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I did a quick search to see if mesh networks have gone mainstream yet: https://futureprepping.com/mobile-phone-mesh-networks/ https://futureprepping.com/mobile

I did a quick search to see if mesh networks have gone mainstream yet: https://futureprepping.com/mobile-phone-mesh-networks/ https://futureprepping.com/mobile-phone-mesh-networks/ The radio dongles are superfluous and I can't think of any engineering reason why all cell phones can't just communicate with others nearby already. Maybe not for cellular voice and data, but certainly for something akin to AppleTalk back in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk When I got to college in 1995, all of the Macs were on the campus-wide LAN and lots of Mac users had their public folders shared. There were tons of apps and games and even little personal BBS-style areas where people posted stories and you could share files to their drop box. It was all free and open and frictionless and stands out vividly in my mind as a vision of what we thought the internet was going to be. If we had that, it would be trivial to run something like IPFS to bypass the ISPs, even without paid cellular service. Then anyone could connect through their tunnel provider of choice and bypass any privacy concerns. The speed would be proportional to the number of nodes, so many thousands of times faster than internet today is, or ever can be. With the debates around net neutrality and the cost of streaming, it's like we've forgotten that the only cost of the internet could be the electricity required to run a cell phone.

dopidopHN 5y ago
My bet is on LoRa being shipped with flagship phones.
- Vladimof 5y ago
  An open alternative to LoRa would be nice... https://revspace.nl/DecodingLora https://revspace.nl/DecodingLora
thrashh 5y ago
The electricity required is precisely the problem why we don’t do it. And it’s not so much the power that it requires but that the extremely low energy density of lithium batteries means we have to minimize power usage as much as possible.
- contingencies 5y ago
  I see no reason why mesh networking should need a huge amount more power than traditional mobile data. If we take the assumption that the vast majority of potential mesh members are unwanted (ie. you are not running a 'fully open' mesh network) then you can trivially ignore data that does not match an originator to which you have pre-approved listening. Similar to ethernet MAC filtering, I believe this is how implementation works in silicon. And indeed this seems to be the case. https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/80211/mac80211.html?highlight=mesh https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/80211/mac80211.html?highl... If you were relaying a lot of traffic for approved peers, then sure you are going to have a higher power profile. However, if you are doing this on an ongoing basis you are probably not battery-constrained (eg. you are connected to a larger power supply such as a vehicle, etc.) and you are potentially talking lower signal strength and closer peers. So it's really an application-specific concern.
  - teraflop 5y ago
    If you read datasheets for radio transceivers, one of the first things that will jump out at you is that simply keeping the analog radio front-end powered on -- either in listening or receiving mode -- is by far the biggest source of power consumption. (At least, this is true for all of the microcontrollers and relatively low-power embedded devices I've looked at. I can't guarantee how true it is for things like phones.) For instance, the popular ESP8266 chip uses roughly 1mA in sleep mode, 15mA when the CPU is awake but the radio is off, 50mA when receiving, and 100-200mA when transmitting. Nordic Semi's comparable nRF52810 uses less power, but follows a similar pattern: <1mA sleeping, 2mA with CPU active, 6mA receiving, 8mA transmitting. So if you tell the radio hardware to discard packets that aren't addressed to you, you may be able to save a small amount of power by avoiding unnecessary CPU activity, but you will still be using dramatically more power than a non-mesh network in which your node could go to sleep when not in use. In order to have any chance of getting reasonable battery life from a small mobile device, you need a protocol that establishes short time slots for devices to wake up and find out if they have any incoming data, so that they can spend as much time as possible with their radios turned off. This is difficult to achieve in a decentralized mesh.
godelski 5y ago
I think if someone could build and demonstrate a cheap node that could be set up and run things like matrix and post it to HN that it could take off more. I think a lot of people know about mesh networks but have no idea how to set one up, legality, and can afford it (put me in this camp). But if it's something that is straightforward and you could cheaply deploy all around the city, then I think people would start putting them up.
guessbest 5y ago
This used to be pretty common until applications like Napster took the usecase for p2p to mainstream for copyright music filesharing. Then p2p got a lot more scrutiny. Also, since it is hard to create a search index for wireless devices that may be offline, the mesh network becomes a bit of a darknet.
Vladimof 5y ago
> The radio dongles are superfluous and I can't think of any engineering reason why all cell phones can't just communicate with others nearby already. Google is not willing to allow ad-hoc wifi (at least last time I checked).
- contingencies 5y ago
  Traditionally in the US, carriers own customers and mobile device manufacturers distribute through them. Many customers lease-to-own handsets on 'plans', with DRM in-handset to ensure the customer can't easily leave the 'deal'. However, Apple began to change this status quo by launching the iPhone and demanding customer ownership. Carriers derive revenues from customer network use. Any carrier that sees a major push toward dropping them is not going to be happy. But it will happen, eventually. But not if Android fails to support it. We desperately need better firmware. Everyone is locked in. There is no better time for an open phone... If you try to ban the future, it will just happen elsewhere. - Paul Graham (2017)
joshspankit 5y ago
You’ve just outlined a lot of reasons why we don’t: 1) Filesharing went from “harmless, only a few geeks do it” to “theft on a level that will put ‘us’ out of business” 1a) Media companies and device makers merged which means that device makers are now beholden to the copyright regime. Previously they argued “we just make tools, we can’t be responsible for how people use them” but we’ve lost those allies. 2) Openly sharing folders by default was great when everyone knew what they were doing, but the public now recognizes that there are real consequences when people don’t know what they are doing. From being “exposed as an imposer” (harmless and common imposter syndrome) to all manner of life/death consequences. It’s a whole different landscape. 3) No protocol is secure forever. Having all devices communicate with each other means that it’s only a matter of (usually a short) time before people can view other people’s personal information, and that leads right to point 2. 4) Similar to point 1, service providers have deals with device manufacturers and those providers don’t want people to be able to bypass them. They even write terms of service that say you’re not allowed to share with your neighbours so that even in the densest cities they can charge all 500 households that are within wifi range of each other though that creates a worse experience as the signals clobber each other.

dopidopHN 5y ago

My bet is on LoRa being shipped with flagship phones.

