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.

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.