How to run a city-wide wireless network from a drawer
I did a quick search to see if mesh networks have gone mainstream yet:<p><a href="https://futureprepping.com/mobile-phone-mesh-networks/" rel="nofollow">https://futureprepping.com/mobile-phone-mesh-networks/</a><p>The radio dongles are superfluous and I can't think of any engineering reason why all cell phones can't just communicate with others nearby already. Maybe not for cellular voice and data, but certainly for something akin to AppleTalk back in the 80s:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk</a><p>When I got to college in 1995, all of the Macs were on the campus-wide LAN and lots of Mac users had their public folders shared. There were tons of apps and games and even little personal BBS-style areas where people posted stories and you could share files to their drop box. It was all free and open and frictionless and stands out vividly in my mind as a vision of what we thought the internet was going to be.<p>If we had that, it would be trivial to run something like IPFS to bypass the ISPs, even without paid cellular service. Then anyone could connect through their tunnel provider of choice and bypass any privacy concerns. The speed would be proportional to the number of nodes, so many thousands of times faster than internet today is, or ever can be.<p>With the debates around net neutrality and the cost of streaming, it's like we've forgotten that the only cost of the internet could be the electricity required to run a cell phone.