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I have been using open-mesh routers for years. http://www.open-mesh.com/ They are reliable, self-organizing and I can get at least 10 Mbps through one with Speedtest.net.

We've started using Open-Mesh https://www.open-mesh.com/ . It's cloud controlled which means the AP require internet access. It's also a mesh so it can be used for areas without a network connection or the mesh can continue working in the event a line does dead. For our budget conscious clients it definitely fits the bill.

Open-mesh.com provides a similar capability with remote web management for much lower cost.

If you need to do any wireless backhauls you can use Ubiquiti NanoBridges to create linked pockets of mesh routers.

Meraki needed a "liquidity event," Cisco may regret this purchase.

Fortunately, it doesn't get easier than plug n' play: http://www.open-mesh.com/ . My point is if you don't like the way somebody's conducting a service, become the competition, all 3g/4g devices also connect to... wifi. A $5 a month paywall would also make this project fairly profitable to anybody with the up-front investment cash.

Civilians are already building their own drones. See DIY Drones, etc.

Personally I'd like to see a drone airship that can hold a stable position around 70,000 feet (~21km) to use as a WiFi relay, which would fix the problem of getting a clear line-of-sight for point-to-point long-range wireless but good. I doubt it can be done reliably though. But if it could, and you built a fleet of them linked with Open Mesh, you could build a global drone communications network for fairly cheap. Call it Skynet... oh.

http://www.open-mesh.com/
The single band series is .11G mesh, $60 for a router and another $20 for the outdoor enclosure.
 

Mesh is great in urban environments where property rights restrict you from crossing roads and other people's land.
But mesh really makes very little sense in this environment. Its a fairly obscure technology, and getting it fixed and keeping it running may be problematic when the campsite geek's RV pulls out for the season.

Look, they have power to all of these router anyway. Why not STRING the cable or use WIFI over Powerline to feed the routers?

Putting in ground-burial cat5e is not that hard and poses no risk to the existing utilities. Its about $300 for a thousand foot roll. Two guys and a rented Mini Trencher can probably install all the cable runs in one day.

You don' have to trench it in more than 4 inches deep, and you only need to go that deep to keep people from tripping on it. You can hand trench when you get near your pipes and power runs.

http://www.open-mesh.com/
The single band series is .11G mesh, $60 for a router and another $20 for the outdoor enclosure.
The dual band does N, $100 for a router and $40 for the enclosure.

Either way you get mesh networking that's really damn simple to configure and has a public and a private network. Public can be open or encrypted, supports individual bandwidth limits, and has a splash page feature for logins or selling airtime. Private network is encrypted and unrestricted.

Love mesh networking. No cables, network topography isn't set in stone, you just toss another router into the mix wherever needed and you can cover wherever you want.

I'd look into some of the fairly inexpensive openmesh routers...they're great for extending networks (or running jasager).

http://www.open-mesh.com/

Check http://www.liveport.com/ and http://www.open-mesh.com/

IMO Open mesh should do the job. 60$ to 99$ a piece, no dependency to third parties (unlike meraki); free, open source. Zero config, just plug in power and go. You can centrally manage things like bandwidth, splash page, etc.

Meshes have no practical coverage limits, can be finetuned as you are using many small APs (which connect wirelessly to each other) to customize the coverage areas, only one of them needs a link to the lan/wan.

Meraki started nice, but became proprietary and expensive, open mesh retained the openness of the original MIT project, and is even more reliable.

Openmesh. Support for a public and a private network, standard encryption choices on both, coupon codes could be used to limit guest vs parking lot access. Just have to run a cable to strategic points so your bandwidth isn't completely limited by wireless speeds at the last mesh hop.

http://www.open-mesh.com/

I request http://www.open-mesh.com/ to help them out

I've got an open-mesh router which does allow you to do that, you can also serve up ToS and charge if you're so inclined to do so. But it's nice because you can make it so that none of the devices can see each other and you definitely can throttle the guest accounts.

