Quote from: drmoo on June 06, 2011, 03:47:09 AM

It makes me cringe everytime someone says Wireless Mesh networks will be the future of the Internet. The fact is, Wireless Mesh networks don't scale well, especially over long distances (coast to coast).
It takes time to transmit a packet from node to node. The latency involved in transmitting a packet long distances over a mesh network would make todays internet unusable. There's a reason the Internet has backbone providers, their job is to send a packet over long distances with as few "hops" as possible.

A wireless mesh internet would be like going back to using the telegraph.

Well, it would surely be a step back in terms of latency but with electronics getting faster all the time, optical mesh networks (free space optics), a few well placed and good connected longer distance links and more intelligent routing algorithms I think it could be quite efficient!

Also don't forget that with networks like Freenet or similar P2P technologies, you would have content replicated all over the net and therefore might not have to pass that many hops anyway. Hosting on centralized servers would probably be a thing of the past and it would be a good thing for many reasons.

Anyway: I'm all for it!