As a knowledgeable internet consumer, I come to it with the general question, "What would such a mesh network do for me?" to which the only answer seems to be, "It gives me the fascinating task of buying a router and flashing its firmware and writing its config file, all based on sketchy jargon-filled docs."

Supposing I do that, and in the highly unlikely outcome that I don't screw it up, I will then have -- what, exactly? Besides a nonstandard router?

Supposing there existed a libremesh network in my city. Not impossible. How would I know? Could I use it to access internet content?

Another crucial question not answered is, how is a local mesh supposed in any way to be a circumvention of the traffic-shaping that we all fear the telecoms will do, now they aren't common carriers? Yeah, to the extent that a whole neighborhood is meshed up, you could have free and unfettered exchange of email and FTP among all your neighbors.

Yippee.

The content that an internet consumer really wants, and which occupies 99.9% of the bits she consumes, comes from the major sites that are out there on the backbone of the net. Ninety-nine percent of what the edge users of a mesh want to pull from their mesh connections originates far outside the neighborhood. And it has to enter the local mesh from an internet access point that is sourced by one of those big bad telecoms.

A neighborhood mesh looks like a fine way for a neighborhood to organize block parties and garage sales, but it really is just a way to share access to some ports to the same un-neutral internet everyone else uses. Except you've added a random number of local wireless hops to every ping.

To answer your most salient question(about whether it provides internet connectivity)

>We provide internet through peering at an internet exchange point. If you have line-of-sight to this “supernode” in downtown Manhattan you can have a fast, reliable connection with suitable hardware, and replace your ISP.

Isn't the point of mesh networking that you only need line of sight to someone else on the network who has line of sight to someone else (etc) who has line of sight to the supernode?

If we take a standard network for example then all your routers can be meshed for each router the primary backbone switches can also be in another mesh but the edge switches that say connect individual users are not meshed.

This would still count as a mesh network despite having 3 tiers with different fault tolerance / handling characteristics for each tier.

Ideally, all I want is a mesh node that I can buy, plug into a power supply, then have an app (accessed via the legacy internet/mobile network) that displays a map telling me how detached I am from the bulk of other mesh users. If I have limited/no connection, I would gladly knock on commercial/residential doors between myself and the bulk network and offer to buy them a node, to "build a bridge" and improve my connection.

The two challenges seem to be reliability and expansion to a global grid without relying on legacy backbones. For the former, resilience will of course improve with increased node density. For the latter I'm sure it will take a well funded, coordinated effort. I would gladly pay an annual tax to a new gov't agency - perhaps an extension of the National Park Service (1), to build and maintain a grid of mesh nodes accross the US, with connections to the legacy GIG backbones.

1.) The National Park Service preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.

IMO, the internet is an information landscape, very much tied to our geographical landscape, that should be free and protected just like any river or mountain.

So, How would they do it? Do you just ask some ISP for a high-speed connection? How does it work? I saw some videos about people in Detroit setting up their own network but they didn't show everything and their internet speed was quite low.

There is a user on here who created/is creating a website that answers that, just in the context of starting a wireless ISP.

But, to answer your question, you would buy a connection to the internet from a provider like Level 3, or Hurricane Electric or whoever.

I for one find no difference between random people and.. Random corporate people.

Neither can/should be trusted, ever, this is why we have cryptographic means of keeping our business between us and the content provider, no one in between should be able to provide you with false content. Sadly this isn't perfect, but this technical challenge must be strived towards, no law can ever protect you as effectively as a good technical implementation.

Depending on the organization, a business may or may not adhere to this sort of practice. And yes, it’s still people mystery meat, behind the veil of nearly any business.

One lesson: Use TLS.

> Is SSL/TLS enough? Probably not for less technical people who can be socially engineered into trusting a malicious root CA because they just want internet.

Is super-secure-network enough? Probably not for less technical people who can be socially engineered into installing malware.

> Is TOR worth anything? Oh, I still feel like it’s pretty laughable that exit nodes operate on an honor system of not snooping on plain-text traffic.

What else would you suggest?

> From where does one summon the mental gymnastics necessary to go along with that?

From where does one summon the mental gymnastics necessary to come up with the idea that it would be Tor's job to prevent you from communicating however you want?

The basic premise of your argument is that this is the best we can do for now, so that should be acceptable. Not unlike claiming “If you can’t create a painting better than The Mona Lisa yourself, you just have to admit that it’s your favorite painting.”

My mind hasn’t been changed, especially by mere flak that lacks constructive arguments. People may disagree with me freely, but that doesn’t fix the holes I’ve pointed out in existing technology that mesh networks still leave open.

You said that, for example, Tor could do things much better, but you didn't put forth any argument as to why you think that/how that could be done. I am not claiming that it's impossible, I am simply rejecting your unsubstantiated claim, and in particular your unsubstantiated criticism of the Tor project. Also, I strongly suspect that any ideas you have in mind have been considered and rejected by the Tor project for very good reasons ... but you'll have to show your actual ideas before I actually know.

Also, it's a useless argument to posit an end user who is willing to do anything they are told by an untrusted third party as a useful threat model. There is nothing that will protect against that, and that includes established ISPs.

But if one were trying to suggest that “it’s time to put mesh networks in play as this newer model, to assert greater control” then I’d like to see a technology that solves certain problems, instead of the same technology as ever, with all it’s existing, known problems, except now distributed and peer-oriented.

I want to see the real problems solved, before I give everything away to peers. Otherwise unsophisticated peers can cause problems for me, just like an ISP. The difference being, most peers will be unprepared to exploit each other for a short amount of time, but then, as utilization saturates, and expertise grows, we’re back to square one.

I'm dubious about the effectiveness of their plan to use escrowed cryptocoins to pay for bandwidth, but I was intrigued enough to sign up for email updates.