There's an impressive amount of negativity in these comments. A community-run mesh network? HN should be all over it, but it appears to have turned into a bunch of network engineers telling us why they are very smart and it won't work, or is "insignificant".<p>More power to you, NYC Mesh.
Shameless plug: I run a website that helps people do this kind of thing: <a href="https://startyourownisp.com" rel="nofollow">https://startyourownisp.com</a> (although it's free and ad free, so not much of a plug really.)<p>Also have a matrix chatroom on this topic: <a href="https://riot.im/app/#/room/#startyourownisp:matrix.org" rel="nofollow">https://riot.im/app/#/room/#startyourownisp:matrix.org</a>
<i>The group also knows there will be growing pains as they challenge the status quo and that it's only a matter of time before the big ISPs take notice, which could bring new challenges.</i><p>I'd like to imagine this would be competition on price and service. Sadly, that won't be the case. They can expect everything from spurious CALEA requirements to rooftop lease shenanigans to unwarranted radio interference claims.<p>Eventually, though, this mesh model will take over the world, from both a network perspective and a commercial one. We just have to squelch our authoritarian impulse.<p>Of course, technical challenges may still exist, but those certainly don't discredit the model.
I really don't understand the HN reaction here. Why all the presumed negativity? This is tech, the best encyclopedia in the world is built on volunteer work and donations. A genius builds the de-facto version control system on his own in 3 months for fun. 2 guys in a garage build revolutionize search.<p>Certainly there are logistical differences between these things, but I don't understand why one would assert with confidence that such a project (that already seems to be working) couldn't work.
This stuff is cool and maybe useful in far-fetched scenarios, but it's not going to replace ISPs anytime soon. Mesh networks don't make economic sense in most circumstances.<p>Also, I'm guessing that users share the same IP address, which can cause problems. Plus, if one user is doing something illegal and causes the supernode to get shutdown then no one on the mesh network will have access to the internet.<p>Addition: quotes like "The internet doesn't really cost you anything, it's just the connection [that has a fee]... Nobody owns the internet, there's no one to pay." Are shockingly naive. Who does he expects pays for the fiber that runs across the country and along the ocean floor? The marginal cost of a new user on the internet is effectively zero, but that doesn't say anything important. The infrastructure that makes the internet work is enormously expensive.
This can work for small scale networks but it needs to be a paid service model to scale it(at least for usable performance).<p>A spine/leaf arch would be great for this imo. The leaves can be local cells of wifi networks. The spine can be operated by payment collecting individuals that maintain a high speed(10g+) and low latency uplink to the internet and network gear that can handle the traffic from the leaves. In spine leaf, leaves connect to multiple spine nodes as well (don't have to worry about spine operator reliability too much,could potentially load balance over spine)<p>That being said,I hope any modern wifi network assumes wifi encryption is not reliable and instead implements a layer2 or 3 tunnel (macsec/.11ae and wireguard respectively)
When you compare comments here a few themes emerge:<p>1. The internet has been captured by the telcos, who operate the internet like telcos have operated the circuit switched voice network.<p>2. We are all overlooking the fact that smart radios make spectrum ownership obsolete. That means that the potential of mesh wireless connectivity is orders of magnitude larger than can be realized in current unlicensed spectrum.<p>3. The assumption that anyone is owed a business model in internet service is going unquestioned. Of course it costs a lot of money to run the internet the way the Bell System ran phones. But there are plausible alternatives, not all of which are compatible with investor-owned near-monopoly "markets."<p>This is an economic tragedy and a case of local optimization holding a global optimum hostage. ISPs are a sweet business, in a way that costs the rest of the economy dearly. Kill the incumbents and reap an across the board boost in GDP.
This sounds neat. Is anyone working on something like it in the SF bay area? I know there's Webpass and Monkeybrains, which are great, but I'd love to be part of a community-owned, actual mesh network.
Can anyone comment on the utility of mesh networks in rural areas, where the big ISPs say "Sorry, not interested", and the distances between potential nodes is high? I have read articles in the past about hardware hackers setting up systems to broadcast WiFi signals for exceptional distances. Could a system of mesh networks provide rural America (or other countries) with low cost / high speed internet service?
This is a great ideal. Sticking it to The Man is never a bad thing :) The question seems to be one of level of service and reliability. Collectives (if you will) can certainly work. But at this scale? And necessity?<p>The ultimate benefit, I would think, would be to cause downward price pressure on the establishment ISPs. But wasn't that also Google Fiber's quest? Which we know didn't last long. Profits or not, there is still a certain level of cost to maintain sustainability of the model.<p>I hope I don't sound cynical. I honestly just curious and will to share my thoughts out loud.
Nice. Our 200+ unit condo building in Portland just got gigabit internet via line of sight radio on the roof from another building with fiber.<p>This is a trend that will definitely take off and removes the huge barriers of entry that laying cable requires. 1ms latency too.
I love seeing the growth of mesh network.<p>“We don’t have any use cases that show how nice it can be if you have enough users.”<p>They are going to need software. The supernodes are still a symptom of the thinking that you need the signal to go to another stage in order to communicate locally.<p>I think there should be more software that works on a local network, like things used to work before broadband.<p>This is what I’m talking about:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI</a>
Actual ISP network engineer here: I'm sure these people are having fun and all, but it's insignificant in the larger scheme of things.<p>(correction to original post: I did not at first see an ASN for them, or announcements of their own IP space. They have an ASN and announce two /24s, and peer at one physical location in metro NYC).<p>Real five nines network infrastructure takes significant capital investment.<p>This part is so much unadulerated bullshit:<p>""The internet doesn't really cost you anything, it's just the connection [that has a fee]. So however you can get plugged in — then you're on the internet. Nobody owns the internet, there's no one to pay.""<p>Actual, reliable internet costs real money, both in the salaries of people to engineer and architect it, salaries for 24x7x365 clued-in NOC staff, equipment, salaries and expenses for field technicians to build it. And that's before you get into things like establishing colo at major IX points, serious core routers that cost $15k each (do you really want to deploy something in the year 2018 to take several full BGP tables that doesn't have a 4 million FIB capacity?), etc. The Internet is a significant construction project at OSI layer 1, whether you're putting PTP radios on rooftops, running aerial fiber, or underground fiber. Otherwise you're just piggybacking on something that another, larger entity has already built.<p>I give them an A for enthusiasm and effort. It just needs to be channeled the right way so that they can figure out what it actually costs to run a reliable ISP. I'm all in favor of new startup ISPs.
Förderverein Freie Netzwerke e. V. has been doing this, rather successfully, in Germany since 2003 [0]<p>Similar projects exist in Austria (FunkFeuer) and Switzerland (Openwireless).<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk</a>
I'm in NYC. I know a few people who played with it. It barely works.<p>I'm all for this kind of tech solutions, but for crying out loud pretending that this is a replacement for ISPs in NYC really discredits techies.
Who's responsible when someone torrents copyrighted material through that Internet exchange point?<p>"NYC Mesh will comply with all federal laws in the countries it operates, however, as policy, no data is collected and therefore no data exists to provide requestors."<p>This is cute, but if you aren't hunting down people abusing the mesh, the whole connection to the internet will go away for a ToS violation.
Mesh networks are too complicated to be reliable over a long term. They are useful in disaster situations or places with no infrastructure. Project Byzantium (<a href="http://project-byzantium.org/faqs/" rel="nofollow">http://project-byzantium.org/faqs/</a>) is a great way to quickly stand up a mesh network as a temporary thing.