The alternative Internet, WiFi based

No security, & contrary to the webpage's claims completely touchable and jammable. Unless you had a ridiculous amount of wireless access points deployed, destroying one node would have a significant effect (again, contrary to what the webpage sees).

"Repeater mode" is usually WDS or a logical client bridge+AP. This is entirely layer 2, has no routing, no useful path metrics, and is completely unsuited for a network larger than a few nodes if you want any sort of reliability/usability.

True meshing algorithms like 802.11s or BATMAN can optimize the mesh topology, but you're still on one huge broadcast domain. The proposal needs to establish a means to restrict the size of these domains - convert each node (or a subset of supernodes) into "routers", and roll out a routing protocol which is optimized to this type of ad-hoc, organic deployment.

The other problem with scaling (no matter what your meshing algorithm does) is the half-duplex nature of RF - if you're doing this with single-radio SOHO routers, you're going to lose half of your throughput per hop. I run two 500-node muni WiFi nets, and we try never to exceed 2 hops between a node and its backhaul gateway - any more and you're in the sub-1Mbps range on 802.11g rates.

Fix these problems and you may be on to something. Of course you also need to bridge geographic gaps somehow.

Sure, the bandwidth will be really poor, but you have to make a few sacrifices, and the robustness of the network explodes as the range of each individual node increases. Besides, in that kind of doomsday scenario nobody will be using a darknet to watch Hulu.

Can a typical router running an ad-hoc wifi network like this really handle provision of Internet to an entire city, and furthermore, is the current 'repeater' protocol the most efficient way to do this?

One of the biggest structural problems with darknets is that of "necking", where one large subset of nodes is only connected to another large subset of nodes through a relatively small subset of nodes. Usually the problem is compounded by the the difficulty for nodes in either subset to discover each other in a network which attempts to be anonymous. Freenet and WASTE both encountered this.

The ability to automatically find Kleinrock routers within a certain distance of you might mitigate this, but it could also affect the security of the network.

Though all of these networks are very impressive, I don't think they can replace the big ISPs in case some one shuts down the Internet completely.

I've always lumped this under the "too idealistic" startup destined to be a nonprofit. Rural America is broke, for the most part, and our margins were going to be razor thin -- even using commodity wifi gear. I only ever got one angel interested, mainly because they all thought the market was bad. We never really got it off the ground. Perhaps skipping the backhaul altogether, (like the linked article), would have made it viable. But honestly I'm not sure I could have sold faux-internet, which is what most people are going to think of this. As it was the only way we were able to get a town interested was to uncover grant money that would have covered most of the costs and let us subsidize prices (see non-profit thing above).

But there were other challenges. Mainly wifi is just not that great over big distances. And it's absorbed by water -- so trees are a big problem. Also one of the most requested apps was VOIP, and the latency on a mesh network makes VOIP kinda crummy. As we built out the financial model, we learned that there was a lower limit to the density of a community that would support a profit. It ruled out most markets. And to make matters even worse, when we did find communities that met our already ridiculous criteria we usually had problems finding a backhaul. For our pilot town we were going to create a point to point wireless connection over 20 miles from the nearest major population center. Yeah, we gave up, graduated, and got jobs.

It's also worth knowing that wifi in major urban centers doesn't really work. There just isn't enough frequency to go around, so the interference makes it pointless. At the time Clearwire (now just Clear) was buying up spectrum in city markets. I thought it was genius, but I always doubted the wimax standard would live up to the hype. I remembered we had a point-to-multipoint wireless 56K connection back in the mid 90's and that was shit. I figured things would get better, but the basic problem remains the same: you can only really jam so many connections into one point, and you need LOS. Of course cell phones seem to work fairly well, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about. But Clear doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation.

Alright, so here are some links to other mesh networking projects that have been around for a long time and have software that is actually deployed:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/roofnet/doku.php (seems to be slightly broken, but working mostly)

http://www.cuwireless.net/ (interned here, really smart guys built this and they have a running network in Champaign-Urbana).

Also recently the feds opened up a bunch of spectrum, so I'm really hopeful about what we can do with it. 2.4 just isn't enough.

Edit: Highly recommend following @saschameinrath He's a genius and has been a champion of community wireless internet since the term was invented. He also started CUWIN.

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_routing_protocol_list

Free anonymous internet you want to pay for: Ambient Connectivity. After 20 years of hard work I am about to roll out a much more ambitious approach:

- free gsm for mobile phones in a square mile - free Wifi for smartphones/tablets/laptops - 'campus' network with your neigbours with 1 - 10 Gb/s ethernet links over optical fiber or UTP cable - free shared storage of tv, movies, music - end-to-end encryption and anonymity in the clients, not the network - users buy the routers $100 ($1000 rural) and the 2-4 cables - Open ISP sells 1000 Mb/s traffic at $4 to pay for the backbone and the free traffic (1 Mb/s per user). - Open ISP can not control anything and proves this by allowing the community to audit their routers

A first-mile network with free mobile and wifi traffic on top of a 1-10 Gbps optical fiber (and UTP) last mile with an non-profit ISP behind it. Crucial is the $100 mesh router I designed, a 10 GBps optical 8 core router with wifi and picocell built in, capable of software radio with. We also use off the shelf DD-WRT and PicoBSD based $50 routers. Without the cheap 10 Gb/s the community network will be too slow. We must compete with FTTH and the telco's. Stringing optical fiber over private property (farms, backyards, roofs, between appartements) is key to the freedom part. This will be my fourth commercial internet provider, one is now big. merik@eigenglasvezel.net Co-fonders wanted.

