March 30 - April 6, 2000
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Pipedreams
Saving the soul of the Internet, one house at a time
by Michelle Chihara
When David Krikorian bought a house a few years ago, he knew where he wanted to live (Cambridge), who he wanted to live with (his hacker buddies), and what kind of Internet connection he wanted (very fast). That last part, he figured, wouldn't be a problem: Cambridge is one of the most wired cities in America, and he thought that for a reasonable price he could get everything he wanted.
He was wrong.
Krikorian and his housemates contemplated signing up for a super-fast T1 line, but that was too expensive. Next they tried to get DSL, the fastest service available through an ordinary phone line, but installation was derailed by technical problems. Then cable modems hit the scene, and last year the housemates signed up for Internet access through their local cable company. They now pay $50 a month to MediaOne for a constant, high-speed connection.
It's not enough. Among other problems, cable modems deliver a lot of information into the house, but they can't move information out nearly as fast. After all, they're part of a system originally built to deliver TV signals.
And TV is not at all what David Krikorian wants. His needs may be extreme -- a techie who lives nearby calls Krikorian's place "probably the most wired house in the area" -- but his problems with Net access highlight a shift in the development of the wired world. The Internet was once a participatory community of nerds. Now it's a mass medium, dominated by corporations connecting with fairly passive consumers. A widening gulf has appeared between what Joe User can do -- even a very skilled Joe User like Krikorian -- and what Corporate User, Inc., can do.
Krikorian and his housemates want to narrow that gulf. They've hatched a plan to provide access to the Internet themselves, on their own terms. By creating their own Internet service provider (ISP), they're hoping to salvage the Internet the way they believe it was meant to be, one house at a time.
Sitting in the living room of his house -- which is named Grey 17, after a secret level on the TV spaceship Babylon 5 -- Krikorian is talking about the soul of the Internet."I don't think it's losing its soul," he says. "I just think its soul is getting brushed aside, or cramped, by people who are trying to keep it from growing."
The people he's talking about are the e-commerce and e-media companies that are increasingly monopolizing the development of the network. "It's like Starbucks pushing out all of the little coffee shops," says one Grey 17 resident. The more Starbucks dominates, the more it gets to dictate not only what coffee tastes like, but also how coffee gets to you.
People like Krikorian are nostalgic. The average home Internet connection is much faster than it used to be, but they miss the days when the Net was an offbeat club open to anybody with a modem and some know-how. Now it's a mass-market game increasingly played by the power-lunch crowd.
It's also characterized by decreasing choice. In 1995, you could sign up with any number of independent local providers. Now, after mergers and buyouts, you're lucky if you get to pick from two or three that serve your area. If you want high-speed access -- broadband -- you're lucky if you have one or two choices (see "The State of the City," page 30).
Everyone agrees that broadband connections are the future of the Internet. The more we want the Web to do -- deliver music, show movies -- the faster our connections have to be. As the network's capacity increases, the possibilities of broadband are endless.
But the reality, right now, is finite. Even in those neighborhoods where broadband access is readily available, residential consumers are increasingly expected to be passive downloaders, not active uploaders. "In order to stay competitive, we have to meet the needs of the greatest common denominator," says Jennifer Khoury at MediaOne, the only cable-modem provider in Cambridge. "That's not to say that in the future we won't offer other services. But currently this meets the demands of most of our consumers."
Most people are, indeed, concerned mainly with ease of use, and with having their favorite movie site load quickly. But access to the means of production is an inherent part of the Internet's soul -- the two-way travel of information, the decentralization of control, is the quality that has always differentiated the Internet from other media. For passionate techies like the residents of Grey 17, that difference is worth fighting for.
David Krikorian knows most of his housemates through MIT, in one way or another. Most of them are tech staff at tech-based Internet start-ups. (Krikorian is a systems engineer at Akamai.) There is one woman in the house, an MIT student. Dress is standard techie casual -- jeans, glasses, T-shirts. The day I meet him, Krikorian wears an olive shirt that he tells me is the only T-shirt in his wardrobe without some sort of logo.The house has the feel of a techie co-op. On the third floor, 70 pounds of sugar are piled on top of the fridge like a trench of bright yellow sandbags. "That should keep us in Kool-Aid for about five weeks," Krikorian says. On the second floor a computer graveyard has spread through two whole rooms -- hard drives stacked five high, Tupperware cases filled with wires, floor-to-ceiling plastic-covered shelves stacked with equipment. On the first floor, empty rooms are strewn with plywood, and walls are stripped to their insulation for remodeling. "It takes a while," says resident Karl Ramm, "because we have 30-second attention spans."
For construction, maybe. But when it comes to technical work, the nine residents of Grey 17 exhibit a patience and dedication incomprehensible to the layperson. They're already running their own networked operation, largely unsupported by their provider. "If something breaks," says resident Jered Floyd, "they'll just look at us and laugh. They don't support anything other than `you have one machine that you use.' "
Jamaica Plain may be a hip place to live, but not if you're a techie. In an unscientific survey on broadband Net access around Greater Boston, JP proved to be among the worst neighborhoods to live in. Along with Brookline residents, JP residents are the least likely to have access to any type of high-speed connection at all. The state of the city
Home users who want a broadband connection to the Internet have two choices: DSL or a cable modem. (ISDN, which generated a lot of excitement four or five years ago, proved too expensive for the speeds that it delivered.) DSL, which comes through a phone line, is available to anyone within three miles of a Bell Atlantic switching station. Cable modems are available if your cable company offers them.
