Reminder: initiatives like Hyperboria (formerly Project Meshnet) exist. Using the cjdns protocol and some communications medium (e.g. wires, line-of-sight microwave, WLAN, IPoCP), you can become the ISP for your own local area, assigning IPv6 addresses and providing a bridge (or many) to the 'net at large.

The various pages on the topic aren't well linked (due to server migrations, name changes, low attention to marketing… you know how devs are), but the main homepage is https://hyperboria.net/, some installation guides can be found at https://projectmeshnet.org/docs/ (which mostly links to https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns#how-to-install-cjdns) and generic, somewhat complete documentation is https://docs.meshwith.me/.

cjdns has some other neat features, which are outlined in its whitepaper: https://docs.meshwith.me/Whitepaper.html

The rebirth of Community Access TV(CATV). Some enterprising community member would set up an expensive and complicated antenna and split it out to all his neighbors. Those eventually become cable companies.

How cyclic...

I kind of hope the next 'net is based on cjdns, because it's a much better protocol and it's fundamentally less centralised. If the new ISPs evolved from Hyperboria, it'd be a dream come true.

There are still some bugs, though (like the horizon issue limiting the usability of convoluted or large networks: https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/bugs/hori...) but it's enough that people using the network don't really need to fix them, since everything still works.

If you want to help out with the code, it's probably best to look at the bugs repo (https://github.com/hyperboria/bugs/issues); the issues in the "bugs" directory of cjd's repo are mostly large, architectural issues and non-trivial flaws that are probably due to the implementation.

I'm one of the Yggdrasil developers, and FYI, the cjdns routing scheme is flawed and has severe scaling issues. It will, in all likeliness, be replaced with a variation of the Yggdrasil[1] routing scheme in future updates to the cjdns codebase and route servers.

The existing Hyperboria network already sees issues due to scale today and it's not even 1000 nodes.

[1] https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Hopefully newer services such as SpaceX's StarLink will break the geographic monopolies or duopolies that have allowed these companies to profit so greatly off of such poor quality service.

Right but the end result of competition is that one company wins and eats the other, or they divide the market geographically, either way you end up back in the same place.

Any competition without local loop unbundling [1] won't be a solution. Without it you simply will never have proper competitive markets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling

The alternative being what? Gov regulations? Where the companies manipulate the regs and have flat out abusive monopolies? As we have now? I don't see how more of the same is any sort of solution.

Can you truly have free markets in a decades-long timespan? Lobbying to rewrite laws seems like a given for large companies. Free market telecom doesn't seem like an equilibrium.