Build Your Own Internet With Mobile Mesh Networking

Software can let smartphones, Wi-Fi routers, and other hardware link up without centralized Internet service.

After an earthquake crippled Haiti in 2010, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands and destroying the country’s communication networks, Paul Gardner-Stephen found himself thinking about all the cell phones that had instantly become useless. With cell towers out of commission across the country, they would be unable to operate. “If the software on the phones was right,” he says, “they would keep working for at least localized communication, handset to handset.”

Gardner-Stephen, a research fellow at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, now leads a project that enables Android phones to do just that. Serval, as the project is called, offers an app that allows nearby phones to link up using their Wi-Fi connections, as long as they have been modified to disable the usual security restrictions. [...]