Now whats that ctwug thingy I keep hearing about

[pmurgs]

Ok, here's the low down on ctwug and my experiance so far. Skouperd... post something about ctwug as well please as you have been on it for a while, even if it's only about how much data is being pushed through you (hint, its a lot).

http://www.ctwug.za.net/ Ctwug website

Ctwug is basically a private network seperate from the internet. 95% of the sites on the network are privately owned (at peoples houses) and the other sites are owned by the group usually on top of a tall building for which permission has been obtained to be used as a "highsite". A highsite is usually there for many people at their houses to connect to and the highsite usually connects to more highsites. Highsites get funded with a rebate received from the wireless equipment suppliers from when wuggers buy their equipment. Ctwug is busy in the process of registering as a NPO. There are very roughly about 400 nodes (locations) connected to ctwug. There is a Jhb wug, Pretoria wug (connected to Jhb wug), Durband wug, Kimberly wug, Bloemfontein wug, George wug and more I think.

http://wind.ctwug.za.net/wind/?page=nodes Ctwug node and link mapping website. You can see all the connected sites here.
http://wind.ctwug.za.net/wind/index.php?page=nodes&node=2521 My node.

Ok, so whats the point of the wug. Well for me the number one reason I wanted to connect was the geek factor. It's cool and I knew I would learn a lot about networking and wireless data transmission and I definitely have. Second to leech warez... there is supposedly 120Tb shared on the wug... no shaping rules to throttle your downloads (except in game time). And then theres game time which is pretty much every evening and a bit longer on weekends. During game time downloads are killed so gamers can have low pings. Some people host dedicated servers, like for COD4 MW1 and there's a private WoW server. People also play things like COD4 MW2 over the network. Then there are also semi random stuff type sites hosted by people, like a web poker site, arcade games site a wug tube site, a wug image server site. There are also things like teamspeak and jabber servers hosted. Also you can get linux distibutions from one node, download windows updates from anther, register for internet mail on a mailserver site plus more. Basically... whatever the members of ctwug feel like making available to each other is there.

So its a private network run with the aim of meeting the members needs in mind, not like an isp that sets policies in place to make money. For instance on the wug everyone gets static and not dynamic ip's. Upload and download speeds should be roughly the same, compared to adsl's high download but low upload speeds.

http://wiki.ctwug.za.net/Main_Page Ctwug wiki. Lots of information about specific sections on the wug available from the links on the left.

So what does connecting entail. Well, you need to buy kit obviousely. If you are lucky, you live in an area like the northern suburbs which has lots of connected people and you problably can end up connecting with about R1500 worth of kit pretty easily, depending on exacly where you house is. Wireless requires line of sight to work, so if you live in a forest, you are probably not going to be able to connect due to all the trees in your way. If you on the side of a hill, you probably have an excellent chance of connecting. If you on the flat, perhaps you can see someone on the hill, or else you need to put up a tall pole to see over your neighbours houses.

There are different types of connections you can have and different types of kit you can use. Most wuggers just have the basic kit and connect to a sector antenna on a highsite. A sector antenna has a wide beam range (often 120 degrees) and can allow up to about 8 people to connect to it at once. Obviousely you all have to share the sector antennas bandwidth. Connecting to a sector is usually the cheapest and easiest option. It's also not a long range link. Most people on sectors get about 6Mbps bandwidth. On the more expensive gear sector antenna sites which are not filled up with users you can get up to about 70Mbps, but this is very rare on the wug.

Now for my connection... connecting to a sector was out. The closest sector I can scan from my house is 40kms away due to me living in a valley with mountains on both sides and the ocean on the other two sides. There is no one connected within 10kms of me. So I have a point to point antenna link. This is where there is an antenna at one side aimed at the antenna at the other side and only those two sites talk on that link. These links are usually a lot faster than sector links and the highsites use these types of links to connect together to provide a "backbone" to carry traffic around the wug.

For me... I have the longest current link on the wug and the most difficult to handle link. Lol, nothing like diving in on the deep end. I have two antennas on both sides of my link, to do something called spatial multiplexing as my 40km link is over water (this causes multipath relections problems and thermal vortex problems) and this was required to get my link stable. My link currently is a theoretically 54Mbps/54Mbps link but with all the overhead of link management packets and so on taken out, my link is doing about 18.4Mbps in both directions at once. I should be able to improve that with some tuning of my link.

http://gallery.ctwug.za.net/main.php?g2_itemId=2971 Photo history of the work done to get my link up and working. Basically my photo gallery.

