Open Garden: Building the Internet of Us. Hello World, Part 2
Thursday, May 31st, 2018
Written by Paul Hainsworth, CEO of Open Garden
At Open Garden, we want to fundamentally change the way people all over the world connect to the Internet.
Our vision: millions of people using the Open Garden protocol to share their Internet access. It’s like Airbnb for Internet access: share any Internet connection, and earn OG, our cryptocurrency.
But what’s wrong with Internet access today? Well, in most countries, access to the Internet — cellular, DSL, cable, even satellite— is sold and delivered by typically two to six companies. In some countries, like China, there’s really only one company, and that company is controlled entirely by the Chinese government. All over the world, these companies effectively operate as an oligopoly.
There may be some benefits to this model, but there are certainly some big downsides for us, the end users. Here are a few:
- Cost: Internet access is more expensive in some countries, including the United States, where Open Garden is based, than it really should be.
- Speed: The pace of innovation, which could speed up connectivity, is stalled out due to a lack of competition.
- Data privacy: Network operators can monitor your use and sell that data to data brokers and advertisers, who push ads at you. They can also share this same data with your government, the extent of which was laid bare — frighteningly so — by Edward Snowden.
- Net neutrality: Your friendly neighborhood vendor of Internet access is also buying up major content businesses online, and permitted to prioritize traffic to the highest bidder. This is great for businesses that can afford to pay ISPs to prioritize their traffic, but pretty terrible for innovative startups that can’t.
Did Internet pioneers like Vint Cerf or Tim Berners-Lee envision this outcome? No way. The Internet was designed to be decentralized, unfettered, and an equalizing force. Today’s Internet access landscape barely delivers on this promise. We can do better.
The Open Garden protocol makes the Internet cheaper or even free, faster and more private. When we scale from two to six traditional providers, to a community of millions of people sharing their connectivity, this fundamentally changes how people connect to the Internet. In the process, we can shift some of the control back into the hands of the community. Now this sounds a lot more like the original vision of the Internet!
More affordable access
One premise behind “Airbnb for Internet access” is that in many highly connected markets, like the United States, we have bandwidth all around us. Most people have quite a bit of unused bandwidth, and as Airbnb enables with vacation rentals, Open Garden enables people to share this unused bandwidth with those nearby. For example, many consumers subscribe to a home broadband service offering at least 1TB of monthly data transfer before the ISP starts to throttle their service. However, most people don’t come even close to using all of this data, using perhaps 30 to 40% of their allotment.
The Open Garden protocol enables these people to carve out as much data as they want to share, say 500GB, set a price per GB, and share that data with nearby neighbors. These Open Garden providers are the supply side of a two-sided marketplace, sharing their bandwidth with consumers. Their cost base is effectively zero, because they are losing unused bandwidth at the end of the month anyway. Open Garden provider pricing can be pretty competitive in this instance.
Now what happens when you have millions of ubiquitous, crowdsourced providers of Internet access, instead of just two to six providers? In most markets, supplier competition drives prices down. Open Garden hotspot operators who use traditional ISPs or mobile operators for backhaul get compensated for sharing, which offsets their own monthly service cost. Internet access becomes more affordable for them, too!
Faster Internet
Another benefit of Open Garden is faster connectivity for everyone. We’re building advanced mesh networking into the protocol. Our development team’s expertise is in phone-to-phone mesh networking, predating even FireChat. Mesh in an Open Garden protocol context refers to the ability to be simultaneously connected to multiple Open Garden hotspots.
This enables some really cool use cases. For example, a YouTube video stream from one hotspot may support only a 480p video stream, which is fine for standard definition content. By connecting to more than one hotspot and load balancing the YouTube stream over two or more connections, however, the consumer can enjoy 1080p or even 4K quality streaming video.
A more private Internet
Today your ISP can see what you’re doing online. While a lot of the traffic between you and an online provider like Facebook, Google, Amazon or Netflix is encrypted, that doesn’t shield your privacy completely. Your ISP still knows you’re using Facebook, for example, but not that you’re creeping on a former high school friend’s photos.
With the Open Garden protocol, we are adding virtual private networking (VPN) to our stack, so that every Open Garden user is connected through a VPN tunnel and the ISP providing backhaul can’t see this traffic. Websites like Facebook can’t automatically see where in the world you’re located, either. In time, this will evolve to become a completely decentralized VPN service, so that every Open Garden hotspot also functions as an exit node.
In China, consumer VPN apps are widely used. They’re also relatively easy for the Great Firewall of China to defeat, in part because there is a small number of exit nodes in these centralized services. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole, where the exit node is quickly identified and subsequently blocked by the Great Firewall. If there are millions of crowdsourced exit nodes, however, this becomes extraordinarily difficult to stop.
