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Ask Slashdot: Could We Build A Global Wireless Mesh Network?
An anonymous reader wants to start a grassroots effort to build a self-organizing global radio mesh network where every device can communicate with every other device -- and without any central authority.
There is nothing in the rules of mathematics or laws of physics that prevents such a system. But how would you break the problem up so it could be crowdfunded and sourced? How would you build the radios? And what about government spectrum rules... How would you persuade governments to allow for the use of say, 1%, of the spectrum for an unlicensed mesh experiment? In the U.S. it would probably take an Act of Congress to overrule the FCC but a grassroots effort with potential for major technology advances backed by celebrity scientists might be enough to tilt the issue but would there be enough motivation?
Is this feasible? Would it amass enough volunteers, advocates, and enthusiastic users? Would it become a glorious example of geeks uniting the world -- or a doomed fantasy with no practical applications. Leave your best thoughts in the comments. Could we build a global wireless mesh network?
Is this feasible? Would it amass enough volunteers, advocates, and enthusiastic users? Would it become a glorious example of geeks uniting the world -- or a doomed fantasy with no practical applications. Leave your best thoughts in the comments. Could we build a global wireless mesh network?
https://freifunk.net/en/what-i...
The problem would be establishing trunks to carry enough traffic to make it worthwhile, or figuring out a way to distribute the traffic over many links so as to (again) make it worthwhile. I think streaming would be hard. And of course it would be an ecosystem, in which bad things could grow, just like the net is now. You have to solve the problem of DDoS to make this work, I think, and I don't know of anybody who has any idea how to solve that problem.
I live in Australia, you insensitive drongo!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Or APRS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_System
It will be licensed.
Mesh Networks, especially with high node density, don't scale well.
There is no business (ie. government) that would allow this to happen. Period...
Even if you somehow managed to get it started, it will be regulated away. I mean you can't have people doing their own thing, doing it cheaply, and helping others. That's the devil's work!
Mesh networking can be combined with micropayments to create incentives to build links. There is no need for it to be crowdfunded or sourced, appart from the protocol developtment.
It is way too easy to just pay some cable company and not think for oneself.
You need to convince or persuade a lot of people. That is what makes this a hard problem. Geeks and nerds aren't particularly great at convincing or persuading people, but they're the people who would have to do it, because they're the kind of people who would want a global wireless mesh network. I know I've thought about it. Who hasn't?
IPv6 addresses are allegedly distributed in a way that reduces the routing table bloat seen in IPv4. With no central authority, how do you manage that?
Storage and processing are both getting cheaper sorta fast-ish, so it may be practical now or in the near future to have a routing table with 2^36 entities (or whatever) and 3 or 4 entries per entity. But how do you pass it around? If my westbound link goes down, I'm no longer the fastest relay to half of the world from a not-trivial portion of my region. How many megabytes is that update?
I'm not sure that the problem is unsolvable, but I don't have any reason to believe that someone out there is sitting on a revolutionary global mesh routing algorithm, waiting for the right time to publish.
See that "Preview" button?
The Governments would demand no "internet", all kinds of limits on what could be said, what kind of data could be networked and who would have to fill in official paperwork for the network.
Once all that is done its POE to the roof and getting a dish network ready.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
A very large mesh network *used* to be possible. Not so much anymore.
> There is nothing in the rules of mathematics or laws of physics that prevents such a system.
In fact there the laws of physics DO put some serious limitations on it, especially a true mesh network. In a nutshell, the frequencies that carry over distance and through walls have limited bandwidth, which must be shared by *everyone* who wants to use any kind of wireless communication. Frequencies above 10 Ghz have a lot of bandwidth, but don't go through drywall. Also of course high frequency waves have high energy - think microwave oven.
Mesh networks are horribly inefficient in how they use the limited bandwidth available in desirable frequency bands. You can do much, much better if you have local transmitters around 1 Ghz communicating with local towers which form a backbone connected via high power dishes, or better yet fiber optics. There is a lot more usable bandwidth to go around using the backbone topology rather than wasting most of the bandwidth by using a mesh. That brings up the issue of who owns and controls the backbones.
