Re: Network stops passing traffic randomly

[Steve Newcomb <srn@coolheads.com>]

On 6/3/20 12:42 PM, Ben Greear wrote:
> If you are trying to lift up a broad swath of the world, then you need 
> scale and vision, and part of that is how
> to make it self sustaining.  Giving a few crumbs to folks is less 
> useful in my mind than helping give them the means
> to make their own bread.  Think someone starting a company that wants 
> to deploy 10k hotspots with 40k satellite
> wifi mesh nodes....
Your vision is deeply correct, but so is mine.  One difference between 
the two ideas is that yours is top-down, with the purpose of offering a 
service, while mine is bottom-up, with the purpose of developing 
community and neighborliness, regardless of service provider(s).   (I'm 
an admirer of the late Fred Rogers, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.)

But you are right, too.  I'm also an admirer of the Indian cataract 
surgery guy (can't remember his name) who insisted that all patients pay 
for their surgery "because charity doesn't scale".  He ultimately built 
a mind-boggling practice that, among other things, presumably now 
manufactures most of the world's intraocular lenses.

>
> Open source software (and maybe hardware) with high volume, 
> affordable, and solid hardware
> is one of the core aims of TIP.  Think of a price and minimum hardware 
> that meets your goals,
> if I find someone that can make such a thing at such a price, I'll let 
> you know.
Fair enough.  How about a *delivered* price, i.e. an out-of-pocket cost, 
of $50.  Obviously a minimum of 2 radios, 128 Mb, and reasonable CPU 
power.  Since we're forward-looking, here, with support for the new 
channels now presumably forthcoming from the FCC.
> If you want wave-1 ath10k to mesh, my advice is to use 7 virtual 
> station vdevs and one AP on each radio.  ath10k-ct
> firmware and software will support this nicely.  Have those 7 stations 
> connect to peers' AP vdevs.  Do routing mesh
> magic through this topology.  Then you don't care about anything other 
> than STA + AP working.  This might also scale to other platforms
> that don't support IBSS or MESH well. 
Many thanks, Ben.  This is a helpful idea, and I daresay not many people 
could have come up with it.  (Certainly not I!)  You have just given me 
some homework to do, and I'm grateful for it.  Bravo. If I get anywhere 
with it, you'll be the first to know.

Steve