 C3T or on the Twitter account C3Lingo. Thanks. He's going to say us what the journey will take that and what we can do with all our VRT-4050. Great applause, thanks. It is on, yeah. Hi, good day. I'm Doctron. I don't come from Mannheim, but from Darnstadt, but yeah, they won't stop us here. My topic is the future has two waves. A short overview, as well as looking in the past, about Freifunk, which is a German free radio initiative into hardware and how we can prepare for the future. The overview is, I give a short introduction about, for all people who don't know, Freifunk yet, and I'll tell you what Freifunk is about. Then I'll tell you something about recommendations about hardware that communities should choose and take a look onto hardware that's available and that we can use. After that, I'll talk about how to govern with deprecated devices, all devices, because that's also an important issue here. And at the end, I'll give a short overview about what you can do as a community. Well, Freifunk is about decentralized mesh networks that are used in communities and local communities in German, mostly in cities or small country sites. Freifunk is both in politics and in technology engaged, and they were about the first people who used this in the large scale. But also, yeah, they also involved in political processes like the German Steuerhaftung Law, which is about liability of other people, abuse of networks and so on. They are engaged in that as well. And yeah, they have a custom firmware, which is based on open WRT, which probably everyone has used already. I will start with some recommendations. Freifunk communities also often give recommendations for people. They say, hey, I want to join, I want to start. And often, Freifunk communities handle that way that there's like an entry device, a low level device, but it's not well specified, and that's a big problem. We are, what is entrance level and where does entrance level end? So what do you expect from an entrance level device? What do you want to like take a look and maybe take it down one month after, but is it something that you want to say where it's like set it up and don't worry about it again and you can let it run for months or something? Another issue that's often visible on websites as well is that people that just inform themselves of our websites are left in the dark because the websites are out of date like five years or older. And there's only hardware that private customers can't buy anymore because they just exist anymore. And that's something that docks until the entrance level devices. Why should we give an accommodation at all? And why is only VPN performance the only measurement on websites? So let's talk about what was recommended for what we recommended until the last two or one years ago. It was often single core devices by Qualcomm, which only used for regular not throughput of 100 megabits or something and relatively slow compared to power PCO ARM architectures. Most recommendations were 2.3 gigahertz single band which has gotten a really large issue especially in cities in the last year because the 2.3 gigahertz band is full and you can't really use it anymore. And the issue arose that we were dependent on one primary hardware vendor and that's not what we want because we don't want to be determined dependent on some company and because they can always say we don't do that anymore and then we have a problem. So how do we should take recommendations? What are the differences that we should think about? And that's the most important thing is to inform the operator of the node. Yeah, to inform him so that he can make an informed decision. What is the goal? What is his budget? And you can maybe think about that himself and maybe inform himself and it's not just got told hey, this thing does fine from Guelph by it and yeah, he can make his own decision. But we have to pre-select compatible devices because the market is huge and I can look at wifi devices for days and yeah, we have to point out a few devices which are most compatible for our goals and we help you to pick the right device on that list and we also point out the differences between those differences. What does that mean? What's good? What's bad? And not just say, well, that's the device you should buy. Take it. Also, node operators have questions and it's important to be approachable and stay in contact. In best case, obviously on a mailing list some public way to contact you to answer questions and give information, which is very valuable. And so we saw what we used to recommend and now we are looking at what we want to recommend. So we would like to have a fast CPU and also because everyone is talking about it but also because we want to say we also have some more loads to put on it. So the person operating the node can also do some fun stuff with it and use it themselves without breaking it down. Also dual-band Wi-Fi would be awesome, so five gigahertz would be nice. Because it's better for modular operation and more bandwidth and it breaks down less. Also, we want to give a choice in hardware vendors and not just say TP-Link is the one computer we are using and we don't want to be depending on this one vendor and we don't want to be locked out from other vendors just because there was one decision made. Also, there is this revision bingo where we don't know which device will be released in the future and that's never clear which device will be released in the future. And this is what I call the Freifunk effect which is a price graph for one single router and this is why we want to have a bigger choice in routers. This was on the market for three years and as soon as it was used for Freifunk or the price shut up and it was no longer available and then we looked at what other options we have, what other routers are there and there is two hardware platforms which we found very usable. We don't want to be dependent on one vendor. It's one reason why we landed on these two. Some are implementing security measurements where we are not sure how this is going to be in the future so we want to have open Wi-Fi chips and we are using mesh which a lot of routers can do so this is limiting down our choices. So our first choice, what we are most convinced by in the community is Qualcomm IPQ-40 which has for C40-RAM, they have a lot of flash, they have 250 megabyte RAM, they have 2.4 and 5 gigahertz. So they have this special marketing claim for Wav2, no, for a special gigahertz conversion rate and also it has Wav2 in addition to that. And the second choice is, or it has been on the market for a bit now, is one from MediaTek which has a Wi-Fi operator which is developing a lot and it... But it's an excellent choice for the price. Yeah, we made some kind of observations and had a short look and what we liked best is that we could increase our wireless throughputs by 20% using these devices, using the same way to the client. This means at 80 megahertz channel with about 