On Tuesday, March 25, 2003, at 06:03 PM, John Stracke wrote:
S Woodside wrote:
In addition I recently had to cope with the hassles of setting up an H.323 connection (with ohphoneX) from behind a firewall at both ends and immediately concluded that people on any kind of wireless mesh that uses NAT are going to be severely limited since they aren't truly a part of the internet.
Right. The problem is that what I've seen in the past is that wireless-mesh proponents want to be able to do massive multihoming, with all participants with external links sharing those links, and all the traffic from the outside finding the shortest way in. I won't say it's impossible, but last I heard nobody knew how to do it; the route flap would be horrible.
This is in fact one of the major goals, although I've never heard the community wireless networking (CWN) folks express it so precisely. The ability to be able to set up a wireless network and route internet traffic through the mesh is strongly desired. I think that beyond that, it is also desirable as well.
Perhaps it is difficult but if solved and implemented it will allow these types of networks to be a part of the internet, not just "on" the internet ... creating a type of viral internet, in some sense, where any new node becomes a beachhead for propagation of the internet into new geographical areas.
I understand that it's difficult, but it's also important. In addition, there is a strong demand for last-mile/rural broadband around the world. People are kludging together solutions that aren't scalable, and/or are fragile, and/or are proprietary (e.g. RoamAd, etc. and a lot of these so called "solutions" are really just vaporware right now).
simon