[saucerful]

Lucky for us, the new IEEE 802.11 was ratified in September and includes (finally) 802.11s for mesh networking. There is support in Linux and FreeBSD for several of the most popular wireless drivers. The open source router firmware dd-wrt also supports 11s.

[peterwwillis]

That is pretty damn cool, but I think for a serious "alternate Internet" to succeed, OSI layers 1 & 2 should not matter. An application installed by a regular user needs to be able to do most of the heavy lifting with most generic off-the-shelf hardware to get a really decentralized open alternative to take off like wildfire.