"That's no good. If you used a focused signal, you're going to have to be perfectly aligned if you're going to talk back to your base, so unless you want to provide a connection to one tiny pinpoint somewhere a couple kilometers away, it won't do you any good." "There's no solution, then? I should just give up?" The crusty-punk held up his hands. "Hell, no! There's just no *centralized* solution. You can't be Superman, blanketing the whole world with wireless using your almighty antennaprick, but so what? That's what mesh networks are for. Check it out." He arranged the beer and the laptop and the coffee cup so that they were strung out along a straight line. "Okay, you're the laptop and I'm the coffee cup. We both have a radio and we want to talk to each other. "We *could* turn up the gain on our radios so that they can shout loud enough to be heard at this distance, but that would drown out this guy here." He gestured at the now-empty beer. "We *could* use a focused antenna, but if I move a little bit off the beam" -- he nudged the coffee cup to one side -- "we're dead. But there's a third solution." "We ask the beer to pass messages around?" "Fucking right we do! That's the mesh part. Every station on the network gets *two* radios -- one for talking in one direction, the other for relaying in the other direction. The more stations you add, the lower the power on each radio -- and the more pathways you get to carry your data." Alan shook his head. "It's a fuckin' mind-blower, isn't it?" "Sure," Alan said. "Sure. But does it work? Don't all those hops between point *a* and point *b* slow down the connection?" "A little, sure. Not so's you'd notice. They don't have to go that far -- the farthest any of these signals has to travel is 151 Front Street." "What's at 151 Front?" "TorIx -- the main network interchange for the whole city! We stick an antenna out a window there and downlink it into the cage where UUNet and PSINet meet -- voila, instant 11-megabit city-wide freenet!" "Where do you get the money for that?" "Who said anything about money? How much do you think UUNet and PSI charge each other to exchange traffic with one another? Who benefits when UUNet and PSI cross-connect? Is UUNet the beneficiary of PSI's traffic, or vice versa? Internet access only costs money at the *edge* -- and with a mesh-net, there is no edge anymore. It's penetration at the center, just like the Devo song." "I'm Adrian," Alan said. "I'm Kurt," the crusty-punk said. "Buy me a beer, Adrian?" "It'd be my pleasure," Alan said. # Kurt lived in the back of a papered-over storefront on Oxford. The front two-thirds were a maze of peeling, stickered-over stamped-metal shelving units piled high with junk tech: ancient shrink-wrapped software, stacked up low-capacity hard drives, cables and tapes and removable media. Alan tried to imagine making sense of it all, flowing it into The Inventory, and felt something like vertigo.