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April 30, 2004

Auto-mesh

Glenn Fleischman writes:

The CUWiN [Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network ] project wants to allow self-forming, noncentralized, mesh-based Wi-Fi networks using standard, old PCs with no configuration. Slightly more advanced units could be ruggedized boxes using Compact Flash, but the basic unit would be a 486 or later PC with a bootable CD-ROM or bootable floppy that bootstraps a CD-ROM. Once booted, a unit finds other similar units without any other configuration or control and forms a mesh.

Clay comments over at Corante Many2Many:

As with straight Wifi, the obvious uses of a simple meshing tool are to replace wireline networks where they would be too expensive, but the second-order benefits that will come out will all be novel and often social uses for temporary creation of self-configuring high-bandwidth LANs — internet cafes without the cafe, temporary autonomous file trading zones, video re-mix culture throwdowns in real time.

The old paradigm of top-down network provisioning is so fragile that just one garage-based genius - surrounded by an open source community - could implode it. Exciting.

Posted by D. Weinberger at April 30, 2004 01:04 PM

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» Whatever happened to the Energizer Bunny? from Telepocalypse
The idea of an energy crunch seems to be getting some more exposure. This has an interesting long-range repercussion on telecommunications. The obvious stuff is that you have a lot more demand for telecom since moving bits is a substitute... [Read More]

Tracked on April 30, 2004 11:56 PM

» The mind that moves the world from The Power of Many
This great line by David Weinberger (commenting on an idea for a self-forming, mesh-based Wi-Fi network) can apply to so many realms of human experience that it reaches the level of Truth: The old paradigm of top-down network provisioning is... [Read More]

Tracked on May 3, 2004 06:41 PM

Comments

My name is misspelled. I only point this out because my name is always misspelled. I don't misspell Shirky. I don't misspell Weinblogger. Please!

Posted by: Glenn Fleishman | April 30, 2004 01:19 PM

Glenn, the embarrassing thing is that I actually checked before I wrote it...but I only checked if it was two Ns or one.

Sorry!

Posted by: David Weinberger | April 30, 2004 03:12 PM

S'okay. I don't mean to be thinkskinned. It's just surprising to me. I just posted what I would call a Google correction cross-reference: all of the misspellings of my name. I figure if someone gets the spelling wrong on Google, this page will come up tops and then they can redirect.

Posted by: Glenn Fleishman | April 30, 2004 04:23 PM

There are a variety of alternative expected spellings of both your first and your last name. Plus, the multiple consonants make it hard to "gestalt" a spelling error in the "shm" sequence. I suspect that's why I don't get many "wineburger"s and but do get a fair number of "weinburger"s and "weinberg"s.

Posted by: David Weinberger | April 30, 2004 05:11 PM

bootable floppy bootstraps? what the frik, man? I don't efen own a cellularphoneyet. got me dylan tix, b-a-b-y! yea...

Posted by: bw | April 30, 2004 10:46 PM

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Posted by: arau | July 19, 2004 07:45 PM

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