So how did I get my link. Well, if you are not lucky enough to just plug into a sector, you have to find someone who will either put up an antenna for you at their site for your to connect to, or more likely you have to provide the radio card, cables and antenna for their side as well of your link. My link has been rather expensive in this regard (choice was made to get on wug over going to rage) since I'm providing the kit for both sides of my link. So besides the money issue, there is the issue of finding soemone willing to let you put up kit on their antenna pole.

My options for connection to ctwug were very limited because of my location, so I had to work real hard to get myself a link. Not many wuggers would want to help fight with such a difficult link as mine to get working. Three months ago the sommerset west / strand / Gordons bay wug guys were wanting to improve their side of the wug as they really had only one highsite and one link to the rest of the wug and both of those were poor. So for past three months I've been driving out to their side of the world at least once a week to help with the work of expanding their network. We now have three highsites up in their area (one which I link to) and one good link to the wug and a second link we working on. So I've been climbing up all sorts of roofs, such a an 8 storey corregated rooftop on wynberg hill in strong winds (just keep looking down at your feet as your cross the 100m of rooftop is the secret) in order to buy goodwill from the guys across the bay to get them to let me and help me connect to them. In the end its paid off.

http://wiki.ctwug.za.net/Helderberg:20101030-RageHSMimoInstall#Rage_Pictures Photos of the site I connect to taken on Saturday (I'm taking the photos).
http://wiki.ctwug.za.net/Helderberg Ctwug helderberg wiki page. Has the work and events that happened with upgrading the strand / sommerset west / gordons bay network.

I have a highspeed sector up at my house for people in Fish Hoek valley to link to me and on to the rest of ctwug. Currently only my friend Dave is linked to it (and he uses it to leech internet access from me with it). We have transfered 22Gbs over the link in 50 minutes and the link had spare capacity available for more clients as we hit the single stream max speed limit on my sector. This evening I'm going round to a potential wuggers house in the valley to take my spare Nanobridge test kit round to see how good a link he can get to my sector (and thus on to ctwug) as he's keen on joining the wug now that it's reached Fish Hoek.

Questions? Oh and in advance... SHUT UP PAUL!

[Skouperd]

Very good write up Murgs, do you mind if I distribute it on another forum that I am active on since I am trying to get more traffic / posts / discussions happening there? I'll give you the credit for the write up?

With regard to my WUG experience, this is more or less my story:

First of all here is my WIND node page:
http://wind.ctwug.za.net/wind/?page=nodes&node=2448

Now the one thing that Murgs down played is just how difficult it is for you to get connected to some people especially if you are trying to connect to a highsite. The one problem in my area is that there are very few people that is connected onto the WUG within a 3 KM radius, and those that is connected, Elvis, Diabolix etc, had massive trees blocking line of site. The only person that I was able to “see” and who was prepare to help me get onto the WUG was Petrus but he in turn had a lot of issues getting connected onto the WUG himself with his current link to the WUG (Elvis) moving house etc.

At the end of the day, Petrus and me got connected, and once we were connected, his Elvis link dropped. I got really p----ssed off and decided that come hell or high water, I want to connect to backbones. Stolla and Kingpin use to run a backbone link between the two sites, which effectively carries a lot of traffic. Since I am located more or less in the middle between them, I’ve approached them both and convinced them that it is a better idea if I am transmitting the data between the two of them, thereby reducing the length of the links, i.e. improving it for everybody else, and me getting quick access as well. After several weeks of fooling around, we’ve got the link stable and working like a charm.

As such, I am basically acting as a hop between all the traffic generated on the Kingpin node (there is a lot) and all the traffic generated from the Stolla link which is effectively a lot of the traffic from the West side of the mountain. The amount of bandwidth processed on my router board is now exceeding a terabyte per week. Petrus have dropped his Elvis connections, and is now accessing the WUG through my site. I am currently in the process to install a 3rd backbone connection running to JackAss, which should improve the experience for several of the people in the area.

