Building Community Mesh Networks
summary
Community meshes here report concrete results: a Slovenia network with about 300–360 nodes, Portland clusters of roughly 100 nodes serving ~50,000 users/year, and a new Oakland test fleet of 30–40 nodes that still crashes in testing. Toolchain uses OpenWrt with batman-adv routing plus VPN tunnels for bootstrapping, a three-tier router model (cheap indoor → street → rooftop point‑to‑point), an automated flash-and-configure pipeline, node maps (ninex) and real deployments for disaster messaging and local services.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (26)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:53Marc Juul
- 1:47Russell Senior
- 7:30Isaac Smith
- 9:08Student Mesh
- 10:42Node Shop Map
- 11:24Presentation of Networks
- 13:39PseudoMesh
- 16:29Automation
- 17:59How to start
- 21:32The whole network
- 23:38Three layers
- 25:59Who is interested
- 26:46OpenWRT
- 28:54Mesh
- 31:03Documentation
- 34:15Routing and Discovery
- 35:44Pseudo Mesh
- 37:32Local Exchange
- 38:20Trust
- 39:58Security
- 40:38Last Mile
- 42:08International links
- 43:47Challenges
- 44:44Repurposing Open Mesh
- 45:33Technical Details
related talks
22mMobility, Proximal Data and Compute Meshes
20mConnecting, Securing and Optimising Enterprise Networks with Free Software
20mOpportunities for Urban Community Connectivity with CBRS, OSS, and NGOs
55mBuilding the Network: Why, How and What's Next
30mRunning an OpenThread Mesh Network with Linux and Zephyr
30mNoisy Neighbors, through Networking
25mLet’s make local and accountable tech!
45mWhat We Learned from Building Edge Computing Nodes