Mesh networks and private internet

General
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  1. Are there any projects in India that deploy mesh networks ? Or any of you folks tried it at a small scale?
  2. Is it legal for private citizens to roll out their own mesh network or private network of sorts?
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Don’t think anyone can make it or any other network topology illegal.

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Hi! @TheJoker, thank you so much for your post. @ashlesh and I had a conversation regarding this, and these are fascinating questions. We are aware that network technologies are closely regulated in sale and use. However, we want to spend some time understanding the law related to mesh networks before providing a detailed comment. Meanwhile, please feel free to share any resources you have related to mesh networks which will enable us to address your queries better. You can drop a line at [email protected] or [email protected].

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Hi @Krishnesh and @ashlesh

A great decentralized network that is bootstrapping in the real world is Helium. Individuals can “rent” out the internet access in their local neighborhoods without any pain.

You can see the growing penetration of it on this map here - https://explorer.helium.com/ - it is already covering good parts of urban areas of US and Europe.

Individuals in Indian cities are slowly starting to provide access to this network. You can see some spots in India being online. This project is still in its infancy but the model itself has one of the greatest potential of changing how internet is accessible without any single centralized control.

The only centralized thing here is that ISP (Internet Service Provider) still provides the access to the internet. But I believe with enough network device penetration this can become P2P network with ISP no longer being the middleman to access it.

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hey @BlackSwan this looks exciting! It is interesting to see so much Helium presence all places in China, I wonder how China regulates mesh networks, considering it can’t enforce it’s centralized censorship models over it.

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Hi @ashlesh ,

So the ISP is still the end internet provider and its not peer to peer mesh. Thus chinese govt has full control on what is accessible vs not since the backbone of the internet still has to go through the great chinese firewall.

But one can see how this can decentralize a lot of things with enough people coming online to provide use. And there is incentivization for people to add themselves to the network.

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Ah, I thought it was a peer to peer mesh, okay makes sense now.