherium is easier to procure so we have a bridge that allows people to buy aetherium send it to the routers and into bridges to X I so here's an example of someone who's making some money and this guy actually has um we said a little bit bigger side up as you can see there and she was that kind of green link if you saw that on the previous slide and she makes closer about 80 bucks a month I was doing pretty well you can see those her kind of ether scan there back when we were originally doing aetherium and and so for her she she's very passive she gets all that her internet from her router and then essentially she goes on what the way that she sees it in the way it feels is that she gets her internet and then about once a month she cashes out 80 bucks with an app on her phone which is in fact coinbase that's going right for her Fiat but for her so it's just very very simple and easy and all the maintenance is done by the local kind of network organizer and then here some of them disconnected neighbors and which kind of exciting is that you see folks like lark over here on the left right so he originally just was getting connected but now he's a relay and connect more people from there it's really kind of neat to see like in this previous side here this one this scow also was just a regular user and then I had mentioned that she was in a really great spot to people to connect up more of her neighbors and earn some money I came back the next day her husband had the backhoe out several trees were down and and just to sort of see that transformation being from becoming from being a passive Internet user to someone who is a participant in the network an owner of the network and all those sort of things that we think about when we think about decentralization the ethos of that coming to life in fruition with you know this older retired couple was it's really really rewarding it's very exciting to see so here's Clark on the left there now he's also a relay as well and then on the top right is one of my favorite stories too this is a Beatrice this home and Beatrice is about 16 and for the last four years she didn't have any internet due to cost reasons and just lack of access so and that had kept her staying late at school and not being able to see her to see her family she spent time with them because they would work two jobs so when we came that day and set up you know 70 megabit per second internet that she could afford and her family could afford and senior holder laptop and say this is the best day ever it is really is really pretty exciting so another sort of feature of having that the mesh routing protocol is redundancy so here you can see two upstream providers at a local business in town and if one of those antennas were to to kind of feel like in that main kind of purple link over there all of the all of the clients of that one relay will reroute and add redundancy to the network that automatically reroute to that so we only have about five minutes left so I want to try to get through the rest of this pretty quickly here we've seen a lot of the credit there the rural area but of course this is actually really applicable in urban areas as well again because that sort of underlying reason is actually cost not necessarily they don't have the infrastructure there people can actually afford it and one of the compelling things about what we did in Tacoma which is an area kind of sought the Seattle very urban is I'm will use 60 gigahertz antennas which is you know what some people may refer to as 5g but one of the things about these types of antennas you get very high throughput several hundred megabits per second up to a gigabit per second is they have to be very close together and one of the struggles that Verizon ATT had in deploying these networks is getting the right-of-way access all the coordination and in fact I believe that when you even when you're laying fiber about 70 percent of the cost is in the right away so this is where that where Althea is really a powerful model because using private property we can locate these antennas very close by and build it neighbor to neighbor and then Abuja Nigeria also some really exciting stuff happening here this was an area where they had no fixed access to the home at all and only mobile at around $3 a gigabyte so our network here we we started about a month ago have a core of 16 people that were adding about 2 or 3 users a month - and then we've just rolled out with a Wi-Fi hotspot access point so that each node in the network each household that has Alethea can also serve their neighbors mobile phones so for each node we anticipate a further three to ten users that are able to connect to that so we're really gonna I'm really excited to see the rapid growth as possible here in Africa so we started there in Abuja and diplomat Park it's run by a local business person yeah Yakubu up there on the top right and he works together with his local mosque who runs the side of Gateway there that brings in that kind of high speed fiber line and then a Legos network is starting soon and actually we also just started a network in Ghana this last week - so really excited about what's happening there and in Africa really quickly we have both a cash based kind of on-ramp and then we also have with debit cards and for cash base we have a really simple mobile wallet 4x I called efectivo yeah ax refers to the X is data credits in a really kind of understandable way for the people there and then they already have merchants that sit under these big shaded umbrellas that are identified as the kind of merchants that can do mobile money and and digital money so it was very kind of easy to introduce these concepts there to those folks that were already used to going to these umbrella merchants who who could then take cash and remit digital payments of their routers and they just think that we just sync their mobile wallet to their router wallet so scanning the QR code instantly loads up their router or wallet in and in many of our networks that people want to use a debit card so we we use kind of a combination of both if we use comp points at which this pretty good we actually just integrated the wire widget into the dashboard which is a May saying feels very seamless you really off you skates a lot of the you know sort of back end of the crypto there's no talk about investment or anything like that so it very much feels like you're just paying for your internet with your debit card and then there's a lot of features on our routers that give people control back of their usage that show how much I've been using how much they've been paying how much they've been earning and then a text message when they get low and form that they need to top up or add funds so what does it look like to grow so in fact as elsita grows and as we moving into Moo new markets we have kind of really worked hard to work out the friction points and the pain points of starting at new like new ISP because this is really you know in telecom itself so this is an example of one of those networks this is a Toronto Wireless in Denver that just got started we come in with a demand aggregation site that helps folks get pre-registrations and marketing materials and how people get that high-speed fiber line and get equipment and all those things are kind of under our package so if you want to start a new network it's very easy to do that with without Thea and actually just going to wrap up again with the silo legacy ISPs that we have now and the the dream of the one opened seamless network where you're instantly switching from carriers on a second-by-second basis thank you very very much I know it's early thank you so much [Music] you