The Netsukuku project is based on the very simple idea of exploiting the great potentiality of the wifi connectivity, making the PCs of wireless communities act as routers and handle together an ad-hoc network even bigger than the Internet.
Netsukuku is an ad-hoc network system designed to handle massive numbers of nodes with minimal consumption of CPU and memory resources. It can be used to build a world-wide distributed, fault-tolerant, anonymous, and censorship-immune network, fully independent from the Internet. Netsukuku does not rely upon any form of backbone router, internet service provider network, or any centralized system, although it may take advantage of existing systems of this nature to augment unity and connectivity of the existing Netsukuku network.
Similar ad-hoc networks have been tried before. It won’t work, because of the limitations of commodity wifi chipsets. They simply don’t have the range or sensitivity for the task. The best network protocol that I’ve found for this kind of fit would be Dash 7, which makes sense because it was based off of a military battleground network with an unlimited number of moving nodes. The problems with both Netsukuku and Outernet isn’t the grand ideas, it’s the physics involved.
To clarify, we’re not married to a particular technology or protocol. Our goal is to bridge the information divide–and use any tool that gets us there.
If by progress, does it work, then yes. It does work.
If instead you mean, do any existing market devices contain dash7 transceivers, I’d have to say no. It doesn’t seem to be a market success.