The Case for Incentivized Mesh Networks

The internet is a marvelous thing – it connects us across continents and cultures and it brings us opportunities for employment and education. We can share, create, innovate and grow collectively. It is our goal to preserve the freedom and openness of the internet and to further access so that all people can benefit.

I live in a typical small town in rural America. We have a small grocery store, one stop light, and everyone knows each other. And, like most other small towns, we suffer from poor broadband access and few choices. In fact, according to the FCC, 39 percent of rural Americans (23 million people) lack access to broadband internet. Running a small business here, l can see first hand how this lack of access affects my community and its members. People have to arrange their days around access to the internet, driving into town to use the internet provided at my shop or at the library. Parents arrange their homeschool schedules to start at five or six in the morning when the satellite internet has no data caps. People struggle to go to online school or keep up with online meetings for work.

The current brittle and centralized nature of an ISP is a poor model for providing access and large scale ISPs have little economic incentive to build costly infrastructure with so little if any profit to be gained. Rural, western Oregon is a perfect example of the difficulties present in building infrastructure in rural America. The population is spread out sparsely in densely wooded areas making infrastructure expansion and maintenance difficult. One solution to this problem has been to provide government funding to ISP build out in under served areas. While government and non-profits grants can ease the financial burden of initial build out, there is little incentive to maintain the infrastructure as it ages or after disaster situations, leaving communities once more at a disadvantage. A short term influx of funding cannot provide a lasting solution.

We believe the answer to rural access will come not from the large ISPs, but from neighbors and communities providing service to one another. This not only strengthens last-mile access, it adds security in a disaster situation. With a decentralized model, many nodes add robustness and fluidity to the outlying branches of internet service.
We will be using Althea’s decentralized, incentivized routing software to provide a way for homeowners to provide internet to their neighbors, and be compensated to do so. This incentivized mesh network model empowers communities to independently build robust, redundant infrastructure, by utilizing a digital cryptocurrency and specialized routing software. Althea’s software also lifts much of the burden of running a wireless network by automatically routing the payments for bandwidth and ensuring all traffic within the network is secure and encrypted.
While Althea provides the software solution, Cascadian MeshNet works to build innovative hardware that is easy for the end user to deploy and maintain.

Current radio and tower systems have several disadvantageous. They take time and expertise to install, and require tools that the average home owner may not have at their disposal. In addition, licensing and permitting may be required for a permanent structure. To this end we have developed a Rapidly Deployable Tower System (RDTS). The RDTS hardware will solve the problem of terrain and vegetation obscuring line-of-sight, and has been designed to be affordable, portable and easy to use. It can be used in an off-grid situation. Our towers can act as a semi-permanent infrastructure for rural access or can be deployed temporarily in a disaster case.

I believe if we can give people the tools, they can build and maintain their own infrastructure, creating a sustainable network. When we shift the incentive from large ISPs to citizens, the network becomes decentralized. A decentralized network is intrinsically robust, resilient, and self-healing. Our Mesh Network will be an internet of, by and for the people. No one entity or corporation will build this new network, instead individuals and communities will own and build the new infrastructure, incentivized to do so by the financial rewards and the neutrality and privacy of content.

Find out more at www.altheamesh.com or www.incentivizedmeshnet.com