What on Earth makes people think a finnicky meshnet that requires a high density of nodes will survive a Sandy-like disaster? Doesn't seem like the most obvious use-case for meshnets, wouldn't people be better served getting ham licenses and learning how to improvise antennas in an emergency?
That depends on the types of devices you use for creating it. You can get a km out of an ordinary router with a directional can antennae. What distance do you think is required for it to be viable?
>You can get a km out of an ordinary router with a directional can antennae
With a line-of-sight and some careful positioning, maybe.
There are numerous examples of people using traditional radios to coordinate disaster response [1] (actually why ham licenses are issued IIRC), this seems like a more complicated, error prone, cool-kid-hackerspace solution. What advantages does a mesh network have over traditional radios (which have bands allocated for this) for disaster response? How well will a mesh network hold up if half (or more) of the nodes fail due to power loss, flooding etc?
Mesh networks are cool, and I'm all for decentralizing communication, but their usefulness for disaster preparedness seems very dubious to me.
Ongoing innovations in open firmware like OpenWRT allow deployment of reasonably robust routing schemes, such that the mesh nodes themselves compute the routes most efficient for transport (and also repair those routes when nodes go down). Groups like Commotion Wireless, Freifunk, Funkfeuer, and LirbeMesh all deploy firmwares derived from OpenWRT to this purpose. The actual capacity, range, and sensitivity of the radio hardware used, whether unlicensed or not, will still be gating factors. Along with ambient noise levels on whatever bands are used.
