And no, I’m not talking about pirating on the internet, I’m talking about getting your internet connection to the outside world without paying or having a subscription or license. Something like a mesh network with your neighbors with the exit node being one person’s high-speed fiber line, or even an exit node through a free public wifi network that you’ve hidden a little repeater device within range of… something like that could be interesting. I’ve been thinking lately of a world where decentralized networks become more common, and where people can freely use the internet without paying an ISP. What are your thoughts?
Wait but the mesh network is virtual they don’t have their own antennas right?
They have their own antennas. If the internet connection of one router dies, but it has a connection to another Freifunk node, it gets routed over the other one.
That’s super cool, that sounds apocalypse-ready. It probably only exists in cities though, right?
It isn’t just deployed by nerds but sometimes also by cafes, libraries and municipalities. So you can expect them to be in every town but they don’t have such a dense coverage that they have a full mesh network over a city.
And the thing that is missing is that there are no inter network services like an copy of Wikipedia, LLMs or fileshares.
Here is a map of all access points in Hamburg, I preselected an acesspoint that has a large mesh network: https://map.hamburg.freifunk.net/#!v:m;n:d8473253afe8