That’s how I envision a second (free) Internet. People getting together and building a free alternative Internet with as much off the shelf tech as possible just to have a second option, politics be damned.
Even though the Internet can probably be infinitely large, it’s still only one. What if the public have a choice of two or more internets? That would introduce competition, especially a free one.
I wouldn’t personally be so fast, as others, to be dissatisfied with a slower global communication option. To communicate globally or even nationally is no small feat, even slowly. If it gets the job done and it’s lower in price or free, I might not care if it’s as fast as the Internet we have now.
It doesn’t have to be everything the Internet we are using now is. It just has to facilitate the exchange of information over long distances between people as an alternative to the current options.
People use packet radio to send messages and I imagine that’s slow. But it gets the job done and it’s free once you have the equipment.
In terms of revolutionising the Internet a project I’m quite interested in is this: http://maidsafe.net/ (video on that page is a good intro)
If they can break the client-server model, then it lays the groundwork for a more peer to peer network, plus I think it’s just an interesting project in it’s own right.
At that point, you have a decentralised encrypted internet running over the existing infrastructure, and maybe satellites will be more affordable by then…
Realise we’re straying quite far off topic here, but maybe that’s OK…
How do current Internet service providers overcome these same problems?
Do they just go for the more expensive networks with more equipment?
Also, while there may be problems involved with creating a mesh network, a slow network may be a very good problem to have because, at least it would be a network that can be improved over time with more equipment.
> “I’m not saying it’s entirely useless technology, but it’s never going to connect a whole country at any kind of useful speed.”
How fast does it have to be? How fast does Outernet transmit data?
Are you saying if an alternative network does not replicate the speed of the internet it’s useless?
To me, I don’t really care if an alternative national or global network delivers at pony express speeds. If it’s free to nearly free and enables me to communicate digitally with someone on the other side of the country or world without some exploitative isp company in between, it’s a winner.
I mean, if you expected such an alternative network to just get completely bogged down with traffic and stop working, I see your point. But if it’s just a speed of delivery problem, I’d rather wait a day or two for my message to get posted on such an alternative internet and be free of exploitative companies, than have high speed internet with all the bells & whistles while being a slave to an annually increasing monthly subscription because the isp’s have everyone by the you-know-what.
In one sense that’s true, but the current Internet isn’t just fibre and routers, most services make use of massive and expensive data centres. That’s the part maidsafe helps with. It also handles all the encryption which is useful if passing data over unknown nodes.
Speed is a function of hops/path length routing overhead and file size. I suspect the routing overhead itself would render a global network non functional with current technologies.
As far as I know Babel is one of the most advanced protocols along with BMX6
There is a yearly meet up to test the best protocols called Battlemesh. The most recent results are here where Babel & BMX6 perform quite well. I still don’t think it would scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes usefully.