17
votes
Do you run any wireless mesh node?
Hi, does anyone run any node for a wireless mesh? if so, is it part of some big project or is it something just on your town?
Hi, does anyone run any node for a wireless mesh? if so, is it part of some big project or is it something just on your town?
Sort of unrelated but I'd love to set up a BBS running over packet radio. I looked in to it for a while there but figured I'd pour a heap of time and money in to it and then the chances are, nobody would use it. :(
It would be a really cool idea, where are you located?
I've played with Telnet BBSes a bit lately. They're pretty cool!
I'm in South Australia
Yeah, a little bit too far :( I'm in portugal.
But if you know anyone interested by radios or even by more "in-depth" of computers, you can try to convince them and create a mesh network, maybe you get lucky enough and it starts growing in Australia :D
You'd be surprised. Have you looked into any amateur radio groups? Perhaps if you set this up as a recurring competition, you might get some interest, even for brief amounts of time.
Since I joined here I keep having to look stuff up... had never heard of that term. This would be very useful in a school setting, no? I love networking technology and have been messing with their wireless set-up on the sly at night out of frustration with poor performance. This may be a huge improvement if I understand the articles on it correctly.
it might be good in that setup, tough i would be talking of bigger setups, like town wide (or even country wide with directional antennas).
The idea of a mesh network is to have redundancy in case of a failure of the "internet" (in an emergency) and well, if the network becomes big enough it can even become an alternative to the ISPs.
There are projects like Freifunk or Guifi.net which are maybe the biggest in europe. Then there are smaller projects like wirelesspt which have similar goals and might somehow connect between each others
Very interesting. I'll read up on those, thanks.
Like a world-wide LAN? That would be so cool!
yeah, basically that, unfortunately there isn't any "legal" way to do intercontinental connections, so that would need to be using the ISPs underwater cables, but as long as there is soil to "plant" a wireless node the network can go anywere it's users would like to.
There is a project called serval mesh, that is supposed to run on android, but it needs root to work on mesh mode and it doesn't work on many phones
What are the illegal ways?
Using amplifiers
Go on...
well, basically you put an amplifier between the router and the antenna and that's it ;D
You might need a directional antenna, fine tuned to the frequency (otherwise you would risk frying the amp).
Something like this https://www.amazon.com/Yosoo-EP-AB003-Broadband-Amplifier-Extender/dp/B07D46VJHH/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=2.4+ghz+amplifier&qid=1566585175&s=gateway&sr=8-7 of course, that is kinda weak to do intercontinental links, but you might get pretty good links with that
Really? Is there no way to set up a link using amateur or citizen radio? I would think that a chain of such radios could go from Canada to Greenland to Iceland to the UK. Going through Alaska and Russia may be even easier, at least for going between the Americas and Asia. Of course the latency and bandwidth would be rubbish at best, but can mesh networks preform well over long distance at all? I'm not sure if such a network would qualify as "amateur"; at the very least it could not pay the maintainers of the nodes. I am actually curious about whether this is possible.
I think the issue is bandwidth. Amateur radio spectrums were selected for voice, or just as spectrum that wasn't useful. Any spectrum that has the ability to run across oceans is either super low bandwidth, restricted by governments, or actively used for something else. I am sure an amateur p2p link is possible, but I think it would be measured in bytes per second rather than anything useful.
maybe it would be possible, but you got some problems, on ham band, you can't transmit in an encrypted way, at least, not using a private encryption method.
And the bandwidth would be terrible. There are programs that connect to a radio to send "emails" (no emails in the sense of smtp protocol) or even do BTC transactions, but these take minutes to send, so... yeah, less than a byte per second most likely :D
I am not really into this topic, but the first time I heard about this was in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B0u6nvcTsI, I really liked how this is used to help people.
I live in Silicon Valley and I'm not aware of anything like that here, which is surprising. I'd love to help build a mesh network.
Initiatives like Althea have seriously piqued my interest in the space. I'd love to set up my own node, but I'd be the only one for miles. Mesh networks seem to be facing a serious chicken-or-egg problem.
That goes a little bit against the freedom idea of a mesh network, would you pay to use a unknown network? me neither
The best scenario would be every client would be a node, unfortunately that's not possible (mobile phones don't have much range and are often limited software wise)
Of course! Aren't we already doing that? What kind of network are you using to reply to my comment? I certainly don't trust my ISP. Fortunately, encrypted communication protocols like TLS and HTTPS make this a non-issue.
Agreed, hence why we should pay people to maintain proper networking hardware.
I do not, do you?
Are there any networks you would recommend setting up a node for? I am a little interested in the idea of mesh networks, but don't know much about any particular ones.
unfortunately no, i haven't yet reached a consensus on what to run :) I might join a portuguese project which is "wirelesspt", these mesh projects are kinda "country-specific" but then there are gateways which can join two different mesh networks (this is if they don't use the same protocol like batman adv)