Given the physics of it all, back in 1990 you could have built a mesh network to replace the wired connections of the day - 48Kbps max bandwidth, with each person using it an hour or two per day, on average. On a new network built today, you'd want 100,000 to 10,000,000 Kbps, with each person using it ten hours per day. So roughly 40,000 times as much total bandwidth. Not going to happen. Not with the physics we know in this century.
There *is* a way we can 40,000 times as much bandwidth as we had in the the 1990s, though. We actually have such a system working in much of Texas. It involves setting the greedy corporate ISPs up in a situation where to make money, they have to compete with other greedy corporate ISPs. Customers choose the best one, so an ISP can't make money if they suck. It's not a perfect system, but it beats the hell out of what I hear people on the coasts complaining about - a single monopoly ISP protected by a government franchise, an ISP that sucks but they don't care because nobody is allowed to offer competing service.
socialism doesn't work. some people don't believe in utopias and for the betterment of mankind crap. when you learn that you'll be better off in this world.
all you dreamers please read up on Fallacies of Distributed Computing http://www.rgoarchitects.com/Files/fallacies.pdf first.
Grass roots also means comsumer level gear. What do you think the distance for even a semi reliable hop is? Probably well under 100 meters. For the mesh to work well, you want more connections to neighbor node, but that also means you cannot have very directional antennas which can boost range. Then think about the physical distance to some of the sites you may want to visit and do a little bit of elementary school math to see approximately how many hops that will take. The latency through each mesh node is probably 1 ms or more (and the more traffic, the worse it will get).
It can work in the sense that packets could get through but with such long lantencies and low thruput that you may be better off using avian carriers.(RFC-2549)
Next question.
There are no laws of physics in the way.
We cannot agree on global declarations of human rights, property rights, units of measurement, or basically anything else.
So, no. We could not build a global mesh network. It's physically possible with technology from 10-15 years ago, but it is clearly impossible with the current political concept of "global."
Routing tables would be fairly hard to figure out how to handle effectively, especially if each device in the mesh network could move around ( like if we were using a cell phone as a node in the network ). The routes would have to update extremely fast with extreme variability in each nodes transfer speeds, latency, reliability, etc. Not something we can currently do fast enough. Even if we limit ourselves to stationary nodes there may be a large number of hops, which means fairly long latency. So we'd need a trunk, which almost sounds like your typical ISP.
Then we have the issue of distance between nodes. Depending on population density, each node may be out of range of any other node. Making the idea fall apart for any place with reasonably low population density. I'm imagining this will be a mostly wireless type mesh network ( as the OP seems to indicate asking about frequency allocations ). So, we could increase transmission power, but then we'll have problems with collision avoidance algorithms increasing latency since we'd have to have confirmation that no other devices will be communicating over a fairly large radius of transmission assuming people will want to pay enough for such a large transmitter/receiver, which also means certain nodes would become trunk nodes, fairly similar to what an ISP already will do. Since we have such a large amount of distance between nodes in certain areas we'll most likely have disconnected networks. Especially over oceans and uninhabitable mountainous regions.
HAM radio is actually a possibility to build a network like this along with bluetooth and wifi over short/medium distances. So there does exist some spectrum already for experimental/commercial devices. But there's another problem, if this network does get built, there would need to be a sharing of some of the spectrum for this network, as only certain frequencies have the capability of being transmitted long enough distances, or being capable of anything other than line-of-sight type communication. I'm sure I'm missing some problems with creating a world wide mesh network. These issues would severely limit the feasibility of any global type mesh network, unfortunately.
Would you be comfortable connecting your IoT devices with strangers? Probably not.
You mean like packet radio?
How would you persuade governments to allow for the use of say, 1%, of the spectrum for an unlicensed mesh experiment?
1% of the spectrum is HUGE. You don't need 1%. However, you don't have to convince anyone because you can just use one of the ISM bands because they are free to use for whatever.
However...
