pplznet is an acronym for People's Network or Peoples Network. The name expresses the wish to have a community driven network across its residents with the following properties
pplznet is a network between neighbours so they can communicate freely without the artificial limits of today's Internet products. Of course it also delivers blazingly fast links.
Today every household has its own Internet uplink which is typically a dedicated connection. Those participants form a star or tree topology. Local providers use either telphone cables, TV cables or sometimes dedicated fiber connections. There are of course other types but it's not important to list each.
Today a customer can only select between few or sometimes even only one provider, especially if they want a fast connection. The line characteristics are being dictated by the provider. The customer often gets downsized products that are stripped down artificially.
Those are the most common problems for private customers:
The users of pplznet define the characteristics of network and Internet connectivity themselves. There are of course guidelines but the choice shall be theirs. Running a server in pplznet is easy and not artificially limited by the provider's arbitrariness.
As this is a group effort there need to be some guidelines about what is best practice for nodes in such a cluster. Those guidelines come from
Users of pplznet can communicate with each other in a way never seen before, because the complete infrastructure is theirs. As the topology of pplznet may and should be in rings of meshes it delivers self healing features and failover if a node fails.
pplznet is tries to be as censor proof as possible by giving the users the power of the complete infrastructure.
Running pplznet nodes will create an excellent local infrastructure. It is some kind of MAN [1] (Metropolitan Are Network) . It's not to be confused with a LAN (Local Area Network). It delivers next generation network connectivity between participants in your very area.
There are two ways of getting Internet connectivity into a cluster, yet Internet is optional for a pplznet cluster. The preferable option is to run Supernodes [2] in order to bring public IP addresses to the users. This option shall always be chosen. In very rare cases other options exist like sharing a normal Fiber / Cable / DSL line with the neighbours. This might be problematic because the very owner of such uplink might be held accountable for breaches of the law.