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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
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?
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.
Just so we understand each other...
Are you proposing that various entities pay small amounts for their little connections to larger entities with larger connections, which in-turn pay to connect to even larger entities to interconnect them all?
Isn't that what we have now? Last time I looked at traceroute results, I connected via inexpensive residential link to inexpensive residential ISP, who connected to regional ISP, who connected to backbone provider, who connected to another regional ISP, who connected to a business ISP, who connected to hosting/colocation/cloud service.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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."
Would you be comfortable connecting your IoT devices with strangers? Probably not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.