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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

I saw an article about this a little while ago. If anywhere in the world could support a wide scale mesh network, it would have to be the Bay Area. It would be a really cool experiment to blanket a part of the Valley in mesh wifi: I imagine it would be very doable to raise $100K and send 1,500 mesh routers to people in Palo Alto or SOMA. Open Mesh has some really cool low-cost ($50 - $75) hardware that seems to just work: http://www.open-mesh.com/. Some might be plugged into an upstream link, but if most were only powered on as relays it would still work.

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A group of us are already well on the way in Oakland, stop by some time!

https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh

Are there any plans to connect up to an SF mesh? I could see setting up some backbones across the bay, but I'm not sure what the technicalities are around this.

WiFi reflection across the bay and the fog is murder. It basically makes all but high-power links useless...

rhodey - you have been hellbanned. It looks like your first comment ever was modded down, and that was that. Lame.

rhodey wrote:

A group of us are already well on the way in Oakland, stop by some time! https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh

Hmm? I can see it, and I don't have "showdead" on.

I have showdead on and it was dead before, and now it's not. Maybe a mod saw it and fixed it or...?

I did give him an upvote, and maybe others did as well. Perhaps it was enough to raise rhodey from the dead? So perhaps my reports of rhodey's death were greatly exaggerated. Unfortunately I can no longer edit my original comment to reflect this.

There's a project started in the East Bay http://510pen.org/

I have a lot of experience with roofnet, Meraki and Open Mesh. They work to some extent, but not nearly with the degree of reliability that an ordinary customer would tolerate. You are not going to get a reliable network with single-radio devices in an urban setting with lots of interference and construction materials that are not friendly to wireless signals. You can do somewhat better if you plan out your backhaul links using traditional, non-mesh technologies and only use mesh for the very last few hundred feet, and stick to dual-radio N devices. There is a lot of hype about some of these networks in Europe (Athens, Austria, Berlin, etc.) but what people fail to realize is that these networks are used by geeks who are happy to build their own antennas, mess around with a linux shell, etc. If you just hand people devices you're not going to have a network that is tolerable for most consumers. It may work okay in a developing country in the middle of a revolution where people are willing to hack something together, but for ordinary consumers who want a reliable connection and don't care about the underlying technology it just doesn't work.

Before they radically changed direction and were acquired by Cisco, Meraki tried to target community meshes in SF and beforehand as Roofnet at MIT. They handed out/sold a lot of mesh APs. I wonder what happened to the boxes.

Several hundred roofnet devices were distributed to low-income housing in the South End and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston. The networks are still limping along with some volunteer maintenance. There are some really dedicated people working to provide for some of the technology needs of the communities, such as free computer repair and training. Check out http://cstoboston.org/ http://www.tech-center-enlightentcity.tv/

Great to hear. Is someone making compatible hardware/software that interoperates?

And yet another mesh network, from HacDC hackerspace in Washington.

http://project-byzantium.org/

Small correction, Byzantium is a linux distro for several architectures with out-of-the-box mesh networking packages/drivers.

"The goal of Project Byzantium is to develop a communication system by which users can connect to each other and share information in the absence of convenient access to the Internet. This is done by setting up an ad-hoc wireless mesh network that offers services which replace popular websites often used for this purpose, such as Twitter and IRC." - from http://project-byzantium.org/about/

This was my first thought as well. I'm in the Bay. I'd do it.

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