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)