The problem with a large-scale mesh network is that you are going to end up needs to make a LOT of hops just to reach your destination. With every hop, you get a little bit of latency and that number adds up quickly. I think to do this on a global scale in a way comparable to our current system that you would need a ASIC to do all the routing quickly. If you are serious about this, you can start off by using an FPGA to manage the radio and routing. You need to design the routing so that it can restructure routes quickly based on throughput, including zero throughput.
If you build it, democratic governments would be hardpressed to try and stop the general public from using it, so they would approve it's use even if previously denied because they could easily be replaced by someone who will approve it.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So you saw the new episode of Silicon Valley too, eh?
Consider prototyping this concept on a platform people are already using so as to facilitate its proliferation. If there is a desire to develop a more proprietary device and / or secure a block of the broadcast spectrum from the FCC, those sorts of advancements would have a lot more momentum behind them if there was already such a network in existence used by lots of people who wanted an improved version of the platform.
The more the mainstream net gets less desirable or possible for information exchange, the more mesh networks will become desirable. The way things are going, seems inevitable these days but we'll see... Either way, the method of exchange of off-line information is well overdue for some modernizing. Carpe Diem
Amateur radio - world wide - non-profit (by law). There is a bandwidth issue, of course, and some countries are harder than others (don't hold your breath for a link to P5 (N Korea)).
No, we can't build a really GLOBAL mesh network, with current technology we can't cover the seas so it will not be global. Small islands are also problematic unless we fix the previous problem.
Next problem is that none of the established carriers would be interested in a global mesh network, they will try everything to prohibit data to/from the mesh to go to thru their networks.
Furthermore some countries do not allow open networks, it is more or less illegal, even in some EU countries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Before you even consider this, get the FCC on your side. Get a group of savage lawyers who know how to fight. It's got to be air tight legal permission. If you think that they are not going to be out to squash your competition like a bug, 'you got another thing comin'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
sure, but you'd need nodes and supernodes and ultimately ultranodes to handle traffic distribution (probably one supernode per 350 users handling id handshakes and content cross filing) and although the each node would be network-selected on a adhoc basis they would generally be sticky (central server-like) and would be voluntary, in as much your personal node, if you were running one, would be saturated, swamped as it were with boring traffic and housekeeping duties as opposed to the fun stuff of p2p chit chat, file transfers and your general stick it to the man type outlaw activities. meanwhile there really wouldn't be all that much communication outside the local node neighborhoods (internodes), certainly no bandwidth heavy file sharing throughput across nodes and across the country. but hey, 350 pcs linked up can pump a lot swag. i've run a global waste mesh for a decade, serverless, stealthy and bulletproof, piggybacked on the internet of course, but i could set up something similar using personal device wi-fi only and go all off grid, at least within a few miles of any central node.
- js.
There was a mesh project in my area that was getting up to quite a few nodes but no internet service providers would allow any gateways from the mesh to the internet to exist. Multiple attempts to make a deal with several ISPs were met with demands to pay full residential account fees for every single node in the mesh before any connection would be allowed.
It was seen as competition to be stamped out.
So to do it you need some sort of bargaining power, such as a government telling the ISPs to give you a chance, or some way to get around the ISPs completely. If there is a long way to the next major city it's a bit tricky to get there without an ISP providing the link.