Vladimof 5y ago
An open alternative to LoRa would be nice... https://revspace.nl/DecodingLora https://revspace.nl/DecodingLora

thrashh 5y ago

The electricity required is precisely the problem why we don’t do it. And it’s not so much the power that it requires but that the extremely low energy density of lithium batteries means we have to minimize power usage as much as possible.

contingencies 5y ago
I see no reason why mesh networking should need a huge amount more power than traditional mobile data. If we take the assumption that the vast majority of potential mesh members are unwanted (ie. you are not running a 'fully open' mesh network) then you can trivially ignore data that does not match an originator to which you have pre-approved listening. Similar to ethernet MAC filtering, I believe this is how implementation works in silicon. And indeed this seems to be the case. https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/80211/mac80211.html?highlight=mesh https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/80211/mac80211.html?highl... If you were relaying a lot of traffic for approved peers, then sure you are going to have a higher power profile. However, if you are doing this on an ongoing basis you are probably not battery-constrained (eg. you are connected to a larger power supply such as a vehicle, etc.) and you are potentially talking lower signal strength and closer peers. So it's really an application-specific concern.
- teraflop 5y ago
  If you read datasheets for radio transceivers, one of the first things that will jump out at you is that simply keeping the analog radio front-end powered on -- either in listening or receiving mode -- is by far the biggest source of power consumption. (At least, this is true for all of the microcontrollers and relatively low-power embedded devices I've looked at. I can't guarantee how true it is for things like phones.) For instance, the popular ESP8266 chip uses roughly 1mA in sleep mode, 15mA when the CPU is awake but the radio is off, 50mA when receiving, and 100-200mA when transmitting. Nordic Semi's comparable nRF52810 uses less power, but follows a similar pattern: <1mA sleeping, 2mA with CPU active, 6mA receiving, 8mA transmitting. So if you tell the radio hardware to discard packets that aren't addressed to you, you may be able to save a small amount of power by avoiding unnecessary CPU activity, but you will still be using dramatically more power than a non-mesh network in which your node could go to sleep when not in use. In order to have any chance of getting reasonable battery life from a small mobile device, you need a protocol that establishes short time slots for devices to wake up and find out if they have any incoming data, so that they can spend as much time as possible with their radios turned off. This is difficult to achieve in a decentralized mesh.

godelski 5y ago

I think if someone could build and demonstrate a cheap node that could be set up and run things like matrix and post it to HN that it could take off more. I think a lot of people know about mesh networks but have no idea how to set one up, legality, and can afford it (put me in this camp). But if it's something that is straightforward and you could cheaply deploy all around the city, then I think people would start putting them up.

guessbest 5y ago

This used to be pretty common until applications like Napster took the usecase for p2p to mainstream for copyright music filesharing. Then p2p got a lot more scrutiny. Also, since it is hard to create a search index for wireless devices that may be offline, the mesh network becomes a bit of a darknet.

Vladimof 5y ago

> The radio dongles are superfluous and I can't think of any engineering reason why all cell phones can't just communicate with others nearby already. Google is not willing to allow ad-hoc wifi (at least last time I checked).

contingencies 5y ago
Traditionally in the US, carriers own customers and mobile device manufacturers distribute through them. Many customers lease-to-own handsets on 'plans', with DRM in-handset to ensure the customer can't easily leave the 'deal'. However, Apple began to change this status quo by launching the iPhone and demanding customer ownership. Carriers derive revenues from customer network use. Any carrier that sees a major push toward dropping them is not going to be happy. But it will happen, eventually. But not if Android fails to support it. We desperately need better firmware. Everyone is locked in. There is no better time for an open phone... If you try to ban the future, it will just happen elsewhere. - Paul Graham (2017)

joshspankit 5y ago

You’ve just outlined a lot of reasons why we don’t: 1) Filesharing went from “harmless, only a few geeks do it” to “theft on a level that will put ‘us’ out of business” 1a) Media companies and device makers merged which means that device makers are now beholden to the copyright regime. Previously they argued “we just make tools, we can’t be responsible for how people use them” but we’ve lost those allies. 2) Openly sharing folders by default was great when everyone knew what they were doing, but the public now recognizes that there are real consequences when people don’t know what they are doing. From being “exposed as an imposer” (harmless and common imposter syndrome) to all manner of life/death consequences. It’s a whole different landscape. 3) No protocol is secure forever. Having all devices communicate with each other means that it’s only a matter of (usually a short) time before people can view other people’s personal information, and that leads right to point 2. 4) Similar to point 1, service providers have deals with device manufacturers and those providers don’t want people to be able to bypass them. They even write terms of service that say you’re not allowed to share with your neighbours so that even in the densest cities they can charge all 500 households that are within wifi range of each other though that creates a worse experience as the signals clobber each other.