6. Community Internets (Mesh Networking) - King John's Blog

6. Community Internets (Mesh Networking) - King John's Blog

6. Community Internets (Mesh Networking)
July 23, 2010King John
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Virnox showed me something interesting to me today. Its known as “Mesh Networking”. The concept is fairly simple: You connect to a wireless network, and can access its resources (network servers, internet and whatnot). While your browsing /b/, something else is actually happening. Your computer is acting as a sort of a wireless access point (or router, though the term is used loosely). So, you’re connected to the WAP (Wireless Access Point), and another person is using you for internets/network access. It can build up from there, people connecting through people who connect through people, right?

Normally this can be done with 2 network cards, and some Windows ICS (Or Linux sharing). But, with this new tech called 802.11s (Wireless S) you can do it with one card. Its mostly software based, and both Linux and Mac (because Mac is based off Linux) include it in their kernel, standard. If I’m right, Macs have it enabled by default.

Now, the “Community Internets”. You’re probably going “Wtf is that?” Well, imagine if Charter, Comcast, Charter, Cox, Charter, Charter, Verizon, and Charter were gone. What if the internets was free? Well, with this technology its is more than possible. Its essentially the same thing as P2P, but physical and more or less legal. The only problem is the non computer literate people won’t really be up for it, amirite? You could go around your neighborhood and hand out devices that expand the network that take virtually no power, and could run off a AA battery for a decade.

Unfortunately, there are some flaws.
Security: Your transferring your data through tons of peoples computers. It just takes one smart person to sniff your network packets and jack your identity.
Latency: You may get some srs lag considering all the people you have to go through to get to another state. This could be bad.
Dead Spots: If you live in a remote area, or just in a place that doesn’t have many computers (Friggin Montana) then you’re outta luck.

There are others, but if you have any computer knowledge then you’ll find them out on your own. The main one is the Security, the other ones can be compensated for in some way or another. Just thought it would be a cool concept to let you ponder over for a while

-KJ

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