pplznet is an acronym for People's Network or Peoples Network. The name expresses the wish to have a community driven network across their 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.
Buildings have their own Internet uplink which is typically a dedicated physical and cable based connection. There are basically three main technologies being used today:
They all have their different pros and cons. Yet they all rely on very old principles that humankind didn't dare to change. In order to achieve the promises made by pplznet some foundational paradigms will have to shift. One of the greatest fundamental problems is the topology. Today we create buses, trees but mustly star topologies. Yet what we urgently need is a mesh. Similar to the mesh we built in the Internet's core with BGP, we need a similar dynamically routed concept that will be used in the outskirts of the Internet. We need to think in the long term. Away with technologies like PPPoE. Let's just use plain Ethernet everywhere. Let's stop the Modem madness.
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 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 called 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.