The Grid, Our Cars, and the Net

Wired is running a piece on the big idea of Robin Chase — the founder of Zipcar — that we need to build our smart power grid on open standards and include cars as nodes in a mesh network. "'Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and tanks and airplanes are running around using mesh networks,' said Chase. 'It works, it's secure, it's robust. If a node or device disappears, the network just reroutes the data.' And, perhaps most important, it's in motion. ... Build a smart electrical grid that uses Internet protocols and puts a mesh network device in every structure that has an electric meter. Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform. Add a mesh router. A nationwide mesh cloud will form, linking vehicles that can connect with one another and with the rest of the network. It's cooperative gain gone national, gone mobile, gone open."

Comments

Too much to lose

[shogun]

Big ISPs and phone companies have too much to lose to allow this to ever happen.

It would be too hard to be tapped by various 3 letter government agencies so they wouldn't like it either.

Sure, but

[g-to-the-o-to-the-g]

Maybe instead of continuing to focus on the dinosaur that is the automobile, more effort should be put into building very a efficient mass transit infrastructure. Just a thought.