This is great and all, but I feel like someone should point out that at some level, you need service to your house. In the US at least, AT&T (or some company that was formerly AT&T) owns most of the last-mile wires, so anyone who can control the last-mile wires ultimately has control over the network.
Actually in a properly setup mesh network you DON'T need service to your house. You just need to be within distance of the next node that can pass your packets along.
So, the scenario is, when you main wire is cut, your router has different firm in place when lets it talk to your neighbor's router which talks to his neighbor's router which talks to a packet radio router. And that lets everyone's packets go everywhere?
Slow but it seems possible.
The problem I'd see is a government aiming for control would clamp down on the international packet radios immediately and not wait till it want to shut off the net.
From the original article, this is already dealt with. "It aims to not only create local mesh networks, but to build a global mesh network of mesh networks stitched together by long range packet radio." (article, under the "Openet" section)
Or hijack a US military satellite, I forget where I read that, something about Puerto Ricans hijacking a still working but no longer used US military satellite.
AT&T-esque companies might own the last-mile phone lines, but I don't think that they are the same as the last mile coax cable connections. Comcast/TimeWarner/etc weren't part of AT&T (or formerly known at AT&T).
Because I didn't know about it =) I've found a few more active mesh networks from around the world, so I'm doing a follow-up story. Thanks for leading me to Freifunk.
How much bandwidth could we squeeze out of long-range packet radio technologies? Even big commercial shops like Verizon and AT&T have to be careful about bandwidth usage on their networks.
What we would really have to do is take over one of these existing companies. Sprint, for example, has a market cap of $13B. I'll start a Kickstarter project.
