THE INTERNET OF THINGS
Open Garden
### Image: CERN
When the Large Hadron Collider went online in 2009, most scientists saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to conduct experiments involving the building blocks of the physical world. But to Stanislav Shalunov, a networking engineer, it looked like a whole new kind of Big Data problem.
A few years before the LHC went live, Shalunov worked on Internet2, an experimental network that connects universities and research organizations. Given the amount of data the Collider would be spitting out – about 10 Gigabits per second, to 70 academic institutions – he knew that the LHC it was likely to clog up the Internet2 network. So Shalunov developed a networking protocol designed to relieve the congestion that was sure to come. "This was an amount of traffic that neither the networks nor the transport protocols at the time were really prepared to cope with," Shalunov remembers.
He didn't realize it at the time, but by solving the Large Hadron Collider data-pumping problem, Shalunov also was helping fix a big problem for peer-to-peer networks. By the time scientists at CERN flipped the switch on the LHC, Shalunov was working for BitTorrent on its popular peer-to-peer file-sharing service. The work he started at Internet2 and finished at BitTorrent eventually was rolled into an internet standard called the Low Extra Delay Background Transport.
This is what Apple uses to keep Mac downloads from clogging the network, and if Shalunov and his new business partner Micha Benoliel get their way, this kind of peer-to-per networking will someday help millions stay connected to the internet, even when they're out of range of their home networks or wireless carriers. They want to shake up how internet traffic has been routed since the start and make it look a lot more like Bittorrent.
Two years ago, they started a company called Open Garden. The first version of their software was a tethering app that let you share internet connectivity between your laptop and Android phone. Within a month they had 10,000 downloads, purely by word of mouth.
The software's tethering feature makes it easy for someone to save $20 to $30 a month in mobile service bills by linking a tablet to a mobile phone's or laptop's internet. But Open Garden is becoming
"The way we think of the network is basically an extension of the internet by building peer-to-peer connections among devices directly without the need to hit the cloud every time," says Benoliel.
People have already built similar networks – called mesh networks – for the military and for large companies, but not exactly in the way Open Garden envisions. "The big difference between what we do is we put it in the hands of everyone," Benoliel says. The way he sees it, when enough people start using the software, you'll simply turn on your phone or tablet or Google Glass and instantly get internet connectivity from all the other Open Garden devices nearby.
It's an exciting idea, but it will take some serious work to make it happen. Today, OpenGarden has about 300,000 active users. About 200,000 of them use the latest version of the software – which uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct to turn devices into a mesh network. That makes it easy to share connectivity when you run into someone else who happens to be a user, but for the ad-hoc always-connected world Benoliel and Shalunov envision to occur, they'll need a much greater density of users.
In a dense urban area like San Francisco, that means somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of people will need to download Open Garden before you'd see continuous connectivity, says Srikrishna Devabhaktuni, one of the founders of Tropos, a company that builds mesh networks for smart meters and other devices. Move out to the suburbs and you'd need maybe 20 percent penetration, he says.
Stanislav Shalunov. Photo: TechCrunch/Flickr
Then there's the big question: If you already have a great internet connection, why would you want to run Open Garden and help everyone else out?
Right now there are about 6,000 people in San Francisco who use Open Garden – that's less than 1 percent of the city's population.
But there are a few other speed bumps. The software doesn't run on IOS – Apple doesn't let developers mess around with the iPhone's networking stack – and it's not clear if Apple will ever allow Open Garden to work on its devices. Shalunov thinks it will. "If we show them millions of happy Android users, we think that's a good way to convince Apple," he says.
Some carriers seem to like Open Garden – the European carrier Orange recently invited the company by to give a tech talk on its product – but others don't. AT&T, for example, blocks it in its Google Play store.
Then there's the big question: If you already have a great internet connection, why would you want to run Open Garden and help everyone else out? "Incentivizing users to share their limited resources – their battery life, their data usage is actually a critical problem in this space," Devabhaktuni says.
But he and Benoliel both agree there are ways to do this. Open Garden could adopt a credit system: you share some of your internet access now in return for the right to borrow some later, when you're traveling in a foreign country or you're out of range of your carrier.
In the meantime, Benoliel thinks the software will take off at conferences, where you have a lot of people clamoring for the same network resources. Typically, tech conferences are a a black hole for many users, but Open Garden could help solve that. "The more people who are on the open garden network, the better connectivity you can achieve," he says. "You can bundle the capacities of all the networks of everyone."
That may sound like a utopian ideal, but Benoliel and Shalunov are used to that rap.
Back when he was at Internet2, Shalunov remembers a National Science Foundation director dropping by his office in Armonk, New York, one day and asking the technical people there what they saw as the next big thing on the internet. Shalunov said that one day everything will be a router. "He thought it was science fiction," Shalunov says.
