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That depends on the types of devices you use for creating it. You can get a km out of an ordinary router with a directional can antennae. What distance do you t

• wcummings 13y ago
  >You can get a km out of an ordinary router with a directional can antennae With a line-of-sight and some careful positioning, maybe. There are numerous examples of people using traditional radios to coordinate disaster response [1] (actually why ham licenses are issued IIRC), this seems like a more complicated, error prone, cool-kid-hackerspace solution. What advantages does a mesh network have over traditional radios (which have bands allocated for this) for disaster response? How well will a mesh network hold up if half (or more) of the nodes fail due to power loss, flooding etc? Mesh networks are cool, and I'm all for decentralizing communication, but their usefulness for disaster preparedness seems very dubious to me. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_emergency_communications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_emergency_communi...
  • simplicissimus 13y ago
    Ongoing innovations in open firmware like OpenWRT allow deployment of reasonably robust routing schemes, such that the mesh nodes themselves compute the routes most efficient for transport (and also repair those routes when nodes go down). Groups like Commotion Wireless, Freifunk, Funkfeuer, and LirbeMesh all deploy firmwares derived from OpenWRT to this purpose. The actual capacity, range, and sensitivity of the radio hardware used, whether unlicensed or not, will still be gating factors. Along with ambient noise levels on whatever bands are used.