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How is your local mesh network doing?
http://curiousmatic.com/forget-your-isp-mesh-networks-are-the-future-of-the-internet/
Is there a local initiative in your area? If not, are you interested to start one? How about a free phone system within towns? Do you think this is going to work? If so, how long will it take?
Comments
It reminds of The Serval Project .
I'm living in Kangaroo state. Here people are still using ADSL2+ (thats what they call it). If you're lucky and close to the exchange, you get 10M for downlink, otherwise all 4M. so I don't know what you are talking. ：）
That is just for phone calls, however, can be modified to become a part of the meshes too, I think it will be a mixed architecture of a few routers on top of buildings and many phones roaming around. Maybe will take some time, but it will happen, the more the surveillance and censorship increases, the more incentives to buy a cheap phone for this purpose specifically, if not a router already.
Well, then you should be even more interested.
Expensive and slow internet prompted people in romania to build neighbourhood nets maintained by volunteers which banded up people together to share one connection and put together their resources. Many of them grew into full blown ISPs and romania is first medium sized country in the internet speed of quality top (HK and singapore are really just cties, not countries).
When you have expensive and slow internet, this is just an incentive, here net is cheap and fast while also relatively free (the romanian government is not really snooping around, but other governments do), but the phone tapping problem is really big.
Can't authorities just hack into the local network and mine information?
That is a bit hard with new encryption at every hop.
The authorities are usually too lame / dumb to do this. But there might be private organizations / individuals who will try to do this.
I really want to build a mesh network but I'm not sure how to do it. The distance between each client will be around 100-200 meters initially.
I honestly doubt it's the future. It's just like the internet now but make everything wireless, which is stupid. 2.4 GHz only has 3 non-overlapping channels in the US, for example. There's going to be a lot of interference. Moving to a 5 GHz network will result in more access points (costs more and uses more power). Even then, the number of channels might not be sufficient.
Consider IP addresses and how it's going to be routed. Who gets to say that IP is theirs and how do you keep someone from spoofing it? There's a few security concerns.
How is this going to work across oceans? Is it cost effective?
When we were in the UK, probably around 2000 - 2002, they used mesh networks in Hampshire. BT hadn't rolled out their broadband to a lot of areas in and around Basingstoke and they were taking their sweet time about it too.
I can't recall the name of the company, Locust something, but they set up mesh nodes across the whole area, great big antennas and all. There were a few base stations in the mix, all connected to Eutelsat to provide satellite internet connectivity to anyone with access to the mesh network.
It went well in the beginning, but as more and more people hopped on the bandwagon the performance was less than stellar. Connectivity was hit and miss at times, and severely weather dependant.
Still, when it worked it sure bet dialup
Edit - to answer your questions....
How about a free phone system within towns?
Someone, somewhere has to taken on the initial costs and from the looks of things it wouldn't be cheap to kit out an entire town/city with all the rules and regulations in place these days. The likelihood of them charging nothing for using the service is slim?
Do you think this is going to work?
There will always be a place for mesh networks in remote areas with no or few other options. Like I say, it was happening back in 2000 and is still used today. It's currently used up in Iqaluit (Canada) for example; www.meshnet.ca.
If so, how long will it take?
I don't see a mainstream adoption coming, ever.
I have an elderly neighbor who has laptop for email and news. I couldn't see the point of her paying for $50 a month for that, so i set a wireless bridge up for her in her house. That kinda counts I guess.
They can easily outlaw the use of wireless networks. In fact I think in many countries it's already (and was from the beginning) only legal to use WiFi within your premises, such as an apartment or house. Anything beyond that, and you need to obtain a commercial frequency license, which can easily cost thousands of dollars in fees and bribes. And it's pretty trivial to detect and locate WiFi transmitters using triangulating equipment, then cause major trouble for the owner. So I personally don't think WiFi mesh networks are some kind of magic bullet against the oppressive governments or anything of this sort.
That will be impossible for mobile phones. I mean, you cannot be forced to use wifi on your phone only at home, you cannot stop the signal to travel outside your house. While stupid rules can be made, there will always be ways around them, links between continents can be done over the existing infrastructure, same within same country but between towns. Nobody can stop me from renting a clear channel of fiber under the atlantic and pass through encrypted traffic. There will be sponsors, these days traffic is cheap, things like Tor relays can be used, you can always setup a router which connects to other routers via a simple protocol. The current Internet can be the backbone for this, as long as packets go encrypted from your device and arrive encrypted to the destination, snooping can only be done by intercepting every flow individually or breaking the encryption.
As for the "IP", nobody needs it, that is needed for current protocols, in a P2P mesh devices will use handles of other kind, such as something derived from MACs with some password and key. It is also possible to do this over the current infrastructure, same as freenet does, but you need a way to access it without having a way to be tracked attached, such as a service from an ISP.
When you're connecting from your phone to WiFi outside your house, it is the owner of the access point who obtains the mentioned frequency license, such as a cafe/airport/train/bus owners. And even then they are only legal to provide it within their cafe, airport or whatever.
One thing if it travels accidentally and there are no WiFi clients outside your house, another if you install directional antenna (or just a really powerful one) with the intent of reaching your neighbor some kilometers away.
That is not what i meant, you can connect to another phone which will not really be the client, nor the server, but a peer. Good luck forbidding wi-fi on phones.
There are laws which regulate the transmitting power, however, there is absolutely no legal ground to regulate powerful amplifiers at the receiving end. Communists tried that here, you could not find amplifiers for antennas int he shops so people could not receive neighbouring countries on TV or radio, but they made own amplifiers, had one in my building which was making good money and we received the yugoslavian tv from bucharest in pretty good conditions.