I did a quick search to see if mesh networks have gone mainstream yet:<p><a href="https://futureprepping.com/mobile-phone-mesh-networks/" rel="nofollow">https://futureprepping.com/mobile-phone-mesh-networks/</a><p>The radio dongles are superfluous and I can't think of any engineering reason why all cell phones can't just communicate with others nearby already. Maybe not for cellular voice and data, but certainly for something akin to AppleTalk back in the 80s:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk</a><p>When I got to college in 1995, all of the Macs were on the campus-wide LAN and lots of Mac users had their public folders shared. There were tons of apps and games and even little personal BBS-style areas where people posted stories and you could share files to their drop box. It was all free and open and frictionless and stands out vividly in my mind as a vision of what we thought the internet was going to be.<p>If we had that, it would be trivial to run something like IPFS to bypass the ISPs, even without paid cellular service. Then anyone could connect through their tunnel provider of choice and bypass any privacy concerns. The speed would be proportional to the number of nodes, so many thousands of times faster than internet today is, or ever can be.<p>With the debates around net neutrality and the cost of streaming, it's like we've forgotten that the only cost of the internet could be the electricity required to run a cell phone.
Note that Adam Dunkels, who wrote this writeup and posted it here, is one of the most accomplished embedded programmers in the world; if you've done TCP/IP on a computer without an OS in the last ten years, you probably used his lwIP stack. What you might not know is that lwIP was originally written for his free-software operating system Contiki, which can run working web browsers not only on a Commodore 64 but even a Commodore PET.<p>A city-sized IPv6 mesh network built out of handheld-sized devices was science fiction 25 years ago. Metricom's Ricochet showed it was possible, without the IPv6, about 23 years ago. And after decades of resistance and sandbagging from regulators, Thingsquare is finally making it happen in real life.
This sounds like one of those tools that was built internally that could spin out to be it's own project/startup. It's such a clever and easy way to solve their problems.
What's OPs view of helium network? It basically solved the issue of network deployment for LoRaWAN. It covers the vast majority of American population centers, Western Europe, and soon south america and APAC.
Wow, what a cool service. It would be fascinating to see what could be done if you bought a lot of plugin devices and then just gave them out to neighbors.
MAC address filtering comes with its own downsides. For one, it’s very easy to spoof. So you can act as a node in the mesh network if you copy the MAC address of a known node.<p>Implications: elevated access within mesh network, capturing traffic between clients and the mesh network, localized disruption of mesh network due to unstable connection caused by duplicate MAC addresses on a single network
> In the field, devices are far away from each other. So they will only be able to hear the devices that are next to it.<p>And I'm out. Mesh networkers really should spend a bit of time re-learning all the lessons from decades of ham radio packet networks.