We often give little thought to the infrastructure that supports the web. After doing a Cisco networking course years ago I abstracted my thoughts up to the higher levels of application development and social interaction, but it’s worth revisiting the fact that without the lower levels these ideas wouldn’t be possible.
After seeing traces of his presence scattered throughout the web, I met Donal at Trampoline earlier this year. What I love is that he’s not just talking about the adhocracy, he’s actually doing it by providing decentralised mesh network infrastructure through his not-for-profit IT company, Nodecity.
Nodecity builds these mesh networks using hardware from a small Silicon Valley-based company called Meraki. After a small flurry of activity in Australia after Mark Pesce’s magnificent lecture on Mob Rules (text / video) I haven’t heard much about them, but perhaps it is time for another serious push?
This video explains how the Meraki mesh network self-organises and the potential access enables:
What’s happened so far? Both the Trampoline Melbourne and Future Summit 2009 events had fantastic free wireless coverage. This enabled some really powerful connections to flourish, such as realtime backchannels and the broader distribution of messages far beyond the physical location of the venues.
When Pete Williams and Donal met there it was only a few days before the people living in the temporary village in Flowerdale after being displaced by bushfires had blanketed wifi coverage from a single rebrokered internet connection. The speed of deployment is incredible.
There are so many amazing implications of this sort of technology, especially when you consider that the nodes can be solar powered. Remote areas can be tied together, suburban streets can share a single external connection, objects can be connected as nodes, cost of access is dramatically reduced, and of course you get more redundancy through the mesh structure itself.
If you could build an internet infrastructure somewhere, where would you build it?
By Ross Hill - August 3rd, 2009 at 10:14pm with 850 views - cisco donal mark pesce meraki nodecity pet peter williams trampoline
