Mesh Networks for a Better World

After Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines at the end of 2013, one of the starkest response deficits took place in the communications. As rescuers tried to help besieged victims, they were unable to locate all the survivors because the communications network had been damaged by the storm. In a country like the Philippines, where 90% of citizens are mobile subscribers, a mesh network making use of mobile phones enabling emergency responders to locate survivors would almost certainly have saved lives.

Mesh networks address communication deficits by creating a backup network comprised of point-to-point devices, known as mesh nodes, that can carry traffic. A mesh network retains a base node, called a backhaul node, but allows devices on the network to send and receive traffic from other devices, which can number from the dozens to the hundreds. This structure creates a multiplicity of routes available for traffic, greatly decreasing the chance that single device failure will lead to network failure. Mesh networks also use dynamic routing to ensure that information travels the shortest difference between two points.

Mesh networks can provide stronger, faster signals than hub-and-spoke models: if a user’s laptop is in range of four broadcast nodes, it’s able to use four times as much bandwidth as one traditional wireless router. Distance is also significant: a device twice as close to a node will receive four times as much bandwidth. Additionally, nodes can provide wired access to devices such as VoIP phones using Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology.

In the Philippines, a mesh network would almost certainly have been comprised by mobile
phones, creating a broad but geographically fluid network, but mesh networks have already been employed in several American cities. Municipal mesh networks use outdoor stationary routers as part of their public hotspot programs. In addition to providing internet to citizens, this creates the advantages for the city of not having to dig for cables, having an emergency communication backstop when cellular service goes down, and being able to use wireless routers to run diagnostics on power and sewer services.

Mesh networks aren’t without their hiccups, however–a mesh network can be difficult to
implement, and current routing technology limits scalability to a few hundred nodes. There are also concerns with proposed public implementation of mesh networks for poor or underserved areas. Traditional ISPs have bristled at such proposals because it might undermine their pay-per-use or subscription models, while some lawmakers cite how lack of oversight in mesh networks could enable criminal net behavior.

No matter how robust the status quo is claimed to be, however, anyone who has suffered
internet service outages knows how disruptive service failures can be. Mesh networks would provide a resilient alternative to current wired networks, and their possible role as a competitive “second internet” certainly merits discussion.