Toolbox for a future - 3 - Open communication technology

Is a telephone-company natural? Where does it say that there always will be overblown telephone companies with a near monopoly on electric communication? Do these companies do there best to provide us with the best and cheapest product possible? My opinion is that telecom companies has been hampering a lot of natural development and that if they could, they would turn back the clock to before the Internet. Remember the Internet was an ACCIDENT! CCmail and Microsoft tried to build an commercial Internet 1994-95 but couldn't agree on a common standard for exchanging emails. Companies grew tired and turned to the "Internet" awaiting a standard - THAT was the beginning of the Internet. Before 1994 the Universities had failed to see that anyone beside them and the US military (for launching nuclear weapons) could have any use of the technology - They sat on the technology from 1968 to 1993.. Let there be another wireless "accident".
I you google Radio spectrum and take a closer look you will find that "common" people are left with scraps of the spectrum. The radio spectrum is a state owned commodity sold to the highest bidder. And the frequencies we can use without a permit or payment is heavily regulated (max 100mv). A normal GSM phone is from 1 to 2.5 watt and this is a transceiver put directly to the head - Therefore we can conclude that the 100mw limit put on WLAN is not to spare our health. But do not despair - the WW record of WLAN transmission is over 200 km with only 100mw.

Several years ago I began thinking about how I could use my knowledge of the Internet to a better use than pushing more product to the already besieged consumer.
The conclusion became the idea of the SU.I.S. - SUstainable Internet Solution. The idea was a self-configuring self-healing digital communication center-less mesh network. This is over 10 years ago. The idea was not novel - I take no credit. Since then there has been some progress in the area of mesh networking, but no consumer or open source application is ready. The military is using mesh networking since long, but the technology don't seem to trickle-down to the rest of us and thats a pity.
A mesh network could bring much relive in disaster areas and 3. world countries where a central government is either non existing or corrupt. Centralized systems are prone to corruption and easy to disrupt.
Do we need this? Here? We got ADSL and 3G and mobile phones and wired phones, why another (slower) communication network? I regard this as an insurance, just like the fire-department. There is also the question of cost - the common European spends over 100 Eur a month on communication, paying private companies an absurd overprice for eg. SMS. In an economic crises many people will scale back on their communication capability, when we might need I most. I don't like the idea of depending on big companies when trying to (re)organize society. Local communication (witch is most of communication) should not cost full rate mobile phone rates and local Internet traffic should not go across the Atlantic ocean. A wireless mesh network using existing WLAN technology would be a good beginning to liberating communication.
Remember its not the bandwidth you miss when you are off-line - Its the connection, regardless of how slow it might be. A wireless mesh is not going to be fast, but it could be a stable and reliable line of communication.

Several open source mesh system is under development, but it will take some time before we see an application that can be installed on every kind of platform and operating system. Here is also some promising developments.

If you come upon interesting news about open source wireless network mesh'es please make a comment!
(I have decided to have ads on the blog - I suspect that it will give me a better google rating for some strange reason..)