Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I had a very nice afternoon drinking beer and eating at Das Kleinhaus (as long as I've used the correct gender - I don't know) on Saturday with Rainer, Chris and Matthew from Kororaa with brief appearances of a very tired Pascal. (We shared a brief complaint about how non-Canberrans, Sydneysiders especially, feel a need to disparage Canberra, then both dismiss any attempt at rebuttal with disdain and get all defensive about their native city as if no person in their right mind could question the urge to live in Sydney. Thank you, Hypocrisy Central.)

We talked about the idea of a wireless mesh network in Canberra; specifically, a network that existed separately to the internet (which avoids many of the legal problems that you get embroiled in if you look like an ISP). My concept here is that this mesh would duplicate many features of the internet; it would have its own IP range (possibly using IPv6), DNS TLD, and enthusiastic contributors could provide search engines, web pages, VOIP, Jabber, and so forth. Because the same basic structure and technology that powers the internet would be used in the mesh, it would be covered by the same laws: which means that publishing unauthorised copyrighted material is illegal but the network is not held responsible for enforcing that.

I know there's been a similar proposal hanging around here (and elsewhere) for years. I don't know the specifics, and to my mind it gets hung up on the whole "how do I know what people are using my internet connection" problem that's implied when you talk about making the mesh join the internet. I think there are deeper technical issues such as routing and address spaces and such that also need to be solved in that case. This is why I think that any successful mesh needs to have its aim solely as providing an extra backbone for data transfer on its own network that's completely independent of the internet. But this in itself is not a compelling reason to anyone individually to set it up.

There are two problems here: having useful content available to actually make it interesting, and having a way for end users to find that content. Again, these problems have been solved on the internet - we now have lots of people putting all sorts of interesting stuff there, and search engines go around and find out what's there and index it for easy finding later. The real problem is content; and to complicate it is the issue of why put anything on the mesh if you're not going to put it on the internet (and, vice versa, why put anything on the mesh that's already on the internet). There may be some things, like live video and audio or high-quality voice chat, that can be done better in the mesh than through the internet - but why reinvent the wheel?