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Hi. I'm Dave Taht. I've been working for the last 18 months straight,
nearly full time, for free, at fixing the Internet's bufferbloat epidemic. I play Sancho to Jim Gettys' Don Quixote, doing whatever is necessary to keep things going.
I keep the bufferbloat.net
website, servers, build cluster and mailing lists running, handle PR, co-ordinate the efforts of engineers and
researchers across the globe, do research of my own, give talks, keep up with the literature, have found, fixed or help fix tons of bugs, and have written a bunch of code.
My biggest sub-project in support of the effort
has been testing the feasibility of new de-bufferbloating ideas in a typical home router, with a bleeding edge version of OpenWrt, called CeroWrt. The R&D strategy (which is working!) is to get the ideas that work from cero into the mainstream and ultimately into a form that the typical home router vendor can adopt and ship.
If you are on this page, and don't know what bufferbloat is already,
please google for it and come back. And this is a review of what CeroWrt is about. Keeping this going is eating me alive and that's why I have put up this page.
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CeroWrt's goal is merely to prove that the various bloat-reduction technologies can, indeed, be deployed, across the internet, on devices big and small, in the places where it
matters most - home gateways, head ends, wifi and 3g - and give those technologies away
so that every manufacturer can use them, and every user of the Internet, benefit.
As I write this (sept, 2012), I figure we have 3-6 months left before we have something truly great. And I'm tapped out.
We've already pushed early versions of the critical code into the Linux kernel and into OpenWrt, but further work is needed to make it right. Everything that works will go upstream. There is no "business model", with or without financial aid to the effort, we're not going to withhold anything - we just want a better Internet to happen as fast as possible.
We've got plenty of donated hardware at the moment, (more than we know what to do with, actually), the biggest need is for stuff that costs money: food, housing, travel, and misc supplies and equipment.
It certainly would be wonderful if the CeroWrt based research effort could become self sustaining, money dropped from the sky, and we could re-expand our scope to include everything we'd planned to do, but I'm not banking on it. If you can help out, even a little, a financial boost would go a long way right now.
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One time donation:
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The above links are to my personal company (teklibre). It's a for-profit (not that it's made any). So cash sent this way is not tax deductable as a charitable contribution. From a goods and services perspective, perhaps I'm inventing a new category: "research as a service" - or "new firmware as a digital good". I try to get out a quality release of CeroWrt every month (with numerous development snapshots inbetween).
If you are looking for a charitable 501c(3) org to donate to instead, the Internet Systems Consortium was the earliest and most wonderful supporter of our quest to fix the bufferbloat problem. They donated 7 servers, rackspace, hosting, electricity, office AND lab space to our efforts. Without their ongoing support, the bufferbloat effort would struggle much harder than it has. ISC also supports some criticial internet infrastructure and a multitude of other open source projects. To contribute to their general fund, click here. If you are an organisation concerned with the future and ongoing health of the internet, ISC's got your back, and you can inquire as to how to become a friend of isc.
I (we) owe them a debt that I can never repay, although I would, if I could.
A bit about bufferbloat.net:
It is not (presently!) backed by some uber-rich zillionaire from his tropic island
in the pacific.
Back in Jan, 2011, when Jim and I started it, we'd envisioned a 2mil/yr budget and a 6 person team with some of the greats in the industry onboard to tackle the bufferbloat epidemic. We then got too busy working on the technical side to form a 501c(3) for it...
Result: Total actual budget: 0. And a global effort consisting of hundreds of volunteers, contributing ideas, time, hardware, and code, to whom I try to give full credit in CeroWrt's credits page. We've made serious progress.
Never has so much been accomplished so quickly on so little, by so many!
Frankly I couldn't have imagined a better outcome, technically.
There are other hard, capital/resource intensive projects, that we would like to be doing, that cannot easily be done by our extended community, so
longer term, Bufferbloat.net's biggest "plan" is trying to structure one or more of the
bigger, stalled out projects (network and wireless modeling, e2e measurements, testbed, field testing) into
a format that could be put on kickstarter or indigogo, and to keep seeking the sizeable funding that we really need to kick those efforts into higher gear.
If you have any other long term funding ideas for bufferbloat.net's efforts,
please share them!
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In addition to my time, I'd spent a ton of money (when I still had some) on bufferbloat.net and CeroWrt. Karmically, given the positive results so far, I'm set for life. Financially, not so much.
If you've found my efforts on behalf of all this worthwhile,
I could use some help making rent and cutting down the enormous pile of backlogged bills. I would prefer to keep
hammering away at fixing problems in codel and CeroWrt than do anything
else, and to keep turning theory into something that can be deployed throughout the internet.
The bandwidth you save may be your own.