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?

Comments

You mean like Freifunk?

[mellon]

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.

APRS

[Anonymous Coward]

Or APRS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_System

Re:Betteridge

[Nutria]

Spanning oceans was the first thing I thought of.

Routing

[Orgasmatron]

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.

Re:Betteridge

[geoskd]

Indeed, all these mesh network fanatic seem to forget that outside the densely populated cities where they live there are vast sparsely populated areas. How does your mesh network reach those areas without being prohibitively expensive?

Even within densely populated areas, the technology doesn't scale well. This only works well at a very specific device density. Field testing has shown that much above or below this density, the performance of the system becomes badly sub-optimal.

It should also be noted that at no density is the technology performance competitive with hardwired providers. This is because as the density goes up, you need more and more primary gateway routers to keep the link latency and link saturation down. This turns out to be right around 2.2 hops per primary access (hard-wired) nodes. In practice, this requires so many hard links that you don't save much compared to just providing hard links to every home, and everywhere that mesh technology is economically viable, hard wired access is also economically viable and vastly superior in performance.

Lastly, the technology is highly susceptible to spectrum poisoning. The only good solution to that is to have a dedicated piece of spectrum for just mesh technology, but that spectrum would be worth close to $100B, and that alone renders the technology completely uneconomical. Current mesh solutions use the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, but both of those are also used by just about every home wifi that is included with any type of Internet access. This punches holes in the mesh that cannot be effectively compensated for. This is only going to get worse as the IOT becomes more and more prevalent.

There are a few mesh networking startup providers that I am aware of, and all of them are plagued by poor performance, poor profitability and poor service reliability. I fully expect the introduction of 5G wireless spectrum from the established cellular carriers to put the final nail in the mesh coffin.

Overbuilders. Fiber makes this the right time

[raymorris]

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.