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Comment by kator | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the old days of KA9Q and pushing IP over packet radio. Tech has come such a long way this might actually be a real alternative. That said bandwidth management will become a real issue quickly since it's hard for the general public to understand the shared nature of a mesh.

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Mesh networks are for the birds. For those who want to enable codependent telecoms to not show moral fiber they are appealing, but one side way to make a radio network slow and unreliable is to retransmit and retransmit and retransmit... If I wanted to have bad internet I can call up my telco and pay an arm and a leg for DSL.

If only there was an entire class of protocols developed over the last 30 years to negotiate and route network traffic efficiently.

These work well for wired networks, but not for ad hoc wireless networks. Mesh networks are on of the many areas of CS that produces endless conference proceedings but no working systems because the DOD has the hots for it.

There a many huge mesh networks all over the world, just not so many in this country. Guifi in Spain has 29,208 active nodes so there is no argument that mesh doesn't scale. https://guifi.net/en/node/38392

I can't find much in the way of specific technical information in English, but from what I can tell Guifi has are tiers of nodes, ordinary nodes and supernodes, where nodes connect only to supernodes and the supernodes have fixed, manually configured directional radio links to other supernodes. It's a lot easier to get thirty thousand nodes on a mesh network if the vast majority of them aren't actually taking part in the meshing and the ones that are use fixed infrastructure links. It basically avoids all the inconvenient "mesh" part.

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