With this model, a person using the Open Garden network can’t be monitored by the Open Garden hotspot provider, the ISP providing backhaul, or even by the government.
A better public WiFi experience
If cheaper, faster and more private weren’t interesting enough, the Open Garden protocol will also make public WiFi a whole lot more usable. Today, hopping onto free WiFi is often frustrating, requiring users to navigate captive portals where they need to view ads, click on terms of service, and sometimes even enter personal information. After all of this hassle, they are connected, only to find that the connection is awful. We can do better than this!
All Open Garden hotspots share the same protocol, and shared knowledge about each other: price, available bandwidth, latency and jitter. If a hotspot is lousy, you won’t be connected. You can see quality ratings when deciding to connect. And when there are multiple nearby Open Garden hotspots, you’re connected to the best quality hotspot first. No captive portals, ads, click-through agreements or personal information required (or even allowed).
Moreover, Open Garden providers will be able to set tiers of service for their users. They can always have a free tier, but set limits on bandwidth to say, 2Mbps. Plenty for web browsing, messaging and social media, but not fast enough to watch video. Users who want to watch movies or download content from BitTorrent in a coffee shop are free to do so, but only if they upgrade and pay for a higher tier of service. This prevents a couple of power users in a coffee shop from clogging up the connection and making the free WiFi unusable for everyone. It can also substantially increase the number of concurrent sessions that the coffee shop’s WiFi network can support!
Three product platforms
We initially envision the Open Garden protocol living in three platforms: phones, consumer grade WiFi gear, and then in existing WiFi infrastructure like municipal WiFi, shopping malls, corporate campuses, airports, stadiums and so on.
We started with the smartphone as a platform. We built the protocol into an Android reference app we built called Open Garden. Download the app, press one button, and it will instantly share your mobile or WiFi connection with people around you. As a provider, you’re in control: set a price per GB you want to earn, how much data you want to share. Open Garden consumers never see the WiFi credentials of your WiFi access point. Starting with phones as a platform is smart, because everyone has a phone. No need to buy additional hardware. Software will always scale more quickly than hardware.
Our developer community will also launch WiFi access points and WiFi range extenders that support our protocol. This summer we’ll launch a beta program with hundreds of hotspots running on a WiFi range extender. By end of 2018, you’ll be able to buy a cheap range extender from our first partner at a target price of $25. Buy it, plug it in, and share your home Internet with your neighbors. Your neighbor can buy one, too, to extend the range throughout their whole apartment, or even extend the hotspot into the unit next door to them as well.
Decentralization and Open Garden
Part of the power of the Open Garden protocol is that it is decentralized. This is really important to the mission of our project. Here’s what this means, and why it’s crucial:
- Resilience: Many large companies and governments may not agree with our vision, as you might imagine. We’re building a protocol to withstand that pressure. Right now, you could drop a bomb on Open Garden Inc. (please don’t), and Open Garden providers could still share their Internet connections, while people could connect and pay for the service. No dependence on a company.
- Non-rent seeking: Open Garden Inc. doesn’t make money when providers share their connections with people. 100% of transaction revenue goes directly to the hotspot provider. We’ll share more in an upcoming post about our business model.
- Peer-to-peer: We built the protocol to use our cryptocurrency, OG, which runs on Stellar. The protocol enables direct peer-to-peer Internet connections, and peer-to-peer payments between consumer and provider. No need for us to mediate the transactions. Unlike a centralized marketplace like Uber or Airbnb, which collect payments from consumers and then pay drivers or hosts, cryptocurrency eliminates this dependency. No middleman needed, thereby eliminating a point of failure. If a government is lobbied to shut down Open Garden Inc., for example, that could be very easy if payments to providers were dependent on a middleman with banking or payment provider relationships. Shut off the payments integration and the protocol is crippled, right? Not with the Open Garden protocol.
Open Garden is building a robust, completely decentralized network that benefits regular people. It’s all about enabling people and communities to reclaim ownership of the Internet. We don’t think about growing the Open Garden network as Uber thinks about building its driver network. The network doesn’t belong to our company, it belongs to the people and communities that built it. We’re enabling each one of us to reclaim the Internet, reclaim our privacy, and establish higher-quality connections at a much lower cost. We’re building the Internet of Us!
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Find us on #Telegram, #Twitter and #Facebook, or sign up for email updates on opengarden.com. Open Garden is changing the way people connect to the Internet. By enabling anyone to securely share their own Internet connection and earn money, the Open Garden protocol empowers millions of people to create their own networks in their own communities, while making Internet access more affordable, faster and private.
