Being Wireless: Viral Telecommunications

sh4na writes "3G is out before it is ever in... because, as Nicholas Negroponte puts it, the *real* next generation is the Wi-Fi "lily pads and frogs" concept. Wouldn't it be great?"

Comments

It has potential, but...

[warpSpeed]

You need a fundamenatly different method of IP addressing, new routing protocols, and methods for interacting with the current net as it exists. Do you think that IANA will easly start putting out IP addresses for Mesh networks? Even with IPV6? The hardware is there, but more work needs to be done on the practical implementations of mesh networks and integrating them into the current infrastructure.

Then lets consider how ling it will take the "Bells" to wake up and notcie that thier stangle hold on the local telco market is threatened. It will not take too long for Congress to churn out some back-assward laws that stifle any creative use of Wi-Fi.

For this to work..

[N3WBI3]

For something like this to work the average user has to do alot of evolving. As we saw with the warchalking article last week there is a good amount of room for someone to try and abuse your network. In the case of most war-chalkers its harmless but there are occasions when it would not be.

I really like the Linksys Wireless Routers/Firewalls, you can set up a dhcp reservation list by MAC address so if you want to share with your neighbors you can get their mac and let them in. things like that combined with keeping track of security notices, and basic security masures could make such a network as secure as your average broadband connection.

Already happening in my town...

[ites]

Check out http://reseaucitoyen.be/, a project in Brussels that has been pushing this idea for some time.
It's in French. Translation: take a WiFi card, attach an external antenna.
Next, take an old Linux box, turn it into a router.
Aim towards another node, and you join the network.
Security is easy: treat this segment as being unsecure and use your existing firewalls.
Basically such an architecture creates a public infrastructure on which all kinds of services are possible.
It's cheap, robust, and a serious threat to the telcos.
Negroponte is right: 3G is the Telcos trying to define the future, when the future is busy happening somewhere else entirely!

Routing in a mesh network

[nchip]

Nice idea..

Unfortunatly reality isn't that simple. First, the routing problems are a lot different from those in tradiotional ip or gsm networks. Suppose you would have 1000+ wifi node network in your city, how would you find the way hopping from node to node to your friend? Even worse, many of the nodes are moving in cars and busses, and just as you have found a nice route through the network some of the nodes have moved or went down.

I'm not saying routing dynamic mesh network is impossible, it's just very hard, and can easily consume most of the bandwidth available.

Besides, if a hop is aroung 100m, a packet travelling 100km would be a 1000 hops away! A user of mesh network will miss the low latency and reliability of gprs networks with the current technology.

The main problem with mesh networks is that they do not scale very well.