@PhenomX6 @opal @coldacid @Charlamagne

Mesh networking is a different thing than becoming an ISP, it's creating a seperate network, which may or may not be connected to the Internet.

I think that something like SNET but more scalable is the ultimate solution.

It's entirely possible in a densely populated city, as long as you can string cable between apartments/houses, and the OCCASIONAL WiFi hop is also totally okay (though it harms scalability).

This can be done with consumer-grade WiFi and Ethernet equipment.

If people could create a mesh network for their local cities/communities, then the many networks could be connected together, as they got bigger, the infrastructure (Ethernet cables and WiFi repeaters), could be improved to scale more (fiber optic cables on power lines).

This would essentially be a way to create your own Internet, which would be far more censorship resilient, as the way a mesh network works is not hierarchical.

This leaves two problems:
1. How do we convince people to utilize such a network?
2. When other networks are created, how will they be interconnected. (We might need to use the Internet to connect them).

To answer #1, it needs to provide benefit for the users *now*, not later, maybe market it as a LAN for everyone in the neighborhood who wants to join, starting with your friends.

#1 is the greatest issue, adoption has to happen in the early stages for it to grow.

#2 Actually isn't too bad, the answer is litteraly "use the Internet." If worst came to worse, the locations of the devices routing data between subnets could be kept a secret.

This would all pair extremely well with IPFS, the anonyminity concerns would be greatly diminished as the network isn't hierarchical, so figuring out where a local IPv6 address routes to is more difficult (especially with MAC address spoofing). IPFS could conserve bandwidth and preserve content.

To scale, you'd want seperate subnets that could be connected in a way where you could still communicate directly with others, but also with people local to your subnet (once again, we're talking about Ethernet cables and WiFi repeaters, gotta save bandwidth).

This is all just unhinged rambling, but I'm actually starting to think of it as a possiblity.