Neighborhood Council Meeting

Photo by kanonsky, used under license through Adobe Stock.

Last night, I went to our neighborhood community council meeting. It’s called the MACC (for Morningside).

I asked if the council would welcome the META MESH guys over to talk with us all about mesh networking and Pitt Mesh. They did, and it was really informative. It will cost a good bit of money ($10k) for the neighborhood to be fully covered in a mesh network, but I think we could at least get a start by blanketing our small business district.

A mesh network is a form of wireless, ad hoc networking. Folks can set up a series of nodes – or antennas – that connect to one another and create a small network. The network may or may not be connected to the larger World Wide Web. This particular network is now in a successful proof of concept test for solar powered battery backup.

Having such a network in Morningside would be useful fora number of reasons:

Business district can advertise, offer coupons to neighbors;
Community events, yard sales, council meeting notes, historic data can be served and shared;
Safety notices, disaster event news, backup information network if Comcast or Verizon went down;
Educational opportunities for Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other youth organizations to learn to build and maintain network architecture;

Once the network is built, my guess is that other people smarter than I am will come along with a thousand cooler ideas of other applications for a hyper-local, solar-powered, redundant mesh network.