lightning router overview

2021-12-02 · 2 min read

• #lightning

Lightning-enabled "Captive Portal"

"Pay-as-you-go" internet usage with Lightning

Thesis #

Faster, cheaper micro-payments enable finer grained usage billing

Use Cases #

1. Cafe / Restaurant / Hotel / Airport
2. Appartment: provide WiFi to neighbors

What is Purchased (Capacity vs Volume) #

One of:

1. Data Volume
   • Users purchase a "data rate" contract, e.g., $0.01 / MiB, charged every X MiB
   • Most cost efficient (?), since users pay only for what they use
   • Provider can charge many users at once
   • Variable quality, since it makes no guarantees about how much bandwidth capacity you're getting
   • Good for: emails, browsing, "spiky" usage
2. Bandwidth
   • Users purchase a "bandwidth capacity" contract, e.g., 10 MiB/s, charged every X minutes
   • Allows users to reserve a "slice of the pipe" all to themselves
   • Some use cases aren't usable without a minimum bandwidth guarantee (Youtube video buffering, gaming lag). Most useful when the router is under heavy usage by many "data volume" users.
   • Good for: gaming, Netflix, Youtube, sustained usage

• Could also provide "slow" connectivity by default, then users pay for better quality.
• Also need to distinguish Up/Down Volume/Bandwidth

Captive Portal #

captive portal

Flow #

custom auth variables passed in query string

1. client gets captured by openNDS
2. openNDS redirects client to FAS API along w/ encrypted token (?) (depends on "security level")
3. FAS API decides whether to auth client by passing them the decrypted token, client hits gateway:port/opennds_auth?tok=XXX with decrypted token to auth.
4. if client follows lightning flow, FAS API can notify openNDS to increase client