[ale] All you Comcast fanboys...

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 01/30/2015 12:49 PM, Dylan Northrup wrote:
> If I were young, poor and/or interested in "fighting the man" I might
> get on board.  But I'm not young anymore, have made enough to pay
> people for services and am interested in helping my kids become
> successful in school and life.
I totally understand.

Ten years ago, I had far more energy to fight the world than I do
today... that said, I think that we could do it, and we could do it
well, and do right right, and within the rules of the FCC's unlicensed
spectrum, AND I think we could actually steal back the Internet.

The only thing I'm missing is the money to do it.  Given the parts to
build a useful working prototype network (say, enough to cover my
subdivision is what I would call a good test) and someone to pay for the
man-month or so of time it would take for me to do it, I'm relatively
confident that I could create a system that allows the attachment of any
network.

It wouldn't have to be painful at all; the mesh would be a giant transit
network.  It could scale quite well, if not as instantly as the
cross-country fiber links that support the Internet's backbone here. 
Just as a starting point, the mesh network could look for any and all
open access points, anywhere, validate that they're connected (e.g.,
actually communicating with the Internet proper, and not a honeypot that
looks like it has a working default gateway), and act to ensure that
anyone attached to the mesh has at least rudimentary Internet.

No, a first version wouldn't be what we'd expect to do e.g., Netflix
over.  But I honestly don't think it'd be difficult to do, given the
money and the time.  Sadly, I have neither.