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I'm still dreaming of a world connected by a giant Wi-Fi mesh network (or several federated networks) fully maintained and supported by its users. It would be l

by kaoD 12y ago

I'm still dreaming of a world connected by a giant Wi-Fi mesh network (or several federated networks) fully maintained and supported by its users. It would be like the Internet as it should've been: free as in freedom. There are efforts underway such as Guifi[1] (very popular in Catalonia) but there's a high barrier to entry, the documentation is very sparse and mainly in Catalan. I'm a technical person but gave up researching how to add a node in my city. The project is really cool and provides both connectivity and services for the network, including gateways into the Internet. Why didn't mesh networks flourish? What killed the dream of a truly free and federated internet? Is there a similar effort in the US or other parts of Europe? How cool would that be? I'll keep dreaming... [1] http://guifi.net/ http://guifi.net/

klez 12y ago
Here in Italy, ninux seems to be taking some mindshare. http://wiki.ninux.org/ http://wiki.ninux.org/ Unluckily, the English website is almost empty.
femto 12y ago
> Why didn't mesh networks flourish? Because of the need for network management. Even the idealised Internet has a few centralised resources, such as the IP address space (IANA + the hierarchy of NICs). There was intense activity in community based WiFi, soon after decent speed WiFi debuted in the early 2000s, but they mostly died, due to the above issue in my experience. Nodedb [1] is still a remnant of that era, which indicates the level of activity that was. [1] http://www.nodedb.com/ http://www.nodedb.com/
- kaoD 12y ago
  > Because of the need for network management. Even the idealised Internet has a few centralised resources, such as the IP address space (IANA + the hierarchy of NICs). How is that an issue? You mean it's a problem because of the lack of volunteers for the job, or because of technical issues to achieve proper networking? Guifi has network management policies which you have to follow to be part of the mesh (IP address space, network topology, routing at supernode borders, QoS, etc.) but everything else is decentralized. To be honest I've never been their user, so I'm not sure how good their networking is. Guifi is quite active in Catalonia. What surprises me is how lacking mesh networks are everywhere else. Perhaps I should be surprised at how active Guifi is.
rakoo 12y ago
> Why didn't mesh networks flourish? Because people want speed. Now that they have been accustomed to what global connections can give, they will not withstand the 1k hops of network between them and Google and the associated seconds latency for each packet.

by kaoD 12y ago

klez 12y ago

Here in Italy, ninux seems to be taking some mindshare. http://wiki.ninux.org/ http://wiki.ninux.org/ Unluckily, the English website is almost empty.

femto 12y ago

> Why didn't mesh networks flourish? Because of the need for network management. Even the idealised Internet has a few centralised resources, such as the IP address space (IANA + the hierarchy of NICs). There was intense activity in community based WiFi, soon after decent speed WiFi debuted in the early 2000s, but they mostly died, due to the above issue in my experience. Nodedb [1] is still a remnant of that era, which indicates the level of activity that was. [1] http://www.nodedb.com/ http://www.nodedb.com/

kaoD 12y ago
> Because of the need for network management. Even the idealised Internet has a few centralised resources, such as the IP address space (IANA + the hierarchy of NICs). How is that an issue? You mean it's a problem because of the lack of volunteers for the job, or because of technical issues to achieve proper networking? Guifi has network management policies which you have to follow to be part of the mesh (IP address space, network topology, routing at supernode borders, QoS, etc.) but everything else is decentralized. To be honest I've never been their user, so I'm not sure how good their networking is. Guifi is quite active in Catalonia. What surprises me is how lacking mesh networks are everywhere else. Perhaps I should be surprised at how active Guifi is.

rakoo 12y ago

> Why didn't mesh networks flourish? Because people want speed. Now that they have been accustomed to what global connections can give, they will not withstand the 1k hops of network between them and Google and the associated seconds latency for each packet.