The pole that I use is a 7.3meter steel pipe with a 50mm diameter. The pole is mounted on top of my games room (double storey) which effectively give me a clearance of around 12 meters from ground level. In order to make sure the wind doesn’t do too much havoc on it, I’ve had to install stay wires, 3 of them. The stay wire is steel cables with a diameter of 2.5mm each. Ideally, 4 stay wires is needed, but I don’t have a 4th place to tie them down to.

There is no ways in hell that I can work 11 meters up in the air whenever I need to make adjustments on my pole, which necessitated me to do something that will allow me to work easier on the pole. I’ve designed a pulley system that basically allows me to lower or raise the pole so that I could stand on the top roof and work on it. The cable that is responsible for this is a 5mm steal cable.

With regard to content, last I’ve checked there is in excess of 150TB of data on DC with new stuff being added daily. It is very difficult to say at what speed one download stuff because you are restricted to the slowest link in the chain. Saying that, if a movie is sitting on one of the guys that has a decent connection to the backbones, then it takes a couple of minutes to download a lot.

If anybody would like to learn more, do not hesitate to ask I am sure between Murgs and myself we could guide you in more or less the right direction.

[Megageth]

Ok, you 2 have jointly won Clan Nerd award. Congrats.
I am thoroughly intrigued by the WUG concept and given that its a community based project with no profiteering it appeals to the commie in me. That said it still lacks practical appeal for me. What would convince me is if the WUG streamed decent TV channels.

[SlipperyDuck]

if someone had to run a streaming server - then that would definatly be possible

[Skouperd]

Mega, receiving an award like that just means so much.

Theoretically though, I could at the moment stream whatever is on my DSTV to the WUG (I am using a HAVA box to distribute tv to my network), however it is kind of impractical not to mention illegal to broadcast tv-signals so not gonna happen. However, ignoring the irony in my next comment, what you could do is just stream whatever series you want to watch to your pc. The speed is almost of such a nature that you could stream HD (almost). The problem though comes in when gaming time commence because then all non-gaming traffic is throttled. (Fair price to pay for uber low latencies).

What I could do currently, if you want to watch an HD movie (or two) tonight, then all you do is you start your download this morning, and by the time you arrive home, you will be ready to start watching.

But yes, I agree with you, and like Murgs, the only reason why I did it is because of the "cool-geek-factor" of being able to do it...

[Megageth]

Skoups what are latencies like on the WUG? I imagine gaming pings run <30ms?

[Skouperd]

Mega, it is very difficult to say, BadAssjack played COD on the WUG (from my site) the other day and he was reporting PINGs in the region of 15ms which is faster than what he could achieve on the internet.

I recon the lattencies between Murgs and myself will most likely be a form of a worst case scenario given the number of hops between us and the pure distance of his links. Murgs and myself could test the latencies between us tonight and give you some feedback, Murgs if you want to test it in the meantime, my router board's ip is 172.18.81.78.

[SlipperyDuck]

I'll probably be joining the Durban Wireless group soon.
I'm going 30Dbi Kit using the 5ghz band.

Will be interesting to compare what Kaapies like to have in a wireless community as opposed to Da KurryMunchaz.

[pmurgs]

Skoups... sure you can copy my story over to your other forum. You might want to clean up my spelling mistakes and such. I didn't take much time to proof read that wall of text I wrote. I'll try ping you later in game time tonight Skoups, but 15ms is what I got last night to 172.18.1.1. So that sounds about right for latency to most of the wug. My rb ip is 172.18.91.1 if you want to test. I'm going to be out most of the evening doing a los scan to my sector for a potential wugger in Fish Hoek.

Geth... get on the wug and start stream video. It's community based as you said, so get involved and provide some sort of service to the wug. I'll accept your award as well, but I think it needs to come with an appropriate image to go alongside Skoups and my avatars on our forums.

Ducky... get ready to have some fun and learn a lot. Getting involved with the guys on your wug and not just being focused on your node will really give you a chance to experiance all the aspects of wugging.

[Skouperd]

30dBi? Lee, how long connection do you want to make?

I've got 2 x 27dBi grids. The one is running a 6KM link while the other is running a 4KM link. They are both backbones hence the increased size. I then have a 19dBi enclosure (i.e. I hide my Routerboard in it) that is running the Petrus link and he is over 6KM away from me.

I would say you only need a 31dBi when you want to do what Murgs is doing. Also, bear in mind that a 31dBi grid is a HUGE grid...