I spent most of 2001-2008 involved with community and then commercial mesh projects. The ideas are attractive but there are some technical realities that make d

I spent most of 2001-2008 involved with community and then commercial mesh projects. The ideas are attractive but there are some technical realities that make deployment unlikely unless there is no alternative. In most places most people want to connect to the regular web and wires (or fiber maybe with point-to-point wireless for the last hop) are faster and more reliable. Existing 802.11 ad-hoc is half duplex & CSMA, if you build a multihop mesh with that on omnidirectional nodes you get greatly diminished performance across the network. TDMA is not really better, the whole thing degenerates into a distributed graph coloring problem. You can have a lot of success building a network of point-to-point links but again you only really see people getting excited because they need non-wired infrastructure or because they like the technology. The Ubiquiti gear is really good for this. Meanwhile you might wonder about doing this on small battery powered devices. It's very difficult to build a mostly-asleep power management scheme if a device needs to be awake to relay packets. I still think there's promise in the area though and do follow what other people are doing.