When the internet dies, meet the meshnet that survives

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229653.700-when-the-internet-dies-meet-the-meshnet-that-survives.html?cmpid=RSS%7CNSNS%7C2012-GLOBAL%7Conline-news#.U1QEul7fhQR

The scenario is part of a drill staged on 5 April in Manhattan by art and technology non-profit centre Eyebeam, and it mimics on a small scale the outage that affected New Yorkers after superstorm Sandy hit in 2012. The idea is to test whether communication networks built mostly on meagre battery power and mobile devices can be created rapidly when disaster strikes.

I'm a volunteer node in the network, and an ethernet cable runs over my shoulders into a wireless router in my left hand. It is powered by a battery in my jacket pocket.

Other routers link up with mine from a few hundred metres away. Soon I'm at the centre of a web of seven or eight nodes, connected through my smartphone. This meshnet, as it is called, is my only link to the others. The messages start coming in on my phone, flowing through an app called ChatSecure, built by the Guardian Project, a group of developers who design software for private communication. The app enables peer-to-peer communication between devices that are networked, but that don't necessarily have an internet connection.

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