... I can't scream it loud enough MESH NETWORKS!!... if everyone had a $50 mesh network router in their house there would be no ISP or single point of failure http://www.open-mesh.com/ ps... I have no affiliation with open mesh.. just always dreamed of a day when the internet could become a mesh network.. and yes I know it's just a DREAM

Better yet, wait for the next Comcast outage, then reconnect everyone. Just reconnect everyone to your neighborhood wifi mesh with something like open mesh or LocustWorld.

Here you go

http://www.kingsbridgelink.co.uk/
http://www.open-mesh.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_community_network
http://freenetproject.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeshBox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking

http://www.open-mesh.com/

http://www.open-mesh.com/
closest thing I've found so far.

I'd vote for Indymedia, 2600, Wikileaks, Pirate Bay, Pirate Parties International, the EFF, FSF, and cDc communications to regulate the Internet. And Open Meshshould be the direction of growth. Ok then, we aren't going to get to coordinate "The Internet", we'll settle for The ParallelNet. There's enough geeks for it.

Once the routers and cabling run over neighbors houses and not through companies and governments, we'll have a public internet.

Yeah, Open Mesh has had this capability for quite a while with some extra bells and whistles.

This is a step up from defaulting to the empty string that we currently do, or an extremely weak one like "password," or "1234." At least this way it gives the person trying to log in some way of knowing whether it was an accident to leave it open or not, and some minimal degree of security rather than being completely wide open.

They should still be running their traffic through a VPN to a known secured point, but they'd have a bit more security than they would otherwise have as they'd only have to trust the hot spot provider.

But, I think most folks would be better off going with something like open mesh As it gives you a way of authenticating people for free without having to handle it on a case by case basis or make it completely open.

If you want it to be open for visitors and whoever else wants in, there's solutions for that. Open mesh includes the possibility, although at this point, they don't seem to allow a proper way of securing it other than just putting in a long passphrase of gibberish and not telling people what it is.

That's what open-mesh was created specifically to do. The devices themselves are cheap and easy to set up. And they provide you with efficient tools to connect up to billing services and authentication if you wish to.

• 3 My Open-Mesh boxes cost..... $45 each
• 3 Plug computers were.............. $100 each
• 3 Mini USB 500G drives were.... $110 each
• Total ~$750.00

I made one of the plugs my apache server, another the Samba storage and the 3rd for various uses including Ubuntu Desktop I could log into and manage everything from a GUI. I have all my music/video's in my house coming through these now.
It all fit in a large shoe-box. Total cost was Less than $750. Total power consumption: Less than 35 watts.
The Open-Mesh is managed via a browser and uses Google Map to show/diagram/locate your Open-Mesh network (if it was ever dispersed over a larger area ... like a shopping center etc) and it will send you sms and/or email if there is ever a network problem such as congestion, an open-mesh goes offline or down etc
It actually works pretty well. But it showed me how much possibility these little devices have.

As wifi use becomes more & more ubiquitous, it would seem beneficial to change from a model where everyone sets up their own walled-off private networks to a model where all wifi packet distribution is shared in a mesh (with automatic routing protocols and such). Something like parasite.net from Cory Doctorow's story, or this: http://www.open-mesh.com/

Instead of having so many AP's & devices "shouting" and competing for access to airspace/time in an apartment building, devices would function more like cellular phones and just "talk quietly" to the nearest AP. APs could also coordinate with each other automatically to find decent channel assignments. In short, a system of cooperation beats everyone doing their own thing.

You could place a few OpenMesh units around the area. http://www.open-mesh.com/store/

Have you tried Meraki? Google bought into the company awhile ago and it all runs on Linux. There are proprietary bits nowadays so you can't put your own distro in place of the original code. However less than $200 for solid, lifetime warranty, outdoor gear is nice. The built in meshing control is impressive. The ranges with omni antennas are great. Also millions of users have connected to the 'net via meraki equipment according to the website. I'm currently writing this on a meraki mesh, 4th hop from the gateway, without a hiccup.

