1) What's the motivation? Can't just be the geek factor. Greater bandwidth to the Internet (ie, you can use your own DSL or cable or modem *and* your neighbors bandwidth in some load blancing config) is the best reason I've heard for people to really want to be part of a mesh.
Once it was in place quite a few interesting possibilities come to light. Forget the wireless bit for a moment and think about it as all your neighbours being on the same LAN. The Wireless bit is just about avoiding stringing CAT5 in the trees.
Now take a typical urban/suburban environment with family homes. The kids all know each other and go to the same school. They fall into year groups. Now picture each year group being on the same LAN.
- VoIP and Video-oIP
- Game servers and gaming
- File sharing (yup, stealing music again)
- Neighbourhood watch webcams
- Community radio/tv
- Barter servers
- Next?
Some of this is already happening in areas with high broadband density. How much more effective would it be with 5Mb to 25Mb between households?
All we're doing here is extending the Internet at it's edges and increasing the number of interconnections. Every time this happened in the last 20 years something dramatic and unforeseen resulted.
-- Julian Bond Email&MSM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Webmaster: http://www.ecademy.com/ Personal WebLog: http://www.voidstar.com/ M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173 T: +44 (0)192 0412 433 -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
