Comment by torginus
4 hours ago
I think meshes do work extremely well in practice, and are quite resilient with regards to errors, and load balancing, and they get better as you add more nodes.
I think it's perfectly feasible for a small neighborhood of regular people to have internet shared over a wireless mesh network, yielding experience comparable to standard approaches.
They don't. Resilience isn't additive. The more nodes you add, the more announcements and traffic you add, which congests the network further. Regular internet topologies work because of high throughput backbones.