500 megabits per second and the performance is really, really noticeable like we have like double the data weights we could achieve. The expected cost was about 50 to 70 euro. Depending on the model you choose, but sometimes the price goes a bit down and we understood that it's like a very reasonable accommodation and a very reasonable choice for most operations and most goals. There's also some cheaper options because sometimes there's the issue that people don't want to spend that much money on a device or maybe they can't. There might have different reasons and therefore we said, well, we need to have also a cheaper option, we need to find something cheaper to offer and therefore we took a look because five gigahertz is a thing we really wanna have and we don't take a compromise on that and therefore we landed a combination by MediaTek which is about a single core MIPS processor with 24K executions and 128 megabytes. No, it's just 128 megabytes of RAM or maybe even just 64 and 16 to 32 megabytes of SBI flash. It's operating as well as 2.4 gigahertz as well as five gigahertz and the same as the MediaTek we talked about previously was that it's supporting 802.11 AC on five gigahertz wave one. The drawbacks is that we don't have any improvement in the CPU processing power against what we are using right now. Only thing is we have the five gigahertz band with this like worth a lot. Another issue is that 64 megabytes of RAM is enough today, but yeah, we have to wait if we need to, if we come back into 8.4.1 situation that in a few years the random access memory is not enough at those devices because we have like two Wi-Fi radios that means we have twice the queues on the device and that's high cost for the RAM and these are obviously drawbacks on these cheap devices but yeah, you have to take a compromise there I guess. Those devices are about 25 to 60 years depending on the model and the market price but from time to time it can be a better option depending on the use case you want to achieve for outdoor access points, there's not that much options or maybe for ceiling mount access points so if you want to do these things you have to take another choice. It's important about accommodations if a community decides well we need to rework our websites we want to take a look what's up to day to day an issue is that you can't predict the future. We have seen in the past, in the very near past there was a WR4100 and kernel size got too large so boot loader could only load the first three megabytes but it wasn't the whole kernel so the device couldn't boot so the boot loader size was too big and yeah, it's not easy to predict all things in the forehand and to decide if it's really sustainable or if you choose another device so it's also hard to set a time span at recommendations we thought which time span we can tell our users that recommendations are up to date and we say well we expect this thing to works for the time span that doesn't mean that after the day you can throw it away but yeah we can expect to look into the future that far we have not the issues as the vendor because the vendor often doesn't even do updates at all or doesn't update the kernel the vendor doesn't even think about that but we have to so it isn't easy it isn't useful to say well that's a solution for forever or for the next 10 years but you have to be realistic and say how far you can look into the future and how far you can predict the future right now we went this whole process in Damstadt and thought about that and thought yeah, how we can find the best how can you have the node operator best to make known informed decisions and yeah, spreadsheets are very useful for that so that's why we did it we can see the table here that's visible on our website as well and there's three categories, indoor, outdoor and cheap and regarding the devices we show all the specifications what radios are, what's the CPU so that node operator needs to inform themselves what does it mean, what's good, what's not so good and if he's not able to predict themselves on a technical point of view we can give colorful highlights so in this case it's a tab for indoor recommendations and at the cheap things we can see it really good we have it for outdoor and the choice isn't quite large here we know that there's just one device but we show what's really good about this device and what's not so good compared to other devices in that category and regarding the cheap overview you can see it really, really obviously that the really cheap options there's very much highlighted because we said yeah, there's the device, the Netgear second device from the left hand side it is dual band drive which is good but when it makes this memory we might be too small for two radios so we take a decent look at the device and say what's the positive aspect and what's not we also highlighted the installation methods I will come back to this later okay so what's available and what might be coming up and what's the future and let's look back to the past and how we can arrange ourselves with that because we and with we I mean all the communities in Germany it's that we saw that some recommendations are only short lived and that we can see with deprecated devices which only have four megabyte flash or 32 megabyte RAM and like both of them are just insufficient and for all communities that's difficult to say how much longer we can go on with this if we want to keep up with the software and the technical development in this area and what we also need to look at in this area is that this is the baseline for a lot of communities and it's not a solution to just like cut off all of the hardware which is used right now because some communities could just stop functioning if they can't use any of these hardware devices anymore but some communities have started mailing to the people pointing out, hey, we found some problems here and there are some alternatives so let's see what we can do on this point I just want to point this out very quickly because on the 35C3 we had a talk on this on the infrastructure orbit so I recommend watching this talk and so what we can do is optimization through software and in the talk there was a lot of more details on this and a lot of communities are using gluon which is developed by a lot of communities in Germany and a lot of the optimizations are already in there so like there is no much more potential to optimize it further a lot of the optimizations we can do are only very short-lived because the technical development is just going so quickly and so we need more memory we need more space to save stuff on also we can't just do magic so there are just certain limitations I really recommend watching the talk on this from 35C3 another point which has been talked about a lot recently it's to soldier on more flash and RAM which kind of fixes the hardware issues so we do have more flash, we do have more RAM but we also have to say that for upstream projects