The Ambitions and Challenges of Mesh Networks and the Local Internet Movement

Lashdots writes: Two artists in New York are hatching a plan to teach kids about the internet by building their own. They'll be creating a small, decentralized network, similar to a mesh network, to access other computers, and they'll be developing their own simple social network to communicate with other people. It's part of a growing movement to supplement the Internet with resilient, local alternatives. "And yet, while the decentralized, ad hoc network architecture appeals philosophically to tech-savvy users fed up with monopolistic ISPs, nobody’s found a way to make mesh networks work easily and efficiently enough to replace home Internet connections. Built more for resiliency than for speed, each participating router must continuously search for the best paths to far-flung machines. For now, that makes them of limited interest to many ordinary consumers who simply want to check their email and watch movies."

Comments

Intractable issue

[phantomfive]

The most intractable issue, even once the routing problem is solved, is that huge amounts of traffic are all going to a few places, and those places require a lot of bandwidth. For example, it would really suck to live next to Google's data centers, or even Slashdot's data centers, because a lot of traffic would be going through your wifi to get to Google.

IF traffic were spread evenly across the network, there wouldn't be a problem, but it's not. So you kind of need a backbone of some sort. (maybe someone solved this? Solution is unknown to me, though)

Re:Intractable issue

[Darinbob]

I've been doing mesh stuff for over a decade, though I'm not the expert in it. This is not easy stuff. There's some of it that might work in this case though: assume everyone is near enough to each other for good connectivity, and waste power and bandwidth because you're constantly reevaluating your routes but that's ok because these are probably constantly powered laptops. Ie, a dorm room.

But it's not going to work well for longer and less reliable links. They'll need to do the sorts of things that wifi doesn't do (I'm assuming wifi because they don't sound like the people to design their own radios). Then there will be the mess of optimizing their network so someone isn't stuck with horrid latency because of all the hops necessary to reach them. Line of sight issues are messy and need optimization too, probably need repeater or bridge nodes. If the nodes are mobile then the constant updating of routing tables wil screw things up as you move from one internet bridge to another. Maybe better if you have immobile wifi hotspots which are then connected to a mesh, an idea that's been around awhile.

Re:Intractable issue

[adolf]

You're making the (perhaps flawed) assumption that the purpose of such a mesh network is to access the greater Internet.

If I want Internet access, I'll just pay for it: Basic and relatively slow (or relatively fast, depending on point of view) always-on ISP service is cheaper than it ever has been.

If I want mesh network access, I'll just build a node and find some folks to peer with.

If I can't get to the Internet from the mesh, and can't get to the mesh from the Internet, I'm OK with that.

If Google elects to organize a mesh's data on their behalf, then they can co-locate on that mesh. If this results in poorer performance than they expect, they can add more geographically-diverse nodes of their own until they meet demand.

If someone wants to monetize or give away a path to interconnect the meshes to eachother or any other network (including the greater Internet), they do so on their own accord.

99.9999% of sites have 1-3 servers per continent

[raymorris]

Of the just over 1 billion web sites currently online, fewer than 0.000001% have more than 3 servers per CONTINENT. To have a server in each province / state would increase the costs several thousandfold.

There are about ten web sites in the world that could actually have servers in thousands of locations without going bankrupt.

There is a reason your neighborhood street that you live on isn't 2,000 miles long. It connects to a minor collector (street with several stop signs), which then connects to a major collector (street with a few stop signs), which then connects to an arterial (street with stop lights), which connects to a major arterial (three or more lanes each way), which then connects to a freeway, which then connects to an interstate. Streets are laid out like that because a hierarchy of larger and larger paths is the only halfway efficient way to move stuff from any house in the country to any other house. That's just as true with digital stuff - it only works when you put fat fiber under the rivers, through the deserts, and over the mountains.

Which means someone has to decide where to spend $20 million on the next chunk of backbone, and someone has to fork over $20 million and hope that it's the right technology, in the right place, at the right time, and implemented properly.