The first thing is getting the F.C.C. to add a new licensing test and small frequency range for extreme novice operators. The test needs to be online, since in many areas it is hard to find 2 seasoned H.A.M. operators to test you at the current novice level. But with this new restricted operators level, you would still get an operators call sign. Then the hardware needs to be inexpensively packaged, but powerful enough to traverse in hilly or tree infested areas; to reach other persons locally. But reaching a more powerful carrier station would be more helpful. Then the software for the hardware(drivers) and the applications, needs to be under a libre/opensource license. Next is getting the F.C.C. to allow encrypted transmissions in this extreme novice frequency range. Meaning allowance of the intent to obscure the transmissions contents. They could keep the part about making sure that the transmission obscuring code is available to the public. This is aimed at the U.S.. Other countries may have greater or lessor restrictions to overcome. I have also seen some interesting work on UHF networking. But this might be a more complex licensing issue. A few years back people were modifying older linksys routers to operate on frequencies specific to H.A.M. operators. They managed to get some good networking in largely populated areas. But the main turn off was getting the initial license and getting through trees and hills. No one wants to have a huge antenna in their backyard. I really think H.A.M. is a disappearing art. Getting more people involved could produce more interested persons. Many of the bars to entry have already been dropped. You used to build a radio by hand before you could get your first license. That is no longer true. I think a key point would be that the (proposed) Extreme Novice license would need companion equipment that is certified not to break the rules of the (proposed) Extreme Novice license. The only way I see around this is part 15. Which is really bad for distance, unless you goes with point to point transmissions. You'd need narrow focused antenna/dishes. And likely a antenna/dish for every person linked to you in a chain of communication. No very fault tolerant. Many points of failure. Other options include extremely high audio frequencies (bad idea) and powerful transmission of focused light (lazer). Both kinda suck. No matter what method is used, it might be best to think about getting the most out of each transmitted bit. Things like javascript and torrent are nice aims. But realistically the fidonet systems of the dial-up bbs systems would be much better. Some H.A.M. radio hardware even has built in bbs software for message relaying. Since most options for a strong network are going to be aggressively dismissed, by the powers that be; you'll likely need to focus on a system that works around intermittently connected devices. Once connected they exchange a large amount of data for everyone on the network. The more often you connect, the better service you get and provide. But those that don't connect often can still easily get any information that wasn't meant to be private. In a system like this, you can encrypt in any way you'd like. The largest issue is connecting people over long distances. That is going to be the hard part.
Big business that uses radio frequencies would not want this to happen because we'd avoid paying them their inflated prices for the data transferred over this network. They'd have their lobbyists buy off the legislators to prevent it from happening.
Yes, you might well talk people into investing a little for a node on your mesh network. But just like Bitcoin, it would almost immediately be corrupted into something used to commit crimes. First and foremost it would end up being like another Darknet for pedophiles to traffick in child porn. Right on the heels of that would be filesharing of all kinds, heavily in movies and TV shows. Before too long someone would start setting up servers and it's subversion into a full-on Darknet would be complete; you'd have illegal drugs and other contraband, and crime-for-hire freely available. This would exist for a while before law enforcement got wind of it, and people would start being rounded up and their nodes confiscated, starting with the pedophiles and drug dealers; some outraged politicians would pass legislation making it illegal, or there would be application of existing laws to shut the whole thing down as illegal, and it would all fall apart. Corporations would back all this police action because a free mesh network would cut into their profits anyway.
> > Also of course high frequency waves have high energy
> What?
E=hn where E is energy in joules, n is frequency in hertz, and h is Planck's constant. In other words, energy is *directly proportional* to frequency.
Its quite intuitive when you think of a sound wave, rather than electromagnetic, especially a sound wave in water. Imagine a sound wave which moves 1 gram of water. Moving 1 gram of water 10 times in a second (10 hertz) represents a lot less energy than moving the water 1,000 times in that same second.
This is one of several reasons that lower frequencies are preferred for long-distance communication. Because it takes less energy to get the same amplitude (particle count) at low frequencies, they are more efficient. Atmospheric attenuation is the biggest reason).
On the coasts, many areas are still under legacy (and even new) franchise agreements. The New York City franchise map is a good example that is readily available - provider A is allowed to operate on one side of the street, on the other side only provider B can offer service. Customers get whichever ISP is assigned to their area by the bureaucrats (who get donations from the ISPs). The ISPs are free to suck, because there's no competition.
There was some hoopla around here a couple of years ago with people saying "franchise monopolies are now illegal". Not quite. The rule from the Obama administration was "before issuing a *new* franchise monopoly, a city must hold a meeting."
In many parts of Texas, we don't have the franchise (mandated monopoly) system. Instead, new providers are allowed to enter an area and offer better service. These are called "overbuilders" because they build new infrastructure, using modern technology, right on top of the incumbent's legacy network. Many provide "cable" TV and internet.
