It seems like there's been another surge of interest of late in mesh networks. Last time this happened, I wrote up a piece explaining why mesh networks are really a poor solution for circumventing censorship: <a href="http://sha.ddih.org/2011/11/26/why-wireless-mesh-networks-wont-save-us-from-censorship" rel="nofollow">http://sha.ddih.org/2011/11/26/why-wireless-mesh-networks-wo...</a>. Since then, some of my colleagues and I at Berkeley wrote a more academic version of this blog post. The talk is available here: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doMYDmtzsTQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doMYDmtzsTQ</a> and you can grab the paper too if you're interested: <a href="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~shaddi/papers/foci13.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~shaddi/papers/foci13.pdf</a>. The short version is mesh networks have fundamental scaling limitations that make them a poor choice for building alternative infrastructures like the ones discussed in this article; for example, a result from 2000 showed that capacity available to each node in a mesh network actually <i>decreases</i> as the mesh grows.<p>The other thing I'd note is that this article is referring to "mesh networks", when it really means "community networks": networks run by a community, regardless of whether the network is a mesh or not. I don't know about the Athens network in particular, but I know that the Freifunk and Guifi networks are rather hierarchically structured (i.e., are not true mesh networks). This is necessary for building a wireless network with reasonable performance due to the aforementioned fundamental scaling limitations of mesh networks.<p>I love the enthusiasm of everyone working on mesh networks, but I think it's valuable to keep a critical perspective and not get carried away with that enthusiasm, if for no other reason than to stay honest about the technical challenges involved.
I hope this becomes a bigger trend, but if we're going to do this <i>again</i>, then I hope we do it right this time, and we make it as secure, as uncontrollable by governments, and as anonymous as possible (if you so make that decision on it).<p>The US government/NSA is ruining the old Internet, so I hope the new one will be very resistant to such attempts in the future. I would watch out especially for hardware-level backdoors for such an Internet.<p>If they can't spy on the network directly because it's P2P they will try to force either the OS vendors or the hardware vendors to implement backdoors and keyloggers for them. So at the very least the focus should be on open source operating systems with <i>open source firmware</i> (and possibly even open source hardware in the future). Such hardware should be given <i>extreme preference</i> for the mesh networks.
I saw an article about this a little while ago. If anywhere in the world could support a wide scale mesh network, it would have to be the Bay Area. It would be a really cool experiment to blanket a part of the Valley in mesh wifi: I imagine it would be very doable to raise $100K and send 1,500 mesh routers to people in Palo Alto or SOMA. Open Mesh has some really cool low-cost ($50 - $75) hardware that seems to <i>just work</i>: <a href="http://www.open-mesh.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.open-mesh.com/</a>. Some might be plugged into an upstream link, but if most were only powered on as relays it would still work.
While this is a great solution for places without easy last-mile connections, it seems to me this would still be vulnerable, as one compromised connection would essentially allow the same kind of snooping that we've got going on now.<p>Does anyone know whether this is so, or how to protect against snooping, as I would assume there is some implicit level of trust required for a network like this to stay secure.
A couple comments mentioned wanting to build this in the Bay Area. I've been wondering for awhile why there's not an active group here.<p>Let's meet up to discuss more, how about a Google group to organize? <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sf-meshnet" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sf-meshnet</a>
If you wanted to start a mesh network in your town, is there advice on how to protect yourself from legal liability in case someone does something clearly illegal with it?<p>Do mesh operators have the same "safe harbor" protections?<p>What if the FBI shows up on your doorstep and says "give us access or go to prison" ?
Similar thing exists in Melbourne, Australia: <a href="http://www.melbournewireless.org.au/" rel="nofollow">http://www.melbournewireless.org.au/</a>
"To repurpose the famous A.J. Liebling statement, internet freedom is guaranteed only to those who own a connection. "And right now, you and me don't own the internet—we just rent the capacity to access it from the companies that do own it," Wilder says."
