3 ms·

There was a standard a few years ago IIRC, EasyMesh. I even bought a kit that supported it. https://www.netgear.com/au/home/wifi/mesh/mk62/ https://www.netgear

by Nursie 2y ago

There was a standard a few years ago IIRC, EasyMesh. I even bought a kit that supported it. https://www.netgear.com/au/home/wifi/mesh/mk62/ https://www.netgear.com/au/home/wifi/mesh/mk62/ I was most pissed off when I bought another (orbi?) kit from the same vendor a couple of years later and it didn't support easymesh, and wasn't compatible at all. Does seem to be a mess!

contingencies 2y ago
Mesh is a mess because the government, mobile device manufacturers and cellular carriers all want you on a centralized cellular system. Money is made selling cellular plans, cellular data, cellular carrier based device distribution (especially in the US, where most devices are carrier-acquired IIRC). Google in particular don't want to encourage non-centralized models, because their whole Android-shall-prevent-Apple-from-taking-the-mobicake play ("commoditize your complement"[0]) was to preserve their cloud kingdom. They're using lawyers and doublespeak to lock down what they've got, for example through ensuring no app can be distributed on Google Play that supports non Google Play store based payments (eg. carrier payments), and no app can be sideloaded without great effort (and there you were thinking it was your device!) At certain levels of their organization they are actively refusing to make mesh work in new Android versions as a first-line use case in Android, even though the hardware has supported it for eons (since ~2011[1]), as well as fiddling with the Android security model enough to make it a pain to use even if it theoretically works. This seems to be a dual layer strategy to frustrate any non-edgecase popularity of mesh. They do claim to support it in home networking products but probably only because they want to take over, monitor and surveil the rest of your house to understand more about your family's behavior, presence and so on. People even leave the bloody microphones on all the time, knowing it's spying on them. It's insane. This is why we need open devices. To be fair, the security model for mesh is hard. Even FirefoxOS couldn't get mesh working properly. I think someone needs to just bring out an open device with mesh as the default use case. If anyone wants to pile on and do it, I'm down to contribute. [0] https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11s
- michaelt 2y ago
  Mesh is a mess because meshes do not, in fact, work very well. You set up a mesh network to provide community internet access to an underserved community? 99.9% of traffic will be going to or from the node that connects to the internet at large. That means that although notionally adding a node to the network adds more bandwidth to the network, in practice that's only true if the new node happens to add extra bandwidth at a bottleneck. And if everyone aims their directional antennas at the egress node, to avoid this? You've just reinvented the centralised network.
  - contingencies 2y ago
    Yeah, with current consumption being "everyone wants a global DNS and global network access" it's semi-pointless. But that's just a chicken and egg problem. All of Wikipedia, libgen, thingiverse, open source packages, etc. can be locally cached somewhat trivially. Most oldschool games will run P2P fine over arbitrary networks. That's quite powerful indeed. Now we just need some localtalk apps (reinvent 'talk' and BBSs and get people off Failbook) and there will be users. Also, piracy can be normalized in a social way instead of the current situation so people can actually, you know, discuss and appreciate art. A killer app may be sharing your CCTV with people, so the community as a whole can more readily resist bad actors. Perhaps a starter node could be a bit of media to pick up wirelessly on your way to your commute, so you have a kind of protected local distribution that's censorship free and surveillance costs substantially more than with centralized networks. Next, bring back Fidonet! Haha. Maybe one too many red wines...
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      If only the users were better and didn't want to stream video, or talk on Facebook, or video call each other, I could run a brilliant service!
      - rusk 2y ago
        It seems to me an approach would be to purposely deoptimize such a P2P network for these applications. Optimise for time-insensitive best effort delivery like the internet of old. Still plenty of applications can work to that model and it is “good enough” for doing business. Keep the bandwidth heavy applications on different channels with a different QoS guarantees and cost structure.

by Nursie 2y ago

contingencies 2y ago

Mesh is a mess because the government, mobile device manufacturers and cellular carriers all want you on a centralized cellular system. Money is made selling cellular plans, cellular data, cellular carrier based device distribution (especially in the US, where most devices are carrier-acquired IIRC). Google in particular don't want to encourage non-centralized models, because their whole Android-shall-prevent-Apple-from-taking-the-mobicake play ("commoditize your complement"[0]) was to preserve their cloud kingdom. They're using lawyers and doublespeak to lock down what they've got, for example through ensuring no app can be distributed on Google Play that supports non Google Play store based payments (eg. carrier payments), and no app can be sideloaded without great effort (and there you were thinking it was your device!) At certain levels of their organization they are actively refusing to make mesh work in new Android versions as a first-line use case in Android, even though the hardware has supported it for eons (since ~2011[1]), as well as fiddling with the Android security model enough to make it a pain to use even if it theoretically works. This seems to be a dual layer strategy to frustrate any non-edgecase popularity of mesh. They do claim to support it in home networking products but probably only because they want to take over, monitor and surveil the rest of your house to understand more about your family's behavior, presence and so on. People even leave the bloody microphones on all the time, knowing it's spying on them. It's insane. This is why we need open devices. To be fair, the security model for mesh is hard. Even FirefoxOS couldn't get mesh working properly. I think someone needs to just bring out an open device with mesh as the default use case. If anyone wants to pile on and do it, I'm down to contribute. [0] https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11s

michaelt 2y ago
Mesh is a mess because meshes do not, in fact, work very well. You set up a mesh network to provide community internet access to an underserved community? 99.9% of traffic will be going to or from the node that connects to the internet at large. That means that although notionally adding a node to the network adds more bandwidth to the network, in practice that's only true if the new node happens to add extra bandwidth at a bottleneck. And if everyone aims their directional antennas at the egress node, to avoid this? You've just reinvented the centralised network.
- contingencies 2y ago
  Yeah, with current consumption being "everyone wants a global DNS and global network access" it's semi-pointless. But that's just a chicken and egg problem. All of Wikipedia, libgen, thingiverse, open source packages, etc. can be locally cached somewhat trivially. Most oldschool games will run P2P fine over arbitrary networks. That's quite powerful indeed. Now we just need some localtalk apps (reinvent 'talk' and BBSs and get people off Failbook) and there will be users. Also, piracy can be normalized in a social way instead of the current situation so people can actually, you know, discuss and appreciate art. A killer app may be sharing your CCTV with people, so the community as a whole can more readily resist bad actors. Perhaps a starter node could be a bit of media to pick up wirelessly on your way to your commute, so you have a kind of protected local distribution that's censorship free and surveillance costs substantially more than with centralized networks. Next, bring back Fidonet! Haha. Maybe one too many red wines...
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    If only the users were better and didn't want to stream video, or talk on Facebook, or video call each other, I could run a brilliant service!
    - rusk 2y ago
      It seems to me an approach would be to purposely deoptimize such a P2P network for these applications. Optimise for time-insensitive best effort delivery like the internet of old. Still plenty of applications can work to that model and it is “good enough” for doing business. Keep the bandwidth heavy applications on different channels with a different QoS guarantees and cost structure.