when you're using gluon or openRT as soon as you start soldiering on your board it's actually a new one so it's a bit unclear what's going on there is there are revisions by the developers for a reason so they are no longer patchable by the provider and like Wi-Fi we can't just soldier on a new chip I know people have done it but I don't really want to talk about this on the other side you also the note operators should be aware that there are consequences you can't just change the boot loader like as soon as you soldier on different chips and devices it's unclear whether the next kernel update everything will still work on this device or on another device so it's a little bit problematic to say this is one solution which we should recommend and say yes this takes us, it works because there is still a lot of risk that soon there might be some kernel update or whatever and it does no longer work actually and at this point it's important to give a realistic outlook what might be the consequences and if people still want to do it they are free to do it but they have the knowledge to make this decision so what do we do now well the obvious choice would be to just buy new devices and everything will be perfect which isn't wrong but like it's possibly not the best solution because like new devices are obviously cool when you look at the recommendations by the community and then it's a big benefit if you make the right choice now but on the other side there might be problems if I have used devices which I have like soldiered on my own stuff and there is only LAN port now available in some environments that might not be the perfect solution because some people I saw during their own outdoor routers and then your router might no longer fit in your lunchbox so then you need to buy a new lunchbox too and like obviously it can also be expensive at GIPPN we pointed out like the whole cost for this and if a community is running a lot of access points then this cost might just be unbearable high another point which hasn't been looked at a lot by a lot of people is business or enterprise access points which are no longer used by them a lot of them have more than enough gum and flesh a lot of the times they also have a really fast processor we have seen a lot of them which have specifically been used for this traffic cases we also use them for so the regular change cycles is three years so even today we already are finding 802 11ac gear which is just very cheap or sometimes even for free so that's an interesting option what's also nice about this a lot of these access points are already using open VRWRT it's often not used for upstream but a lot of vendors haven't used other software but a lot of them are actually using the open WRT and you can actually add upstream without a lot of work some examples for this is enterprises which are just using ODM so they are building firewalls and we need Wi-Fi in our products and they are just adding it by buying it on and you have a lot of vendors but they all are using the basic same board so these are some vendors where we have seen this which is, yeah, this is the case and I'm already almost at the end of my talk so I think a lot of people here are active in the Freifunkommunity and the local communities what can you do? so we see the technological developments and we are seeing what we did in the past which might not always have been the optimal thing to do but I think it's important because Freifunk is also about education we should trust our node operators not just give them ready-made solutions for everything and there is not one size fits all solution but we think you are capable of making a good choice and do an installation which might be a bit more complicated but we can help you out there we have a good documentation if we have any problems there you can come to our meetings and you can learn something there so this is what I think gets people interested in the Freifunkommunity and this is something we also have seen a lot in our communities that when you are talking to the people and they are asking questions and they are coming to the meetings they might come to another meeting so we think there have been a lot of positive aspects from this yeah, just as I've said before Freifunk is a long-term project we have to develop ourselves if I just think about my time for the past four years the network has changed a lot from the technical aspects to the hardware it's very different than it has been four years ago so it's important to look at the use cases we have and that we have a broad spectrum covering all of the different use cases so that's it from my part yeah, herzlichen dank yeah, thanks a lot for this really interesting topic there's microphones in the room so if there are questions by the audience I see someone already over there I have a question about memory consumption how do we reduce memory consumption of openwrt what are the components that put the most strain on it the most load on memory maybe in percentage is by wifi, so by the radios they have to operate two or maybe even three queues and sometimes there's like private wifi or second measure interface and that's what consumes the most memory thank you, is there another question yeah, in the front I want to ask because the device the choice of devices is small what about locked bootloader signatures and especially on the political layer because yeah, I had a feeling that there was a big momentum there some time ago but no, I haven't heard of anything trying to change that for a long time there was this FCC story from a few years ago tenently, situation is that locked bootloaders and signed bootloaders are maybe more exception than the general that what TP-Link did was like a new image format that they used in their CPI devices in that case locked bootloaders as such are not really common in the private market like there are some vendors of access points that do bootloader lock-in that the bootloader notices well, you're trying to flash a modified software and the device does self-destruction of selves the keyboard isn't implemented and resetting now and then the device is like toast you can throw it away but we haven't seen that on devices that we really used and really took in our hands and we really recommended but sometimes vendors want to do that Netgear has a device, AVM has a kind of signature verification in place but it's not that an issue right now yet wait for the microphone please please wait for the microphone so from Ubiquiti? by Ubiquiti yeah, there's often signature in place and that's an issue I only know the UniFi devices by Ubiquiti and they are quite open you can't boot them by the bootloader you can't flash it by the bootloader but they load the image if it's in place another question no, that doesn't seem so yeah, thanks and huge round of applause to Blockporn and to the whole Freifrom community and thanks some translation booth you can give us feedback on Twitter, on the headset