If you live in Jamaica Plain, your phone service is routed indirectly (through Roxbury), which means you're often too far from the switching station to get DSL. (Charlestown has the same kind of problem.) And your cable company is Cablevision, which doesn't yet offer modems. They say they're rebuilding their network and will have most of Boston cable-modemed by the end of 2001. For now, though, you're stuck with old-fashioned dial-up Net access.
Within Boston proper, broadband availability is hit or miss. Bell Atlantic estimates that 40 percent to 50 percent of metro Boston is either out of reach of DSL wires or wired with copper that's not in good enough shape to carry the upgrade. The cable company RCN offers cable modems, but within Boston the coverage is building by building -- call (800) 746-4726 to find out whether you're covered. Once again, you're out of luck in JP (and more than likely also in Allston/Brighton, Mattapan, and Dorchester).
Outside Boston, the picture improves a bit. Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington, and most suburbs are generally well covered. In most surrounding towns, cable modems are available through RCN or MediaOne. (One exception is Brookline.) DSL is also largely available: call your phone company to see whether you're in reach of the central switching office.
-- MC"We want to run our own servers and our own mailing lists," Krikorian explains. They want, among other things, multiple IP addresses for all of their machines. They want to control not just how fast but also on what terms they connect to the Internet.
If Grey 17 were a business, it could afford to pay more and run a T1 line into the house, with the full service support of a local network company. But it's not a business, and at the moment the cable modem is pretty much the fastest consumer connection available: about 126 times as fast as a 56K modem. But a connection through a cable modem is "asymmetrical," meaning you can download information up to 50 times faster than you can send it. That's problem number one for a household where the online activities -- MP3s (legal files only!), mailing lists, countless other Internet-related projects -- involve uploading a lot of information.
Problem number two is control. The market reality is that as the masses go online, a smaller and smaller percentage of customers want to control the front end of their service. The less they need to learn, the better. Today, the people who know how to use the kind of access that Grey 17 wants can usually get it through their six-figure-salary jobs. At home, it's another story. People wanting such a high level of access used to be the norm on the Net; now they're considered exceptions.
The Wall Street Journal recently blamed problems with overcrowded broadband services on people like the folks at Grey 17, calling them "bandwidth hogs." The Journal was siding with the companies, for whom users like Krikorian are a drain on time, energy, and carrying capacity.
"It doesn't surprise me that they're looking at people with legitimate desires and calling them abusers," says Scott Rosenberg, an editor at Salon who covers the evolution of the Internet. "But that's a pretty profound misunderstanding of what the Internet is all about."
If you want it done right, as they say, you hack it yourself. The residents of Grey 17 can't find a provider to give them the connection they want, so they'll set up their own: an ISP for superusers only. They plan to do it by renting a DSL line directly, then signing up their friends to connect through the entity they're calling Grey 17 Network Service."We want a decent connection to our building, we want decent connections for our friends, and we want to spread the word of the Internet as it was supposed to be," says Ramm.
"We want to be the corner store of ISPs," says Jered Floyd. With a blond mohawk, wearing a purple tie-dye, Floyd is Grey 17's most flamboyant and gregarious member.
"The corner store in the nerd village!" Krikorian interjects; Grey 17 owns the domain name "nerdvillage.com."
Floyd continues: "We have relationships with other people who are clueful enough, and who want the same thing."
Similar households, with other sci-fi monikers, are already being attracted to Grey 17's project. There's been interest from Zocalo; Sector 14; Unseen University, whose name comes from the comic fantasy Disc World; and other techie warrens in Cambridge and Somerville.
Grey 17's residents don't expect their little ISP to turn much of a profit. They vow that any money they make will be plowed back into infrastructure. "We don't want to make money," says Floyd -- a strong statement for this particular set of people. Given the value of high-tech expertise, it's dizzying to quantify the monetary value of the time and effort that the nine residents of Grey 17 will probably spend on their project. The irony seems to please them. "Economists don't factor people who work for the love of the technology into their theories," says Ramm.
What excites Grey 17 is the connection, the "pipe." Acquiring a critical mass of power users will create what is almost a miniature node on the Internet. And they'll be able to have something else they've been longing for: a pipe that will send their data directly to MIT instead of bouncing it to New York or Virginia and then back to Cambridge (its current route).
At the outset, Grey 17's club will be clueful-only -- unnamed households need not apply. Normal consumers require a lot of hand-holding, and "frankly, we have better things to do with our time," says Krikorian. Ultimately, though, he's hoping that they might be able to colonize at least one small corner of the Internet with thinking people of all stripes.
"I'd like to see something like the WELL," says Krikorian, referring to a venerable and notoriously wordy San Francisco online community. "A place where intellectuals who aren't computer-savvy could go."
In any case, Grey 17 is bucking the current Net trend. A Harvard information-infrastructure expert calls Grey 17's project "the kind of thing that moves things forward." And if enough of Grey 17's friends sign on, perhaps their way of wiring things could trickle down and give the rest of us a taste of the old-school DIY Internet.