I know it's fun to roll your own solution. If it's for your own personal needs I'd say go ahead with any of the variety of open source projects doing this. If you absolutely don't want a closed source then look at http://www.open-mesh.com/. It took the concept of Meraki and went totally open source. It's a neat idea but having transferred over a terabyte on meraki gear I'm completely happy and wouldn't want the headaches of hardware and software not backed by a commercial company.

Good luck on your WISP venture. As anyone in the ISP field will tell you - you're gonna need it!

Yilch, hadn't noticed that before. Not that I don't have a box lying around I could stuff it in, but I'd have been a bit disappointed.

Slap this wireless mesh router on one of the ports(or integrate it), stick that combo in everyones house and have some really delightful darknets that only touch the public net for backhaul.

I don't really like the fonera scheme. The only reason i even know such thing exists, is because someone brought me a device with the fon sticker on it and i started researching how to remove their customized openwrt with either true openwrt or dd-wrt, which i did successfully, and the device became a regular wifi ap.

Fonera is not even a mesh, its plain regular wifi access, for which you have to have an account with them (centralized), by means of paying a fee, or sharing your wifi. Terrible.

The hardware they use is good, strong and compact, atheros based iirc. These are the same used in the much better open-mesh project, which is what meraki could have been before it corrupted itself into oblivion.

Open-mesh lets you mess with the hardware all you want, does not force you to authenticate to third parties, does not forbid you from modifying/installing your own software. Its the opposite of Fonera and Meraki, in the spirit of the Free Software they run things with; they just provide you the tools (hardware and software) to roll your own wifi mesh and do with it whatever you want, no third parties involved.

The technology discussed in this article wouldn't help much for that. What would help are the $50 open-mesh mini routers.

There is an open hardware platform to go along with the open software platform.

The hardware available right now is built by Accton, and sold in a plain brown box, with no logo on the unit. You can buy them for $50 each from http://open-mesh.com/, or for $40 in packs of 20. You can build a product out of them if you want, logo them, even put a nice little retail slip cover over them if that's what your application requires.

But, the cool bit: The SKU is open. So, you can call up Accton in China and order a shipping container or two full if you want to, at a cost a bit over $30 a unit (10,000 units quantity). This is really interesting, it's a bit like if Delta let you order the Meraki SKU - or if Apple's contract manufacturer allowed you to order up a batch of iPhones, FOB Taiwan.

And, the platform is a reference design, so if you don't like Accton or can find a better price elsewhere, you could have someone else build it too.

Open software, open hardware, open manufacturing. Very cool.

Check Open Mesh. Just like Meraki, but open.

This decline was something people have foreseen for a while. There is a rapidly maturing collection of open source projects to create a real open source Meraki replacement (disclaimer: I am helping develop one of these).

ROBIN is an open source mesh firmware that can run on reflashed Meraki nodes (well, I don't think it's "allowed" by Meraki anymore, since they've changed their license agreement to forbid 3rd party firmware and have made it really difficult to access the bootloader).

Open-Mesh is the dashboard management service that ROBIN nodes are configured to use. The guy who develops this actually started working on this dashboard when Meraki was still Roofnet - compare the Open-Mesh dashboard to the Meraki dashboard, the similarity is obvious. Also, you can buy pre-flashed, fully featured ROBIN nodes from Open-Mesh.com for $50 each, the same price that Meraki sells their crippled "standard version" of their nodes.

OrangeMesh, is an open-source version of the dashboard being developed that will allow you to host your own dashboard server, completely freeing you from reliance on any third party. You can check out it's progress here.

For those who want to build their own mesh, check out the open-source ROBIN project. They are building a complete plug-and-play mesh networking package. they are even configured to automatically connect to the Open Mesh Dashboard so you can manage your network. Open Mesh will start selling pre-flashed nodes this week at their site.