[astrobe_]

More importantly, what's the point of building pipes if nothing flows through them. I don't think there is a YouTube or a HN over there. One may imagine that users may share files they have on their discs, or more generally serve stuff, but then you depend on them being up and running (and reachable) 24/7.

[johnchristopher]

I can see that problem solved or attenuated if those meshes turn into some kind of distributed networks like bitmessage or bittorrent where everyone has duplicate pieces of a larger "file" thus ensuring almost 99% availability. Data put in the network would be everywhere and maybe a distribution algorithm could ensure that there's always a complete source on one node so the swarm could be rebuilt if one node goes down.

Of course the bandwidth will be nothing like what ISP can offer.

What concerns me is how highly vulnerable to RF disruption some of those projects relying on WiFi are. This is a serious problem if you are trying to communicate vital information in a country where the government is hell-bent on not letting citizens set up counter-revolt or grass-root movements because it'll actually be very cheap to disturb those signals (I may be wrong but from what I understand of WiFi freq. range it's easy to neutralize a network by flooding it with interference).

edit: But maybe we don't need 24/7 availability for those kind of network usage. Well-organized revolutionary and underground movements might not need a youtube or facebook uptime.

[DanBC]

> What concerns me is how highly vulnerable to RF disruption some of those projects relying on WiFi are. This is a serious problem if you are trying to communicate vital information in a country where the government is hell-bent on not letting citizens set up counter-revolt or grass-root movements because it'll actually be very cheap to disturb those signals (I may be wrong but from what I understand of WiFi freq. range it's easy to neutralize a network by flooding it with interference).

Plenty of WIFI networks are sub-optimal because the people implementing them don't know what they're doing with channels and power etc. I'm worried that meshnet activism will attract many people who are keen but not clueful.

See also "IETF Attendees Re-Engineer Hotel WIFI" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771876) (https://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/032812-ietf-makeover-...)

I agree that it feels like jamming WIFI would be trivially easy for people with even moderate skills and resources.

[adestefan]

It's pretty easy to pick up a 2.4GHz jammer on ebay or various other sites.