Certainly there are logistical differences between these things, but I don't understand why one would assert with confidence that such a project (that already seems to be working) couldn't work.
Doing > Wanting to do in nearly every instance. So to borrow from popular culture, Just Do It, and Haters Gonna Hate.
At least that was my read on this community.
...but why Dropbox? We already have google drive/OneDrive/WebDAV.
...but why an Airbnb? We already have BnBs, hotels, and hostels.
Compared to most funded startups, this idea seems extremely practical and feasible (1.6 million people in Manhattan alone). Wireless internet is already a successful business model (Monkeybrains in SF), and extending it with mesh may add latency but I'm not going to pretend to know more about it that the guy who is currently doing it...
This is the opposite direction. Mesh NYC is saying that ISPs are useless because anyone can string up some APs and get access to the Internet.
Which explains while there is always a caste of "professionals" who for the sake of "security"(job) - defend against the relentless wave of people who unleashed could undo there little safe space in life. To be fair- most of them have familys, so they are not doing that for greed- but because out of vulnerability.
You want WISP competition (co-op business model or not), then lobby the FCC to free up some spectrum for it. Cheap gear is here, spectrum is the scarcity.
So here is the plan- we jam a frequency of a local TV-station, nobody views, who is just sitting on the spectrum for license worth. After proofing for one year and one day, that nobody listened to it and nobody cared- we pronounce that this spectrum is unclaimed and should be returned to the government to be auctioned off.
Under normal circumstances this should not go through legally- but hey, there is booty, there is a government in debt and there are interested parties.
Its the perfect storm and just having legal rights - didn't help the native Americans either, didn't it?
Come to think of it- maybe planning the heist in public was - ill advised.
I wonder how much it's because so many Silicon Valley salaries are dependant on people assuming that replicating what they do is way harder than it really is? What happened to Britannica or BitKeeper or AltaVista might just happen to the ISP industry - or any other Start-up-de-jour...
To contrast, those with negative presumptions have plenty to say, and incentive to say it (arguments are a form of discussion).
This leaves us with a skewed representation of attitude.
I think an unconscious bias may be that a bad but free connection that can negatively impact the perception of web solutions from casual users, which in the end is the revenue base for everyone here involved in B2C business models.
Unreliable but redundant commodity grade hardware pretty much allowed "cloud computing" to eat 99.9% of "big iron" sales.
I strongly suspect what Google does internally with software defined networking looks a lot closer to what these people are doing than the traditional "buy a small number of powerful-but-expensive entrenched vendor network hardware" approach.
This mesh is kinda the network equivalent of autoscaling or autorepairing cloud computing strategies that are so common these days. Once this grows to 2 or 3 IXP connections it won't surprise me much to find they stomp the traditional ISP model reliability-wise, and if they can build that "virtually", where they don't need much more than a bunch of somewhat transient mesh participants with a few medium reliability "super nodes" which are mostly completely remotely configurable...