[liberationtech] Mesh Networks?

[Douglas Finley]

That picture shows a damn macbook in Afghanistan....completely unexpected.
But there is also probably a size/usage difference between a "community" in
Afganistan and a "community" in the States.
Not talking security, but it looks like the mesh networks in the states
might need to look at charging a small fee ($5)
a month per user or something to get some type of broadband backbone support
instead of free.
Throttle service for non paying vs paying customers. 1.5mbs down...1mbs up
would be more than enough.
If you provide a node...then no charge or something.

FabFi seems to be using a combination of mesh and point to point to get the
job done.
Some commercial antennaes as well. 11.5 mbs and some of their links are
miles apart. Intense.

http://fabfi.fablab.af/techsummary.html


On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 2:34 PM, elham gheytanchi <elhamucla at hotmail.com>wrote:

>  if that is the case, why is the state department funding mesh networks in
> Afghanistan? (reported in the NY times)? FabFi is expanding its work:
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/06/12/world/20110612-INTERNET-ss-3.html
>
>
> best,
> elham
>  ------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:26:46 -0700
> From: steveweis at gmail.com
> To: companys at stanford.edu
> CC: liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu
> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Mesh Networks?
>
>
> My experience using MIT's roofnet mesh network was generally poor. They had
> about 100 nodes around Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here's an old snapshot of
> geographic coverage and connectivity:
> http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/roofnet/doku.php?id=map
>
> The roofnet team went on to found Meraki and tried to build community WiFi
> in San Francisco:
> http://meraki.com/press-releases/2007/03/04/meraki-networks-selects-san-francisco/. They
> had 800 Wifi hotspots around the city. I never personally used one, but you
> used to see their "Free the net" networks everywhere. As of 2009, they
> stopped expanding their network. I don't know what happened to it, but
> didn't see any mention on their website anymore. I think they have shifted
> away from mesh networking to focus on network management products.
>
> Portland had a similar network to roofnet called NetEquality. It doesn't
> look like they even have a webpage anymore. OLPC XS was supposed to use mesh
> networking: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_Server. That also went
> nowhere.
>
>  I think WiFi-based mesh networking is difficult because you need many
> nodes to cover even a small geographic area. It also needs enough egress
> bandwidth to support regular usage and a means of preventing someone from
> swamping the network. None of these examples were unauthorized. They would
> have been trivial to corrupt or disable by someone motivated to shut them
> down.
>
> I don't know if this is relevant to OpenMesh. They are asking for "high end
> wirelesss engineers that understand how to change firmware for wireless
> devices". That could mean a lot of things.
>
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 8:06 AM, Yosem Companys <companys at stanford.edu>wrote:
>
> What do you all think?  Will mesh networks work?
> Shervin Pishevar is a really smart guy, so if anyone can help organize this
> effectively, it is he.
> But mesh nets have been around for a while and never taken off, so just
> wondering what the technical hurdles are.
>
>
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