[This article was first posted on Cent]
Yesterday at about 12pm an underground fire in a KT (Korea Telecom) broadband cable tunnel located in the Chungjeongno 3 ga neighborhood of Seoul effectively sent the districts of Yongsan, Seodaemun and Mapo back into the dark ages.
The broadcast signal that mobile phones, land lines, credit card readers and home internet + cable rely on was cut off sending every KT subscriber (myself included) in the effected districts into a communications blackout.
No cable. No internet. No Cent.
It's pretty amazing - not to mention disconcerting - that a single location is responsible for supplying the signal that as many as 956,000 residents depend on for, well, pretty much everything.
After food, water and shelter, internet connection is essential to being able to live and function in modern society.
For that precious connection to life and the rest of the world to be concentrated and housed within a single point of failure strikes me as incredibly poor planning.
I first learned about mesh networks a year or so ago, probably from this post about goTenna on avc.com.
Mesh networks essentially connect individual wifi routers (and mobile phones) directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to one another in a way that provisions a localized internet where everyone within the area of connected nodes can connect to one another as well as any services set up on that network.
The fact that mesh networks do not have any single point of failure since there is no single individual owner makes it invaluable in emergency situations, since it ensures communication by anyone to anyone remains possible.
Luckily I didn't run into any great emergency today. And it gave me the perfect excuse to do as my ancestors did and grill meat over heated charcoal.
However, if a similar blackout occurs in the future I may not be so lucky. For that reason I will definitely look into what options or apps are available that could allow me to join or setup a mesh network as soon as I get my internet back.
Do any of you know of a mesh network app or service that I should check out?
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