Using Maidsafe instead of a VPN

I was thinking about the other side of the equation from what we normally think through. Here is an interesting use of a VPN to take advantage of the multiple connections that a lot of the people have, say an ethernet connection, a wifi connection, a 4G dongle, and then a tethered phone. They route your internet through their VPN servers which know which of your connections have the least latency, what their data limits or throttling limits are.

My immediate thought after I started to understand what exactly this idea was whether Maidsafe, or a maidsafe style architecture (Maybe ā€œbandwidthā€ managers?) could do this (only better and without a centralized server looking at every single packet which goes to your computer).

As an aside: @dirvine, @nicklambert and the whole Maidsafe team have drastically spoiled me in terms of openness. When I went poking around this project trying to find out what it was all about and how exactly it worked, it was jarringly different from what Iā€™ve become accustomed to around here.

What do you think? Could maidsafe accomplish something like this?

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That is brilliant news as its to date our biggest failing (apart from not launching as fast as we want :frowning: ) soon though we are getting through the testnets and we will make sure its correct (or as correct s can be). Cheers for that

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Failing?

Hehehe, well I know you donā€™t have time to go out into the big ugly world of closed-source centralized software projects. But Iā€™m sure that you remember enough to know that there is a world of difference from what you guys are doing.

And I want you to know that we in the community can sense that.

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On another note, this sort of thing could be useful for allowing people who are on throttled or data limited connections to actually have vaults. It could also be a step on the way towards that idea of allowing the Safe network to monitor and reward people for providing internet Access.

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Yes mesh network tech will be a good answer here, where we can aggregate and select differing routes based on many factors. SDR is also involved in the mix there to.

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Had a quick scan of their blog and found out about another insidious practice :

Edit: moved to a new post:

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How would that workā€¦free lunch? Iā€™m in :wink:

No, the big barrier to having a vault if you have a limit on your data connection, that you canā€™t tell the network to shut off. You canā€™t manage your own bandwidth. If there was a manager that could monitor your bandwidth use and allow the Safe network to use the extra, but NOT go over then you could have marginal vaults.

Again, that granularity thing that safe is so good at.

Arenā€™t there local system applications already out there that let you manage bandwidth? Itā€™s been ages since Iā€™ve had data limits, so I wouldnā€™t know. It doesnā€™t seem particularly hard to program such an application though.

Yes, of course, but Iā€™m not sure how they would interface with the SAFE network, so for example if I have one connection with low bandwidth but also low latency, and another with high bandwidth but high latency (say a satellite connection), then I want to be able to use the low latency connection to communicate with my data managers, but when Iā€™m sending a chunk, I want to sent it on the higher bandwidth connection.

Iā€™m not sure that any existing apps would allow you to do this, in a way that the Safe network Data managers would be able to recognize as still coming from one machine.

The ability to utilize the bandwidth multiple connections Iā€™ve long thought about, thinking of it like a shipping company on an island with roads, air, water as connection types. I believe you would have to establish a primary connection that could grade every route then divide the package amongst them for best performance. So you would end up with a building one (address) with multiple entrances (sub addresses, loading docks?) all working with every other island. So maybe a package goes out by air to one island then hits a road to its final destination based off of the next islands route grades. As I understand it the network already functions in this manner when grading nodes so you would only need to have an in-house node contained to your machine, I suppose it sounds easy enough. This would be a great way to use a mobile devices Wi-Fi and carrier networks. Iā€™ve even thought about device to device networks for emergency situations when traditional networks fail. Such that you walk by someone and they then spread your message by walking by someone else until the message can reach an island or even make it person by person.