Too little bandwidth and too few nodes to do this in the sense I think you mean.
You can build a hotspot and try setting up meshes with any of the available hardware or software packages out there, but you're going to end up being the gatekeeper to the service. HAM radio ends up working out the same way, as I understand. It's just too technical for people to have this spring up collectively without a single person or team doing everything.
Lack of tech experience to even know how to build a mesh let alone prioritize its limited bandwidth is why the general public isn't going to assist.
>And then, could they repeat the hotspot, to build a mesh? I know there are projects to do that, but what do they accomplish exactly?
Yes, pretty much. The problem is poor definition of the problem, though.
What are we trying to solve? A way to send trickles of comms out, like "Mom and Dad, we're alive?" or "We have life-threatening casualties at x',y'?" Emergency kiosk to send emails one at a time? Doable if you have an Internet source like a Starlink, or any other uplink that's still up somehow.
Or is to restore the "Internet" as generally known, which might as well be synonymous with YouTube and Netflix and web browsing for people. You and your system would be overwhelmed as soon as your mesh comes up.
You might be able to define this particular problem using negatives instead of positives. Everything except stuff like YouTube, Netflix, etc. If you cut out images, audio, video, and other intensive data streams text based communication in natural language is extremely lightweight. Particularly if the protocol is carefully designed with the intended deployment conditions in mind.
I guess a requirement for that is a sufficiently generalized protocol with a matching hardware stack.
You can build a hotspot and try setting up meshes with any of the available hardware or software packages out there, but you're going to end up being the gatekeeper to the service. HAM radio ends up working out the same way, as I understand. It's just too technical for people to have this spring up collectively without a single person or team doing everything.
Lack of tech experience to even know how to build a mesh let alone prioritize its limited bandwidth is why the general public isn't going to assist.
>And then, could they repeat the hotspot, to build a mesh? I know there are projects to do that, but what do they accomplish exactly?
Yes, pretty much. The problem is poor definition of the problem, though.
What are we trying to solve? A way to send trickles of comms out, like "Mom and Dad, we're alive?" or "We have life-threatening casualties at x',y'?" Emergency kiosk to send emails one at a time? Doable if you have an Internet source like a Starlink, or any other uplink that's still up somehow.
Or is to restore the "Internet" as generally known, which might as well be synonymous with YouTube and Netflix and web browsing for people. You and your system would be overwhelmed as soon as your mesh comes up.