Most of us have probably heard of the PirateBox in the last couple of days. (In case you didnt: [wiki.daviddarts.com]<p>I saw a comment somewhere that you might even be able to inter-connect those boxes. (could be lifehacker, not sure) Could that hypothetically mean that you can set up your own "grassroots internet"?<p>Anyone you'd want contact with would have to be connected to the same network of course, but if it's something that grows really big, then you don't need isp's etc.<p>Problem of course is inter-continental contact, but are there any other things which would make this not work?
Sure, it has and is being done.<p>GuiFi is a running example of a mesh network in Spain.
<a href="http://guifi.net/en" rel="nofollow">http://guifi.net/en</a><p>Friefunk are a number of networking running in Germany
<a href="http://wiki.freifunk.net/Kategorie:English" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.freifunk.net/Kategorie:English</a><p>Village Telco is a project using mesh wifi to provide voice telecoms in remote parts of the world using custom hardware
<a href="http://www.villagetelco.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.villagetelco.org/</a><p>The issues come with a smart mesh protocol. There are many around, 802.11s, oslr, BATMAN, etc. (Village Telco & Friefunk use BATMAN).<p>See Project Serval for implementation of BATMAN on Android devices.
<a href="http://www.servalproject.org/how-it-works" rel="nofollow">http://www.servalproject.org/how-it-works</a>