[gowld]

Sure thing. And I offer free WiFi access to all my household members, houseguests, and next-door neighbors. The main thing holding me back is scaling up the number of installs too. I'm hoping a billion dollars of donations can square that away for me and my wider-area neighbor.

[danShumway]

I get that you're joking, but this is basically how public wifi works.

A bunch of businesses and nonprofits offer free wifi to their customers, and over time you build up a big enough blanket that pretty much anybody can walk into a coffee shop or library and check their email.

Tons of security risks, of course, but... I mean, I've used public wifi before during personal emergencies, and I was pretty grateful it existed. If you're gonna pick a comparison to be derisive with, maybe don't pick something that's widely useful and appreciated?

Comcast has even turned this into a selling point (I think somewhat unethically) by turning all of their customer access points into semi-public routers for other customers. It actually seems to scale pretty well.

[gowld]

Comcast doesn't do it for free. That is financed by bill-paying customers

[danShumway]

Yes?

Comcast provides its wifi by allowing you to connect to any other customer's router. (Roughly) a mesh network provides its wifi by allowing you to connect to any of the other nodes within the mesh.

What's your point? Is the money/infrastructure less legitimate because it was donated? Is the public wifi down at the library fundamentally worse because its cost wasn't bundled into the price of a coffee?

Hardware is hardware. If it works, who cares where it came from?

[bitcrusher]

Obviously you're being sarcastic, but they're not just dumping netgear routers on walls and saying "TADA! MESH!"... They're actually using industrial grade equipment to do this.

[ybloviator]

I missed the "industrial grade equipment" part in the arcticle, TBH. In fact I saw no real technical details at all. "Mesh" isn't even really defined. You'd think they'd at least mention what firmware they're running on their gear to implement "Mesh".

[Stephen304]

This is essentially what I do. I do have my housemates pay a share because they have access to a hardwire connection, but I have an open AP which my neighbors, guests, and anyone within line of sight down the street use. I have plenty of bandwidth that goes unused so I don't mind - I pay to have fast bursts of traffic, so I don't have a problem letting other people use what I don't. The only thing holding me back from having more people use it is locations nearby for repeaters. But I may put more effort into getting neighbors interested in hosting repeaters so that may change.