It’s true that the mesh nodes on the fringe of the network, far from any gateways to high speed networks (notice I didn’t say ‘cable modems or DSL’) will suffer some speed limitations. There are various causes for this: some come from the natural wifi signal degradation as it moves through empty space, or is absorbed and reflected by objects. This causes the signal to be weaker, sometimes meaning packets get lost and have to be retransmitted, which causes higher latency and possibly a reduction in throughput (“bandwidth”). Another source of latency is that caused within the mesh node itself, as it does computation and routing. The way that various protocols suffer from bandwidth restriction, latency, and packet loss differs from protocol to protocol. We deal with each protocol separately, in order to present the best user experience (another way we differ from Meraki). I don’t want to get too technical here, but rather to give an introduction how meshing problems can be minimized.

Mesh networks still represent the most cost-effective way of providing wifi Internet coverage on a large area. If the proper mesh technologies can be coupled onto FON, the network would be greatly benefited.

Martin, please contact me in private to discuss some of the specifics. I’d like to work with you and FON. I am already a FON Fan and a ‘Linus’.

Regards,
Robert Keyes

Just in case you don’t check the FON English blog.

Here’s one idea, not meshing exactly, but I’d like you to consider it.

Have you thought of doing the following:

- Make La Fonera work as a repeater
* one SSID plugs to my current private WLAN
* second SSID does the FON_ thing
* the kicker, let me plug my xbox/xbmc/slingbox/htpc and connect to my private WLAN trough the Ethernet port.

I believe this is an everybody win approach, because of the following:
- If placed in my living room, chances are La Fonera would be closer to a window/patio/[front|back]yard and therefore a public area than if it’s located in a basement/attic and therefore linus/aliens get better reception.
- The fonero gets to plug non Wi-Fi enabled gadgets in the living room.
- La Fonera has less chances of getting bricked when following this guide http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/La_Fonera_Flashing

Let me know if you plan to implement this or if this is readily doable with plain Fonera firmware so I can refrain from hacking my way around the coming weekend.

My 2¢

We will do our best to work with Meraki.

we love meshing but we believe that only in a very dense and localized scenario the Fonero will take advantage of meshing. On the other hand meshing algorithmic are costly on CPU and data traffic, if they are used on environments where it is not adequate it will definitely affect the AP overall performance. But again, we are considering to use meshing at some point, maybe for specific deployments.