Free anonymous internet you want to pay for: Ambient Connectivity.

- free gsm for mobile phones in a square mile - free Wifi for smartphones/tablets/laptops - 'campus' network with your neigbours with 1 - 10 Gb/s ethernet links over optical fiber or UTP cable - free shared storage of tv, movies, music - end-to-end encryption and anonymity in the clients, not the network - users buy the routers $100 ($1000 rural) and the 2-4 cables - Open ISP sells 1000 Mb/s traffic at $4 to pay for the backbone and the free traffic (1 Mb/s per user). - Open ISP can not control anything and proves this by allowing the community to audit their routers

A first-mile network with free mobile and wifi traffic on top of a 1-10 Gbps optical fiber (and UTP) last mile with an non-profit ISP behind it. Crucial is the $100 mesh router I designed, a 10 GBps optical 8 core router with wifi and picocell built in, capable of software radio with. We also use off the shelf DD-WRT and PicoBSD based $50 routers. Without the cheap 10 Gb/s the community network will be too slow. We must compete with FTTH and the telco's. Stringing optical fiber over private property (farms, backyards, roofs, between appartements) is key to the freedom part. This will be my fourth commercial internet provider. merik@eigenglasvezel.net Co-fonders wanted to built a viral website and unix (routing) code.

Free anonymous internet you want to pay for: Ambient Connectivity. After 20 years of hard work I am about to roll out a much more ambitious approach:

(1) free gsm for mobile phones in a square mile. (2) free Wifi for smartphones/tablets/laptops. (3) 'campus' network with your neigbours with 1 - 10 Gb/s ethernet links over optical fiber or UTP cable. (4) free shared storage of tv, movies, music. (5) end-to-end encryption and anonymity in the clients, not the network, no logon. (6) users buy the routers $100 ($1000 rural) and the 2-4 cables.(7) Open ISP sells 1000 Mb/s traffic at to pay for the backbone and the free traffic (1 Mb/s per user). (8) Open ISP can not control anything and proves this by allowing the community to audit their routers

A first-mile network with free mobile and wifi traffic on top of a 1-10 Gbps optical fiber (and UTP) last mile with an non-profit ISP behind it. Crucial is the $100 mesh router I designed, a 10 GBps optical 8 core router with wifi and picocell built in, capable of software radio with. We also use off the shelf DD-WRT and PicoBSD based $50 routers. Without the cheap 10 Gb/s the community network will be too slow. We must compete with FTTH and the telco's. Stringing optical fiber over private property (farms, backyards, roofs, between appartements) is key to the freedom part. This will be my fourth commercial internet provider, one is now big. merik@eigenglasvezel.net Co-fonders wanted.

That would solve a real, current problem and save consumers money, instead of trying to preempt the highly speculative possibility that our government would want to shut down the internet.

Also, just local wireless mesh has plenty of technical challenges. As other posters have noted, significant challenges stem from both sparsely populated areas (link distance) and densely populated ones (interference, spectrum limitations). There has been significant research into overcoming these limitations--see, for example, MIT's RoofNet and UIUC's CuWIN.

One project I think is especially interesting is Phil Levis' research at Stanford, studying full-duplex wireless. For the first time, they have nodes that can receive and transmit on the same channel at the same time. This (almost) doubles max throughput, but more importantly, it solves a lot of difficult interference problems (particularly the "hidden node" problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_node_problem).

There's also a hard, unsolved software problem: how to route traffic effectively on a large mesh of unreliable, low-throughput routers. No existing routing protocol that I know of (RIP, OSPF, BGP, etc) is well-suited for this.

I would love to see a startup built around last-mile wireless. They could, for example, use commodity PicoStations along with high-gain antennas. The hard part would be nailing the business model and the software. Both are fascinating problems.

The problem is, ok say we can get a mesh network using commodity routers within Iran up and working...how do the packets get out of Iran ?

Do you then setup mesh nodes/connections with the surrounding countries and then route traffic through their backbones ?

But what if those networks are also taken offline ?

I am not being sarcastic, but this is something that I have seriously thought about and haven't found a solution. If someone has a suggestion, that would be awesome.

Also, how do you build cross-Atlantic mesh networks with commodity hardware ?

i.e. say the underwater fiber cables to India are cut again, like they were last year or the year before, how does this system work in that case ?

(Edited a few times for clarity)

You cannot connect the networks of America and Europe with a WiFi router, so you'll need some more serious hardware. This hardware should be maintained by somebody. And so you have the ISPs again.

In the moment only a geek can setup a Kleinrock router. Imagine your neighbor who can barely coupe with the simple task of opening "the Internet" (or "the blue E") setting up the router, installing and configuring a firewall.

I seriously doubt that home routers are enough for a bigger traffic than couple of computers. Just look what cheap pieces of shit the ISPs are giving now. Of course you can buy a better one, but that's not what the majority of people will do...

Unless you want to build out an entire secondary network of cables (fiber, copper) there will not be a 'second internet'.

Their idea is to have the shared medium be airspace. This would almost be feasible with a ton of satellites, but not using peer-to-peer repeaters and ad-hoc networks.

Now - if you could figure out how to do communication over power lines through major power grids, you would be onto something. There are some household devices that can do this, but not between households.

But why creating something new when there are projects available like OpenWRT or DD-Wrt or Freifunk Firmware wich creates a Mesh-Network that works quite good? The only thing you need is standard Wi-Fi routers and those firmwares.