Mesh networking today got a boost from the NSF, reports Om Malik. It comes in the form of a grant to Sasha Meinrath and the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network.
A mesh network can be different than the usual Muni WiFi setup–it's true peer-to-peer networking, where nodes on the network can talk to each other in an ad-hoc fashion as opposed to going thru a central server (unlike a typical WiFi setup which uses a hub and spoke {h&s} network). Why does this matter? Well for one, it minimizes the single point failure in an h&s, because there isn't necessarily a “central” resource. Instead, if a resource becomes unavailable, just connect via another node.
What Sasha does a great job at presenting is how current broadband business models make absolutely no sense, when you realize what a community can do with inexpensive off-the-shelf parts and some brilliant open-source software.