Governments/Corporations shutting off/censoring your internet? Set up your own worldwide wireless network. Seriously.

If you're a democracy loving American like myself, you're concerned about developments such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman's proposed Government Kill Switch for the Internet , the FCC's decision that your Internet Service Provider can censor your internet however they like, and U.S. politician's support of the Egyptian government who brutally oppresses its people and shuts down their communication services when it feels threatened . Luckily "The Internet" as you know it is not our only option for a world wide data network.

I'm particularly interested in an evolving technique known as Wireless Mesh Networking that many hope will help create a "Citizens Network" as an alternative to the current Internet.

Wireless Mesh Networking

Definition from Wikipedia: Mesh networking is a type of networking wherein each node in the network may act as an independent router, regardless of whether it is connected to another network or not.

If you don't speak cyb3r g33k, that means any computer connected to a Mesh Network can help send data along to any other computer connected to that same network. In the case of Wireless Mesh Networks, there is no central Internet Service Provider (NO COMCAST!), you just wirelessly connect to the closest computer to you who is connected to a computer that is farther away from you that is connected to another computer that is even farther away from you ... on and on .... circling the globe ... thus making a global network of computers where you can share data with anyone in the world just like we have with "The Internet" today. Mesh Networking expects that not all computers will be online all of the time so when one computer shuts down, data then finds another path to get where it is going. Notice in animation, if one of the computers goes down and breaks the chain to first computer, the computers still on find an alternative path back to the first computer.

You may have already heard of, or at least participated in networking close to the Mesh Networking paradigm by joining what's called an ad-hoc wireless network. When Microsoft released Windows XP they unexpectedly unleashed quite possibly the largest ad-hoc network to ever exist. This was due to a "bug" in the Windows XP software where when it couldn't connect to a wireless network on the machine's favorite list, it would broadcast an ad-hoc network using the name of the last network it was connected to. As NPR pointed out, this caused the "Free Public WiFi" network name to spread like wild fire across the country with users connecting to it, finding they couldn't access the "The Internet" through it (remember because they are just connecting to someone else's computer who isn't connected to "The Internet"), disconnecting from it, which then causes their own computer to automatically broadcast their own ad-hoc network named "Free Public WiFi", and so and so forth.

But isn't Mesh Networking going to be slow? Nope, chaos will probably win the day.

Take Ethernet for example. In Ethernet "... all communications happen on the same wire, any information sent by one computer is received by all, even if that information is intended for just one destination." In contrast Token Passing networks wait to send data to a particular computer instead of sending data to every computer all at once. It was Xerox in 1980 that proved the chaos of Ethernet improved network speeds over the conservative Token Passing networks. These gains in speed are due to complicated algorithms that keep the data from becoming a mess. I'm not saying that Mesh Networking will work in the same way Ethernet will work, I'm simply pointing out that we find that what would seem intuitively to be the slower way to move data is sometimes the faster way and indeed researchers are already finding amazing ways to move data around in a Mesh Network.

How do I get started?

Mesh Networking capabilities already exist in computers you can buy such as the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO laptop but the Mesh Networking technology does net completely replace "The Internet". Unfortunately, at the moment this movement is limited to hackers who don't mind working with unfinished technology with the goal to improve it. DateLineZero has provided a list of 4 projects that are moving in the direction of getting Wireless Mesh Networking technology that replaces "The Internet" into the hands of the people.

Don't give up on the Internet, take action

I'm currently planning on joining friends, activists, technologists, and concerned citizens at the National Conference for Media Reform. This conference is hosted by FreePress.net, one of the leading organizations forging the way for Net Neutrality.

• Mesh Networking diagrams provided by Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking