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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

There's an impressive amount of negativity in these comments. A community-run mesh network? HN should be all over it, but it appears to have turned into a bunch of network engineers telling us why they are very smart and it won't work, or is "insignificant".

More power to you, NYC Mesh.

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It's OK to be optimistic about something different. It's also ok to discuss the reality, that's not necessarily negativity towards a project. Are we only supposed to discuss one side of the argument and ignore reality just because it makes us feel nice inside?

There are bazillion reasons that this is nothing more than a cute side project that will fall on its face when its time to scale in any meaningful way. Unless they have discovered a new technology they are not taking on ISPs by any meaningful way. Especially in NYC.

There is a difference between, just "connecting to the internet" and having a "reliable connectivity to the internet", the difference is a massive investment in infrastructure. Wifi p2p mesh networks don't work on magic. They are very unreliable and hard/impossible to scale to 100,000 users, let alone millions of users. In some places, wifi p2p connection hardware actually costs more money than a traditional wired network.

Mesh networks have been around for a while, technical and reliability aspect of this is well understood within the networking industry. There is a reason why it's not widely used, especially in cities. In remote areas, this kind of network makes sense, if you don't have a choice or an alternative.

Don't brush of educated criticisms from people within the industry. I own an ISP for 5+ years (mostly wired). I am not in US and I am not at all worried if this kind of network comes in my country/area. We are not worried because we have tried and deployed this kind of network in cities and they are extremely unreliable and costs real money.

I also don't understand the "Anti-authority" angle of the argument, unless I live in a different universe, they still have to get license/permit from the local government to do this business (non-profit or not), they still have to follow the same rules enforced by local and federal government when it comes to log/customer information sharing to LEO. So not sure how they are Anti-authority? Unless they mean anti-establishment?

Once upon a time the network, storage and data center guys thought Facebook/YouTubes one to many broadcasting of content would never scale too. Now they fall over themselves to work there.

I think pavs is referring to physical limitations of the technology that prevent it from scaling.

They scaled by making a huge investment in their network. They didn't make a fundamental new technical discovery that didn't exist before. They had money, they threw money at the problem, as expected it worked. The problem was an investment (which takes time), not technical.

https://peering.google.com/#/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/565767133547005/steering-oce...

Any ISP (if big enough), can host their own Google, Akamai, Facebook, Netflix nodes on their premise.

It has been a few years since I learned about Guifi.net (non-English site; English portal:guifi.net/en/node/38392) in Catalonia/Valencia - a 2004 startup. WP says that (as of a year ago) it has 'over 33,000 active nodes and about 46,000 km of wireless links.' It's described (in English) in this 2016 paper

http://dsg.ac.upc.edu/sites/default/files/dsg/acm-sigcomm-ga...

as 'known to be the largest community network in the world ... and is still growing while successfully evading the collapse of the tragedy of the commons. Undoubtedly, this is due to the governance model that the foundation has developed....'

Since it's been around for a while, and still viable, that says something about the idea worth attending to.

More info: http://www.dtic.upf.edu/~jbarcelo/tmp/guifi.net.pdf

The weirdest part of HN for me is the optimism. Engineers are pessimistic because engineering is hard and physics is unforgiving. Engineers like to point out things won't work because it probably won't and engineers like to be right. Mesh networking is incredibly hard to get right to the point where I wouldn't even say anyone really has ever gotten it right at scale.

It would get a lot more positive comments if it was called what it is: A low-bandwidth mesh network. It's nice, but not going to replace ISPs anytime soon. It consumes more energy, it's slower, less reliable and higher latency than regular wired/fiber networks.

These things don't scale well and all those radios can be universally jammed by a single drone over the city. Not a great backup plan if you're anti-establishment.

I'd love to partake in such a project but keeping your expectations grounded is very important.