On Sat, 5 Apr 2003, David Young wrote:Is this a current problem? This sounds to me like a problem in the far-off future. I am aware of only two not-for-profit, ad hoc wireless networking projects, the Kingsbridge network and the modest network we've built here in Urbana. We have six nodes in two networks in Urbana. I think that Kingsbridge has six nodes in one network. At six nodes or less, these networks are a long way from the routing breakdown you describe.
How many copies of MeshAP do you think are running out there? I'd guess around 1000. Most of them are probably experimental.
Some of the hard problems bite you in a big hurry as you start adding nodes and aps...
Quite. You have to solve most of the problems just to get the first three meshed APs to work together. Yes, this is a dream that might be years away from being a major problem. But we're on the threshold where it could explode really fast.
Take just one scenario. What if Locustworld reached an agreement with Cisco and Linksys (or Apple, or Dlink, or ...) and they then produced a meshable 802.11g AP for home use. We could turn lower Manhattan or downtown SF into one big mesh in a matter of months. But this will never happen if there isn't a well understood, standard, commercially supportable way of dealing with the IP allocation and routing problems. It's about making the jump from a relatively amateur collection of open source tools running on low production volume boxes to the mainstream.[1]
[1]Which raises another issue entirely. The hardware manufacturers need to produce device drivers for the radio-NIC but why do they use proprietary code for the gateway-firewall-DHCP-NAT part of their AP offerings? And why are most of them ignoring or blocking Linux device drivers? In fact why don't they release tech specs and APIs and let other people write the device drivers? Surely they don't want to be in the software business?
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