Mesh Networking: An Emerging Alternative to Internet Architecture

Mesh networking may be an emerging alternative to Internet networks with ISPs vulnerable to censorship and disaster. Julian Dibble writes on the technology in the March 2012 Scientific American.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-rise-of-instant-wireless-networks

Mesh networks are in a very beginning phase today. Computer users have their own routers and develop a democratic, peer broadcast architecture that does not go through an ISP. The routers are wireless and cost about $150. The concept of computer users linking directly through a wireless net to other users and only secondarily to the Internet via ISP’s does have quite a lot going for it beside cost savings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wireless_mesh_networking

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/02/24/activists-creating-decentralized-mesh-network-that-cant-be-blocked-filtered-or-silence

http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

Discrete, independent mesh wireless architecture would let users avoid giving data to mega-corporations and governments such as Facebook, Twitter and the National Security Agency in as great of quantity. There are existing social networks on the Internet that let users store personal data on their computer instead of in ‘the cloud’.

https://joindiaspora.com/