The last 10 years or so have been a very important time for overbuilders because previously, the incumbent had a huge advantage in that they already had the infrastructure in place. It's major expense for an overbuilder to replicate all the wiring that the legacy provider already has. The incumbent doesn't have that current cost. In some areas, the phone company was providing DSL service using wiring they laid 60 years ago.
Now that we're going to high-speed fiber, the incumbent no longer has the same advantage. Their decades-old copper infrastructure isn't an overwhelming advantage any more. Overbuilders come in and lay fiber, often with short lengths of high-quality, high-capacity coax for the last few hundred feet. In some parts of Austin there are four to six providers to choose from. Even in some very small towns there are two cable TV companies, competing to have the best, most reliable, and fastest network. If they one doesn't do a good job, customers don't choose them, and the company doesn't make money. Companies like to make money, of course, so they don't suck, not to the extent that they suck in guaranteed monopoly areas (government franchises). The lead engineer for my city of 150,000 gave me his cell phone number, telling me to call him directly if I have any problems and customer service doesn't take care of it properly.
> list of reasons to move to Texas will gain another entry.
We'd love to have you! Please bring that list with you. A lot of Californians move out here and I ask why they came. They came, perhaps, because we have good jobs and a low cost of living. A programmer II can afford a 2,600 square foot house here. Within a week they start telling me about things we should change in Texas, to be more like California. We should have California-style policies, they say, and they don't hear me when I point out those policies drive up costs and increase unemployment. Not that they are necessarily BAD policies. Maybe the benefits outweigh the costs, in some people's opinion. Fine. But if you want to do things the California way, and get the results California gets, it's easy to just stay in California. No need to come to Texas and try to turn it into California.
> Texans have a problem believing too many lies, as usual.
The various ISPs I can order service from are lies, they don't actually exist? That's weird since I'm using the service to post this message.
Apparently *one of us* was lied to.
I work from home, so reliable service is important to me. For that reason I asked around to see which ISP is best in this area. Fellow customers didn't steer me wrong - I've not had any down time so far, nor have I had any billing issue.
Hey Miss Mash, can we get you to add some more moderation categories like GAY, RETARDED, RASSIST, etc.? And then do away with this STUPID mod points system? Rob Malda has been dead for years. He'd probably agree it's time to move on at this point.
We could totally do a 'mesh network', however it would not be a mesh network containing all multi-directional antennas. It would require layering point to point nodes for long distance travel with localize links using either multi-directional antennas, or an array of narrow antennas (say 4x90 degrees, each driven by a separate wifi router.) There would be dead spots, and it would not be the mostly seamless experience of cell phone access. However it is certainly possible, especially with IPv6 module addresses and regional 'base stations' for public mobile ips to be based out of, to produce a global mesh network that would offer an alternative to the current and increasingly censored public hardwired internet.
The questions are: Will enough people organize to do it? What protocol will they used (ipv4 and 6 are out if you want to use a complete address space and not make people waste money on a 'land grab' like IANA/ICANN/etc all are pushing.) And if people do do it, how will they keep consistent international/inter-continental uplinks going when a large collection of counrtries don't want a citizen controlled infrastructure to get around their restrictions?
Food for thought. It can be done. I've done some tentative planning for something similiar (You would need around 100-300 deep sea buoys depending on 'cheap' tower height to reach between America and Europe/Africa/Asia/Australia continents and at least one 4000+ foot one to run the last 300-400 miles offshore to avoid EEZ claims/buoy takedowns by hostile domestic nations. Honestly they will probably take them out either way.) If you use something other than the 802.11(x) standards the distances and ranges change, but the hardware outlay for those could allow a few gigabit using directional antennas and reasonably low transmission powers.
No.
Yes.
The death penalty is public torture and it does not stop murder.
For some time now the death penalty has been the opposite of torture, with great lengths gone to to insure it is eater painless or instant.
I think we all want a "shadow" internet that includes all the features of the current one except that it would be off limits to monetization.
HA HAHAHAHAHAH HAH HA AH AH AH AHAHA H AAH AH AHA HA AH AHAH AH A HAH HA *gasp*!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Old joke - Lone Ranger and Tonto (his Indigenous sidekick)
Lone Ranger -Well Tonto, it looks as if we are surrounded by the (fill in the tribe name here) and WE are in trouble.
