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About pplznet

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

  • 💥 Disaster Proof
  • 🚀 Future Proof
  • 🩹 Self healing
  • 💪 Self determined
  • 🏃🏼‍♀️‍➡️ Fast
  • ⛰️ Scalable
  • 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏽 Maintained by the residents and their elected operators
  • 🫰🏼 Free to use for cluster and inter-cluster usage
  • 📡 Crowdfunded 10G+ Internet uplinks
  • 👨‍🔧 Inexpensive to setup and maintain
  • 💰 Non profit oriented, but strong self-financing
  • 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏽 Focus on the needs of the citizen
  • ⚙️ Hosting friendly / offers local content
  • 👶🏼 User friendly, Easy to use 🧨
  • ⚙️ Highest level of convenience to the users as well as the operators
  • 🚨 Souvereignity and Security builtin

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.

Status Quo

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: - Fiber - Cable - DSL

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.

Todays biggest Shortcomings

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:

  • Not disaster proof / hardly any redundancy
  • No public IPv4 address (DS-Lite / CG-NAT)
  • No or stripped down IPv6 connectivity
  • Users cannot choose firewall solution
  • Provider's firewall does not get security patches / Known cases of provider backdoors
  • Firewall is preconfigured with very limited access for the user
  • Wifi Management done by the provider. Why would I give control to my wifi to the provider as well?
  • Filtered inbound or outbound traffic (Most prominently blocked port 25 outbound)
  • actual speed below promised speed - sometimes way below
  • Unreliable links (PPPoE links lost etc.)
  • Generally too slow Internet link speeds (Download and/or Upload)
  • Limited support
  • Call centers with annoying catalogue answers and frustrating AI hotlines

Benefits of pplznet

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.

Restrictions of pplznet

  • The pplznet nodes won't be administered by the node owner as long as he is not a Cluster or Stack Admin.

A typical pplznet cluster

Internet connectivity

Running pplznet nodes will create an excellent local infrastructure. It is called MAN ^[Wikipedia about MAN] (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 ^[What is a supernode] 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.