Comment by hedora
2 years ago
Apple AirDrop was basically this, but they neutered it at the request of the Chinese government. It still works, but it automatically turns itself off every 30 minutes, so you can't (for instance) opt-in to allowing people to automatically push uncensored news to your phone during your daily commute (without interacting with the phone every half hour).
(It isn't technically a mesh, since it doesn't support multi-hop routing. Still, it is peer to peer, and doesn't require a data connection.)
Apple also has an API called MultiPeerConnectivity[0] that handles this better than AirDrop. I’ve long wanted to try building a mesh network with this. Not sure about multi-hop, maybe that could be part of the business logic.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/multipeerconnectiv...
A better example is perhaps Apple's Find My network in which they explicitly said that locations of your Apple devices (including AirTags) would be transmitted over a mesh network and eventually to Apple's servers so you can see them on your iCloud console.
From an anti-censorship / user interface perspective, AirDrop is closer to the mesh network dream, but, yeah, from a network topology perspective, Find My is an actual mesh network, and AirDrop is not.
I'd love to see something with the characteristics of Find My, but open to arbitrary data transfers. The cell connectivity in my area is poor (due to monopolies not bothering to build out infrastructure, unless you believe there's no demand for network connectivity in the SF Bay Area...), and most places I drive to have guest wifi networks anyway.
I can easily imagine dropping my cell phone plan and only being available for high-latency text messages (and emergency calls to 911) when out and about.