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Comment by Locke1689 | Hacker News Reader

So now you have a single home computer and a crappy 802.11 router serving the first week of House of Cards to everyone in New Zealand? Or, even worse, you have a BT net on the mesh which completely overloads whatever poor sap(s) happen(s) to be in the bridge in the graph?

And we haven't even gotten to any of the other problems, like address assignment, routing, etc.

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With this purely hypothetical mesh network, ideally files would be spread out across the network, bittorrent style. If the mesh has a single node bridging two otherwise large and connected graphs, then the mesh network would be in a poor state to begin with. This is assuming a healthy network.

More realistically, ISPs could place far higher bandwidth limits on local (to NZ) traffic. That is, if it is just the undersea cables that are lacking, not the rest of the infrastructure as well...

I'm not saying either of these are realistic or easy. I'm just saying that the sarcastic quip "I'm sure ad-hoc mesh wifi is an excellent solution to limited across-the-ocean bandwidth." is not a real criticism of the proposal.

A lot of these are solved problems. In one neighborhood in NYC the local mesh wifi was able to provide better internet service than Verizon. http://rhicenter.org/redhookwifi/

Bittorrent could be scoped to the country too, it doesn't have to seed or download across the ocean.

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