[Mesh] Hurricane Harvey and thoughts on mesh resiliency

[Nicholas Carter]

As Hurricane Harvey dissipates and the rebuilding effort takes shape in
Houston, I've been thinking about the horrible circumstances, loss of life,
and (of course) the usefulness of a resilient networking solution in a
scenario such as the Harvey recovery. I'm guessing many traditional network
links are down or literally underwater right now, and cell networks must be
flooded too (forgive the pun).

In my idealistic networking mind, It would be great to see a system of
off-grid-powered, auxiliary transceivers sitting on cell towers, sides of
tall buildings, etc., that would be lying in wait to take over at least a
portion of basic traffic for users to get messages out to family and
friends, emergency use, and the like. Something like what AREDN/BBHN is/was
supposed to be on a very large scale, but with the
power/flexibility/security of cjdns. That was a big point of founding the
Montgomery Co. Mesh Network meetup (to start discussions on the hardware
bits of this alternative connectivity implementation).

More thoughts and comments on this are very welcome.

_Nick C
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gathman.org/pipermail/mesh/attachments/20170901/a5e2cfb0/attachment.html>