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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

The group also knows there will be growing pains as they challenge the status quo and that it's only a matter of time before the big ISPs take notice, which could bring new challenges.

I'd like to imagine this would be competition on price and service. Sadly, that won't be the case. They can expect everything from spurious CALEA requirements to rooftop lease shenanigans to unwarranted radio interference claims.

Eventually, though, this mesh model will take over the world, from both a network perspective and a commercial one. We just have to squelch our authoritarian impulse.

Of course, technical challenges may still exist, but those certainly don't discredit the model.

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I don't think mesh makes sense from an economics perspective. The number of edges scales O(n^2), where n is the number of people in the network. That's not very efficient. Even if you think wireless internet is feasible in dense urban areas (I think this is still an open question) it seems like a star topology connected by wireless backhaul to fiber makes more sense. This scales O(n).

That's why we build a hybrid network with p2p and p2mp backhaul.

> The number of edges scales O(n^2), where n is the number of people in the network.

I don't see how this is true for any reasonable definition of "edge". It's certainly not the case that every node directly communicates with every other node; if they did, you wouldn't need a mesh.

A mesh network is defined as a network where the nodes connect to as many other nodes as possible. In the limit this is a complete graph with O(n^2) edges. It's true that in practice you won't have a complete graph but it's still less efficient than a more hierarchical, tree-like network structure.

the fact that a wifi network node only covers a very limited area is sufficient to show that your theoretical limit is never going to be reached -> by a large margin. You can probably assume that in a dense network, every node will be reachable by every other node through at most 7 hops. But thats it [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network

Am I missing something here?

Let me approach your math with a reasonable argument:

Assume a 1 sq mile area (1mi x 1mi).

Assume each node has a 50 yard diameter reach.

If you space a node every 50 yards, you will have 35 nodes on a side, for a total of 1,225 total nodes.

Each node will only be able to physically connect to 3 other nodes on the edges, and 4 other for interior nodes.

That means the node connectivity is only .00326 for an interior node.

The longest path is diagonal across the square. Given the 35 modes on a side, and A^2 +B^2 = C^2, that means 35^2 = 35^2 = C^2. And c^2 = 2,450, meaning C = 50 (rounding up).

So I’m not sure how O^2 even applies in this example. Yes, it’s theoretically a max, but theory >< the real world.

Is this not correct?

Aren't mesh networks higher risk for security? My initial reaction is that while ISPs collect a lot of information about you a mesh network allows an unknown amount of hostile actors to collect information (unless it's set up like Tor, but that has issues too).

At least with the standard ISP model there is some accountability and privacy rules could be implemented/enforced.

Edit: I think I might have been misunderstanding what mesh network was referring to - this looks like a wireless access point?

Well, the content of your requests will be encrypted, that's what SSL is for.

Also, individuals who are concerned about this would be free to purchase a direct line via an ISP.

Website fingerprinting is still possible.

DNS over https

The radio link is still encrypted so an attacker won’t get much out of it. In fact, it’s a lot easier to tap a cable, DSL or fiber line (which operate without any encryption unless you put IPSec on top manually) than a mesh link which would be using WPA2 Enterprise with perfect forward secrecy.

Is it encrypted?

https://nycmesh.net/faq/#secure

That seems to suggest otherwise? Unless I don’t understand what network traffic within the mesh means.

Seems like anyone with access to the mesh has the keys to decrypt anyone's traffic, but it's still encrypted from an outsider's point of view.

Yes, but anyone can become an insider (and an attacker would). Probably an okay tradeoff given decentralization of network access and maybe could be made better if internal traffic was encrypted somehow, but does seem higher risk.

Mesh networks are fine for peer to peer comms inside the mesh. But if you want Netflix you need an uplink.

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