[torginus]

I think meshes do work extremely well in practice, and are quite resilient with regards to errors, and load balancing, and they get better as you add more nodes.

I think it's perfectly feasible for a small neighborhood of regular people to have internet shared over a wireless mesh network, yielding experience comparable to standard approaches.

[Karrot_Kream]

They don't. Resilience isn't additive. The more nodes you add, the more announcements and traffic you add, which congests the network further. Regular internet topologies work because of high throughput backbones.

[torginus]

my impression was that there are algorithms that work well (dont remember the name sorry), and they don't really keep track of the entire network per node, each node only has a heuristic idea of how to route packages both to local and faraway neighbors.

This is very much like pathfinding in a video game - you know how to get to a next the next grid square, and also your region you are in knows how to get to its neighboring ones - recursively to the top, but said info is distributed heuristically through the network.

Also, meshes need not be composed of constantly moving and changing nodes. An example of a neighborhood of houses or radio towers, where each node is semi-reliable and doesn't really move is an absolutely valid and real world use case.

[Karrot_Kream]

> my impression was that there are algorithms that work well (dont remember the name sorry), and they don't really keep track of the entire network per node, each node only has a heuristic idea of how to route packages both to local and faraway neighbors.

That doesn't change the fact that announces and extra nodes can still degrade performance. For one, it's hard to know whether a new link is better or worse than other existing links. Link conditions can also change which is very common in the kind of mesh networks folks are putting together using LoRA on antennas.

> Also, meshes need not be composed of constantly moving and changing nodes. An example of a neighborhood of houses or radio towers, where each node is semi-reliable and doesn't really move is an absolutely valid and real world use case.

Yes these are called repeater nodes in Meshcore and are already well known. Repeaters still don't have the same QoS that fiber backbones of the usual Internet have. The reason the Internet works well is because your packets are routed from your house eventually to a backbone network that helps the packet get close to its destination, and the backbone networks themselves are very top-down statically routed affairs with high capacity and QoS.

Once all of your repeaters are connected via high QoS fiber links you end up with the Internet topology we already have today.