Wi-Fi Should Scare the Hell Out of Verizon and AT&T
businessweek.com
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There are efforts underway such as Guifi[1] (very popular in Catalonia) but there's a high barrier to entry, the documentation is very sparse and mainly in Catalan. I'm a technical person but gave up researching how to add a node in my city.
The project is really cool and provides both connectivity and services for the network, including gateways into the Internet.
Why didn't mesh networks flourish? What killed the dream of a truly free and federated internet? Is there a similar effort in the US or other parts of Europe?
How cool would that be? I'll keep dreaming...
Unluckily, the English website is almost empty.
Because of the need for network management. Even the idealised Internet has a few centralised resources, such as the IP address space (IANA + the hierarchy of NICs).
There was intense activity in community based WiFi, soon after decent speed WiFi debuted in the early 2000s, but they mostly died, due to the above issue in my experience. Nodedb [1] is still a remnant of that era, which indicates the level of activity that was.
How is that an issue? You mean it's a problem because of the lack of volunteers for the job, or because of technical issues to achieve proper networking?
Guifi has network management policies which you have to follow to be part of the mesh (IP address space, network topology, routing at supernode borders, QoS, etc.) but everything else is decentralized. To be honest I've never been their user, so I'm not sure how good their networking is.
Guifi is quite active in Catalonia. What surprises me is how lacking mesh networks are everywhere else. Perhaps I should be surprised at how active Guifi is.
Because people want speed. Now that they have been accustomed to what global connections can give, they will not withstand the 1k hops of network between them and Google and the associated seconds latency for each packet.
I guess the gripe might be not using cell networks makes it hard to charge for some cell services. I suppose WiFi will just cost more. WiFi may be "free" at the hotel I stay at, but the hotel is paying for it (and probably padding their rates accordingly).
IOW, strongly suspect the costs will "come out in the wash", we'll pay for it one way or the other. Besides, FWIW I know several people who use their cell connection to feed WiFi routers. Think about it, since more and more people are abandoning land-lines and "going all cell" where would their WiFi be connected to anyway?
yes, but wifi is unlicensed spectrum, whereas cellular (lte/hspa/cdma/...) is licensed, which translates to huge capital expenditures by operators, and hence i guess, the need to milk it (the correct term is 'monetize') for all it is worth. which i think, also might account for great eagerness on operator's part to move to virtualized world where equipment costs are further reduced.
Too bad they didn't name these startups.
Be warned though, I entered my address in their system and they ended up physically spamming me with pamphlets to share with my neighbors.