Tonto - Who do you mean by WE - white man?
By WE is that the royal WE or the - here let me give away all of my hard work for free - nerds of the world.
Don't need to say any more really.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
As the owner of a wireless ISP I can only laugh at the ridiculousness of the suggestion. Mesh networks in themselves are horribly inefficient for any scale beyond a single static location. Then factor in that the slices of spectrum which are actually capable of the task are but a tiny fraction of the whole. Then factor in that devices would have to significantly grow in size in order to have antennas and radios capable of participating in such a network.
The whole idea is just silly nonsense coming from people who have never worked with wireless at any significant scale.
The above critics are right - while such a construct might be possible in theory, the practical difficulties may be insurmountable.
But there is one technology that could make it, if not feasible, at least a bit closer to that goal: Content-addressed networking. Build a decentralised store for static content into the network from the beginning. That way you don't need to get people from all over the world all trying to access one server to download a popular file - if the person next door already has it, they can take the file from that much-closer source automatically. I suggest using IPFS as the base for that functionality, as it's already decently mature, reliable, and has a very elegant data structure that can scale endlessly.
Now you still need your mesh to enable real-time communication, but you've taken almost all the load relating to static content distribution off if it. The capacity requirements are slashed.
The FCC manual is only 180 odd pages long.. there's lots of public bandwidth, cheap digital radios. I'm for it. CB radio, 'the citizens band' radio comes to mind. Curios Sceptic
Now that a great many people have unlimited cell phone minutes, enabling calling across entire continents why couldn't a new version of the old BBS-style store-and-forward systems be revived?
If there were a standard smartphone app that could consume any sort of 'share this' intent (thinking Android, don't know the iOS equivalent) and send it on via SMS/MMS or even encoded audio calls to a few peers, it would work the same as the old BBS systems for propagating data via multiple hops.
It wouldn't be real-time, but it would be fine for small packets of messages, important updates during protests and emergencies, etc.
The entire concept of 'long-distance' is pretty much obsolete so let's just use the cell networks. If the goal is, however, high-bandwidth video streaming and file sharing, well that's a bit moe difficult due to data caps.
We have 120 meshnodes here, all with internet connectivity. But only 2% of these devices can actually hear each other.
We need more transmission power and/or meshnode creaters should stop buying cheap routers with useless antennas.
AREDN The Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network, and a node map
The still-widely-deployed predecessor, BroadBand Hamnet
A port of this mesh to the RaspberryPi, HSMMPI
Previous versions were called ARESNET and HSMMNET.
And there's also the European ham network, here and a map.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
The bandwidth issue is a different problem, and I'd argue one that is irrelevant - if you consider the use case of this samizdat network. The tl;dr here is that providing bandwidth to support commercial enterprises like Google or Netflix isn't free. All those fibers and satellites and switches and the BOFHs needed to keep them working 24/7 cost real money, but the money is spent because it earns *more* money back [theoretically, LOL]. You could make an argument that if every person in the US was willing to spend say $5/month on this enterprise, they'd collectively have the financial backing to keep a fairly sophisticated network operational - but this isn't true, partly because of the physical limitations of these mesh networks that everyone else has discussed above, and partly simply due to your $5/month, spent on *your* node, not being able to contribute to any sort of economy of scale. You can't get a formula 1 car by getting together with 299 of your friends and buying 300 Yugos. But on the other hand... for the actual use case where this network shines, you don't need one. Google has huge bandwidth because its customers have huge, very realtime needs and if those needs aren't met, those customers will go elsewhere. But getting an answer in 0.0001sec to "how are babby formed?" without the government knowing isn't the use case for people who need to let the world see cellphone pictures of that government digging mass graves or publicly executing teenagers. They need to exfiltrate small amounts of data anonymously past specific barriers, and their needs are not very realtime. If it takes 10 minutes to get a single JPEG past the gatekeeper, that's fine.
