It’s exciting to see so much interest of late in the Darknet Plan hatched by redditors to build a second, people-owned, censorship-free Internet using a large-scale wireless mesh network. Freedom of speech on the Internet is an important issue and it’s important for all of us to take it seriously. Additionally, as someone who thinks wireless networks are the bee’s knees (and who does research on wireless networks in his day job), it’s exciting to see so much interest in using wireless to circumvent censorship.
That’s why it’s painful for me to say, “hey guys, this isn’t going to work”.
I got into this space about five years ago to build a community-owned Internet using solar power and wireless mesh networks — censorship circumvention wasn’t an explicit goal, but it was part of the broader vision. I actually wound up building a couple sizable networks using equipment like this (Orangemesh grew out of this work). After a couple years I developed a pretty good understanding that wireless mesh networks aren’t actually a good way to build a real network. These are a few of those reasons.
via life and times of sha.ddih – Why wireless mesh networks won’t save us from censorship. This is a really compelling argument as to why unplanned wireless mesh networks won’t work at scale.