I guess it makes sense that the future could be dominated by multiple, parallel internets of varying degrees of freedom. The corporate controlled internet we know today is just the mainstream realm of YouTube and email, while darker DIY internets pop up that are the realm of torrents, bitcoin and various hackery. Kind of seems obvious this would happen eventually
Im quite surprised that noone mentioned AirJaldi - which has to be some of the most pioneering work in this area, over some of the most inhospitable terrain.<p>It was built to connect the Tibetan community in Dharmsala, India using modified, off the shelf hardware and custom software at some of the hardest mountainous terrain where such equipment can be deployed.<p>en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirJaldi
There is a huge community around wireless community networks in Germany. Checkout <a href="http://start.freifunk.net/" rel="nofollow">http://start.freifunk.net/</a><p>Don't miss the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks (<a href="http://2013.wirelesssummit.org/" rel="nofollow">http://2013.wirelesssummit.org/</a>).
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?page...</a><p>For best UX, set your "Referrer:" header to google.com<p>Also, I think Cisco paid over a billion for one mesh community network's project. I think a YC cofounder may have been involved in that project. Not sure. Its Cisco brand name is Meraki.<p>It appears portable autonomous networks (i.e. no telco needed) are useful and valuable for many, diverse reasons. I posit that if you can build your "no telco required" network from affordable parts and can get it to work consistently, then it has value, irrespective of whatever "intended uses" for it you might have in mind.<p>Of course, I could be wrong.
There's just a lot that has to be rethought for mesh networks to work as "show up with an antenna and you're on the internet/ are the internet". IP layer, I'm looking at you.<p>I remember being told about research being done on multi-core processing in the 70's, but no headway there could outpace the standard of shrinking the technology and increasing the clock rate. Now we may as well assume n-cores. It's my hope (because mesh networks sound way more democratized and just "seem" like the next logical way of scaling the internet) that antennas become cheaper at a faster rate than wired infrastructure (given the fairly inelastic cost of digging shit up) and mesh networks start to make sense.
This seems something like the Serval Project (<a href="http://www.servalproject.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.servalproject.org/</a>). Difference being that Serval is for mobile telecommunications meshes, rather than fixed(-ish) data connections.
Could someone build this into DD-WRT or Tomato and then build this on top of WIFI / WLAN? In a built-up conurbation, you have a high concentration of WIFI routers that have a short range but with such a large concentration, maybe it doesn't matter?
We've also got the same thing going on in Montreal :) <a href="http://wiki.reseaulibre.ca" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.reseaulibre.ca</a> (we're trying to figure out how to have a bilingual wiki...)
I live in the mountains (Central Arizona) and I have garnered some interest of other people in my community to set up a local mesh network. Really good in emergencies (e.g., east coast during Hurricane Sandy).
If you live in Seattle and you're curious about mesh networking, I highly recommend checking out <a href="http://seattlewireless.net/" rel="nofollow">http://seattlewireless.net/</a><p>They've been at it since 2000, have various nodes throughout the city and some impressive long distance directional links. (Seattle's topography provides some interesting challenges.) When I lived there in about 2005 there were regular wireless hack nights. Find Matt Westervelt or Rob Flickenger.
Submitted by me 2 days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266765" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266765</a>
What backbone protocol is largely used for these projects?
I only ask because the range of even 802.11ac would be a limiting factor in these sorts of networks.
I had been a member of the AWMN for some years. You can see a map of the nodes here: <a href="http://wind.awmn.net/?page=gmap" rel="nofollow">http://wind.awmn.net/?page=gmap</a><p>I remember AWMN had experienced a boost when the ADSL's were out but very expensive, so many people used to buy one and share it alltogether.<p>It has come a long way since.
Reminds me of the packet networks that we hams used to build back in the BBS days. Most of the stations went off air with wide spread commercial internet service and operator turn over, but there's a renewed interest with newer, cheaper, radio gear come out.<p>Also there's many cities with a first responders mesh network.
I'm surprised noone has linked to the FNF before. They seem to be one of the more organized mesh efforts in the US.<p><a href="http://thefnf.org" rel="nofollow">http://thefnf.org</a>