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If nothing is going to convince you otherwise then you really are being closed minded on this subject.

Regardless, Austria already has a free wifi mesh network going which connects to the internet in many different towns and areas.

http://www.funkfeuer.at/index.php?id=42&L=1

That pretty much disproves your "never going to happen" since it has already happened, in more then one country and for many years now. There are also similar things happening in Germany and France. I am also interested in starting one myself in my area.

It wouldn't take much to get the general public interested. You can put the routers in AP mode while still being part of the mesh network. This first encourages use of the network and allows normal users to connect which you can later on re-direct users to a page encouraging them to download the software that lets them become part of the mesh for perhaps faster speed. I'm sure that would get people using the network, people love getting something for free even if it's slower.

Next problem is coverage. This can only be solved by community investment. Set up some solar powered self sustaining mesh routers which act solely as traffic nodes to increase the coverage as the funkfeuer project have done.

Next problem would be connecting to the existing internet structure, that can be done lots of different ways by many different peers. The OLSR protocol has already thought of all this and find the quickest route out of the system.

All of the following can be done by just one person in the town. It only takes one person to purchase the equipment and hook it up around town (ignoring legal issues) for such a network to begin to take off. I'm personally interested in doing such a thing myself, so far I've costed it around the $100 per mesh node, the idea is that you hook up maybe 2 or 3 mesh nodes to your internet and let the thing organically grow out as other people hook themselves onto the mesh.

What I am describing isn't really forking the internet however finding a way to make the internet more peer to peer based all the way down to the home.

It's already happening, check out OLSR being ported to the android. With this your android can connect to an OLSR mesh network.

This is precisely why I think that the whole concept of an ISP is fundamentally flawed. Your Internet connection shouldn't be dependant on a company, government, or any other entity. Instead, we should build a mesh of wireless devices, where your computer communicates with nearby ones, they communicate with those further away, and so on all the way to the other side of the world. To solve the issues with latency, we could still have large publicly owned backbone wires serving the function of highways; but your actual connection would be provided by everyone near you.

This kind of systen would make it utterly impossible to cut anyone off the Net, and if implemented properly, would also make communications pretty much untracable. However, I'm afraid that it's already too late: now that powers that be know the threat networking presents them, they'll look at any such development like a hawk. Perhaps small and cheap "insect robots" could be used to get the base mesh going?

Well, this is the idea behind the http://www.funkfeuer.at/ city-wide network in Vienna, and part of the motivation between the MANET work in the IETF http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/manet-charter.html.

Heh. We've had people talking this talk since 1998 now, but whoever had tried to walk the walk discovered how hard it is to make work. These guys actually implemented something along those lines.

Netsukuku and other Wireless mesh based routing protocols nearly all share the same two limitations:

Backbone identification/allocation and latency mitigation...

Sure I can build a wireless mesh that's 500 hops deep in diameter, but if I'm on one edge trying to reach the other edge, even if I'm only 250 hops end to end, what the hell happens?

In most designs, the packet gets dropped somewhere between 50-255 hops...

Even protocols with good testing (OLSR) have problems upwards of 500 nodes.

(Which is why they're designing OLSR-NG)

Doesn't really matter tho, this would require massive adoption, which would require a killer app...

Design it and you create the Napster of the mesh network, except this one would learn from napster/kazaa and be totally decentralized.

If you do that, no oppressor, no law enforcement, and most of all no record company lobbyist, could stop it.

Just remember, it's a virtual pandora's box, if you succeed it's the freenet dilema on a global scale...

For a nice city-wide implementation of a mesh network, look here:
http://www.funkfeuer.at/index.php?id=42&L=1.
It's done mostly with cheap Linksys access points with OpenWRT and works really well. On this page http://www.funkfeuer.at/index.php?id=66&L=1 you can see that it meshes really nicely.

For a nice city-wide implementation of a mesh network, look here:
http://www.funkfeuer.at/index.php?id=42&L=1.
It's done mostly with cheap Linksys access points with OpenWRT and works really well. On this page http://www.funkfeuer.at/index.php?id=66&L=1 you can see that it meshes really nicely.