news – Page 11 – Sudo Room

You drop in on a Thursday evening, curious about what’s going on at this hip, happening place, and you see a band of strange people fiddling around with these weird devices that look like this:

What could these strange devices be? Who are these weird people?

“We’re the SudoMesh meetup. Come join us,” a happy person says. She’s literally dancing, waving a weird plastic device back and forth in the air.

“What is SudoMesh?” you ask.

“You know the internet… as in the internets? And how you usually have to pay someone on a landline to get it, and pay monthly bill and then you get on the internet? Or if you are downtown you have to wander around and find a coffee shop, and buy coffee and then you can get online?”

“OK, I get it, that’s how I usually get ‘the internets’,” you say.

“Well, suppose we could create a free alternative: a mesh network.

“So that we could have a people-powered internet so that WiFi is available to everyone. Even old people, or people without any money, or people who have bad credit and just can’t pay the bills…. we would make this free internet, and it would all be in the control of the people, not some big company that you have to send bills to every month.”

“But nothing is free, is it?” you ask, confused. “How does this work?”