Over the past year or so I have watched from afar as wireless tech is highlighted sporadically. I have to wonder if it's only comes to my attention when someone makes a marketing push. I'm not dismissing it as pure hype, as it's definitely captivating from just an engineering viewpoint. Whether it's hype or not, this type of cheaper decentralized wireless networking seems very cool and possibly ripe for motivating new business models. There are a few of companies (and their founders) making noise and at least one interesting acquisition not too long ago:
+ Ubiquiti (founded by Robert J. Pera, hn might appreciate his entrepreneurial background, look him up)
+ Artemis (founded by Steve Perlman, another hacker/entrepreneur )
+ Meraki (aquired by Cisco in late 2012, seems like this one did actual mesh networking in MIT and SF)
It seems like there is a lot of noise around these wireless technologies, what is holding back adoption?
I spent most of 2001-2008 involved with community and then commercial mesh projects. The ideas are attractive but there are some technical realities that make deployment unlikely unless there is no alternative. In most places most people want to connect to the regular web and wires (or fiber maybe with point-to-point wireless for the last hop) are faster and more reliable.
Existing 802.11 ad-hoc is half duplex & CSMA, if you build a multihop mesh with that on omnidirectional nodes you get greatly diminished performance across the network. TDMA is not really better, the whole thing degenerates into a distributed graph coloring problem. You can have a lot of success building a network of point-to-point links but again you only really see people getting excited because they need non-wired infrastructure or because they like the technology. The Ubiquiti gear is really good for this.
Meanwhile you might wonder about doing this on small battery powered devices. It's very difficult to build a mostly-asleep power management scheme if a device needs to be awake to relay packets.
I still think there's promise in the area though and do follow what other people are doing.
If you want fast access to the general internet, mesh networks are never going to be particularly competitive with telcos. This is what most people want, as well.
Community networking over community networks could be a thing, but bootstrapping is hard, and it can be hard to see the point. "Buy this thing and set it up and you can talk to people within shouting distance with your pc/phone" isn't super exciting.
It seems like the problem is that it's easier to make the normal internet produce the same behavior than to actually make a mesh network fast and reliable. If all your neighbors have normal internet with NAT-PMP supporting gateways then you can create a "community network" entirely in software.
Maybe the problem is they're doing it from the wrong angle. Don't create a mesh network independent of the internet, create a mesh network integrated with the internet. Then use whichever interface has the best performing route and use them to back each other. So if your wireless goes down you can still use Comcast and if your Comcast goes down then you can seamlessly use your neighbor's Verizon.
+ Ubiquiti (founded by Robert J. Pera, hn might appreciate his entrepreneurial background, look him up) + Artemis (founded by Steve Perlman, another hacker/entrepreneur ) + Meraki (aquired by Cisco in late 2012, seems like this one did actual mesh networking in MIT and SF)
It seems like there is a lot of noise around these wireless technologies, what is holding back adoption?