NBDN: Althea Mesh - Justin Kilpatrick

More info and links to slides can be found at this meetups minutes page.
http://bit.ly/NBDNAltheaMinutes

Join us this month for special guest Justin Kilpatrick who will be doing a rundown and interactive display of Althea mesh network.

Heres a rundown on what problems Althea hopes to solve:

Because today’s ISPs are often monopolies in the markets they serve, they’re able to provide a low bar of customer service, and an even lower bar of internet quality—all at a high price. But they don’t manage the entire global internet: they just tap into bandwidth from the internet backbone at data centers, and build infrastructure from those locations to different towns, neighborhoods, and eventually, individual homes and businesses.

Two barriers to entry have helped these monopolies hold onto their power:

Laying the physical infrastructure that runs from their primary source of bandwidth all the way to your house, and supplying each house with the hardware they need, is expensive.

Starting and managing a traditional ISP requires significant time, human resources, and technical know-how to manage the network manually.
Althea networks break down the first barrier by distributing the up-front investment in the hardware required to run the network.

Each participant owns the equipment that connects their own home or business. The return on this individual investment is, for all users, better and more reliable internet service—and for users that connect other nodes nearby, the ability to make money too.

This individual ownership is made possible because Althea allows each node to automatically buy and sell bandwidth from neighboring nodes, effectively making each node its own ISP. Althea allows communities to cut out the middleman.

Althea also addresses the second barrier: the sheer complexity of centralized network management. Althea nodes manage their own connections to their peers, eliminating most network management (although physical installation wires and aiming of antennas is still necessary). This dramatically reduces the workload of the local groups Subnet DAOs, that promote, and support the networks.

https://altheamesh.com