The important points here are a) that the data doesn't need to stay in this global mesh for its whole life - in fact, it becomes most useful when it gets onto the "real" networks, and b) most enduser traffic is not of a nature that requires this protection. It's not necessary to bathe the world in a sea of connectivity, it's merely necessary to dig modest sized tunnels under all the border fences and assume that the data will eventually reach a friendly environment.
Trying to solve the general problem of "unlimited-bandwidth, uncensorable communications between any two points on the globe" is not a rational goal for this type of network, and generally not a useful goal anyway. For any given piece of data that's subject to censorship, it's rarely subject to censorship worldwide. Once you've helped it to escape from wherever it's restricted, it can spread on The Man's networks, because most of The Man doesn't care. If there is some piece of info
Think about mesh networking. How far is your wireless range? Let's say 1km with good antenna. And how big is the latency? Let's say 10 ms. How many hops does your packet need to get to the target? How much latency is acceptable?
You won't get a usable network without cables.
And getting 1% of frequency spectrum ... globally? Do you think all countries use the same allocations?
If Telcom Companies could co-operate with each other for the greater good of the Countryside - Town - city - State - country - world then we would have a stoking greate communication system but Telcom Companies do co-operate.
What I mean is if the they all got together and built a system between themselves that EVERYONE could use, they placed cell towers every sq. mile acrosss the country(s) and all took a stake in running and profit share then imagine that, but NO.
We have have dispot companies each building their own poor network (espeically outside city limits) where signal become shit and worthless.
The math and physics _do_ restrict what is possible. There are limited frequencies available and bandwidth requirements limit what is usable and by how many. Mathematics (specifically information theory) quantifies the limits on the exchange of information and performance in noise.
In a vacuum, in the absence of any electromagnetic noise, in the presence of infinite number of frequencies, with error-free 1-bit encoding of all information, and a limitless supply of free energy to power transceivers, then vast mesh networks are possible. Start by dealing with each of those assumptions in turn and you begin to see what is holding back mesh networks long before you even start considering the economics and politics of implementation.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Just getting people together create and maintain a wireless network is a lot of effort.
Air-Stream (http://air-stream.org/) being one of the largest community wireless networks in the world.
Seriously join a group, if there isn't one create your own with your friends, family and neighbors.
Yes, I solved ALL of these problems with a system I developed, almost 20 years ago!
It's compact, light, overhead goes down as the number of nodes increases,
it solves the issue of rural areas without adding new towers, or satellites, or any of that BS.
It was demonstrated to the DOD in 2001, as well as various other companies.
Many people including MIT, UCLA, and others have tried to steal the technology and replicate it,
but all of their efforts have failed.
Everyone designing these systems makes the same mistakes, in almost the exact same place. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
Every book I've read, every article, including research articles, every single one! Always!
It's pathetic. I solved this! it's now almost 20 years since I created the first version,
it was designed to operate while under DDOS attacks, that was the whole point.
And it works, better than could have ever imagined.
It can expand to hundreds of trillions of nodes (yes, trillion with a "T") or more. It really has no limits.
it's built with the idea that there isn't always a tower or satellite or physical access available readily.
it's a communications/networking technology.
And it's the only one I know of where the overhead goes down as the network grows.
the more nodes, the lower the overhead.
imagine bridge groups of 85,000 nodes, or the only path from A to B is 50,000 hops.
It's no problem for my technology.
oh, and loops are impossible.
It just works, and remarkably well. It's incredibly complex, yet elegant.
And it's no wonder people have problems wrapping their heads around it.
It doesn't work like anything else out there, and in almost 20 years, no one has even come close.
always make the same mistakes.
And it does it without IPv6 (yuck), fully compatible with ipv4, no gateways or nonsense.
it needs no management or oversight, no engineers to maintain the network,
it has no manual configuration to speak of. yes, no network engineers needed at all.
It just works (tm).
The rest of the world is welcome to join us, when you're ready.
Well, let us imagine for some time that we have unlimited WiFi spectrum. But let's assume that the dipole antennas give maximum 250 meters. So in order to traverse Moscow (Yes, I said Moscow!) (about 25 km in diameter according to Wikimapia) you need 100 hops which require all equipment to not only work but to be placed in good high places. The ping times also would be quite.....
You could install a 20dB dish to access a local mesh router and it would give you about 2.5 km of distance. But it does NOT solve the problem of these 100 hops.
In order to have something better you need not a mesh but a STRUCTURE of longlinks. 2 dishes could give you 25 km (really less due to obstructions and atmospheric loss). But this structure is 1) highly visible and very suspicious for Competent Organs 2) Very expensive. Basically every node should have at least 4 longlinks and a local mesh router. It's about 2 average Russian monthly incomes + installation + construction of antennas.
There ARE such networks in Athens, Barcelona and Havana since the price of Internet is quite high there. But please take in account that Athens and Barcelona are in countries with good legal systems, and in Havana the local Competent Organs are quite sober and don't object if you don't show your dislike of Castro. I prefer not to discuss USA or Russia from this aspect; it's a hint.
Check out FreedomBox, an open source hardware & software solution under development
https://www.freedomboxfoundati...
A mass mesh network is one of the few methods society can ensure the tyranny of centralization does not continue.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...
A solution to congestion is forming nodes with polygonal faces, each face mounted with it's own independent antenna, thus enabling more broad point to point communications as opposed to radial transmittance.
... and each face should have a separate outdoor-class WiFi router that costs about 0.25 of average monthly income. But you increase antenna gain 4* giving distance only 2*. 500m instead of 250m are not a solution. The problem of only 4 separate 2.5 GHz channels (1 5 9 13; 3 channels in USA) is secondary.
This effort would be exciting and I would be game to participate and help build it out.
I suppose you could take your cell right now with off the shelf software and have a node. But I think of it as a bit like ipv9. A ping could take almost forever. The characteristics are different then ipv6.
This is probably a good idea because the comments were immeadiately sidetracked. Grin.
Australia.
New Zealand.
And other examples where it's not a mesh any more...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
> Is this feasible?
Technically feasible, yes I think. Imagine a weatherproof box combining a $5 solar cell and a $5 tiny linux computer operating as a mote repeater and open wifi access point.
Place one on each utility pole running out and around the rural areas. Place one on the roof of every home in the burbs. Homeowner can provide an internet gateway if they choose.
> Would it amass enough volunteers, advocates, and enthusiastic users?
Unlikely. The stakeholders mentioned have already done so much. They have published their research and have supported the open source hardware and software.
Existing ISPs will fight to preserve market share. Government will protect corporate. No startup will achieve enough to get past the chicken-and-egg problem and establish enough market share. No technology or protocol will be dominant enough to become the standard. There will be 'islands' of Zigbee and islands of Dash7, and so on.
One option may be through government emergency preparedness, disaster relief and charitable organizations to build this as a 'backup internet' in case of SHTF scenarios.
Do you mean something like the wireless networks that the phone companies use to use? The ones made from microwave relay towers and satellites and Earth stations that allowed clueless plebs to pick up a telephone dial a few digits and speak with people all over the globe?
Google AT&T Long Lines and Telstar satellites. A publicly available global wireless mesh network existed since the early 1960's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsukuku ?
Aredn.org
The Govts would get involved and then fight about how to tax it, monitor it, and the addressing system... they can't count past 10 anyway.
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
We can't. You can't cross the oceans with wireless. And even if it could be possible, governments would ban it.
Telstra look to be attempting this with Air. (using a combination of dedicated WIFI and guest networks from their ISP clients) DOesn't seem to have taken off enough. https://www.telstra.com.au/bro...
There are only a tiny handful of use-cases I can imagine, where a mesh network becomes very appealing:
1). Disaster situations. The existing communications links are down or saturated. An ad-hoc grid would be the cat's pajamas in this situation;
2). Ad-hoc communications in areas generally off-grid. Think away from civilization, for camping, field research, or hunters/fishers/trappers.
And, well, that's about it. For these uses you aren't looking for a world-wide grid either, just informal local networks. If you had a backhaul link to the wider internet, you'd be lucky.