After IOTA’s (MIOTA) Tangle, MeshBox Upscales Networking Using Blockchain Technology

We live in an era where technological advancement has reached its peak and for obvious reasons, it’s not going to stop anytime soon. There was a time a few decades ago, where people thought that the “Internet” is not such a great thing and that its hype will eventually fade out. Same happened with the introduction of electricity decades before that and exactly the same is happening nowadays with blockchain technology. Electricity doesn’t even need an explanation, and it is now so standard that it is one of the basic elements that describe human societies. The Internet has almost achieved a similar state, where most of the technologically advanced and economically leading countries use it as common as we used electricity a couple decades ago. Same will happen eventually with blockchain and other more unique approaches to DLT such us IOTA‘s (MIOTA) Tangle Network, but before that, we have to integrate the power of the Internet into the whole planet, exactly the same way we did with electricity since there are still parts of the world, as a matter of fact, a big portion of it, that are completely disconnected from the “grid”. Could we connect these regions into the digital/physical realms we created based on the internet and how long it would take us to achieve such a concept? A blockchain based platform called MeshBox says that not only we can, but we’re already working on it.

In modern and developed civilizations, human units have 24/7 access to telecommunication systems and services as well as access to the internet at any moment and at any place within the developed areas they inhabit. Therefore there are another 3.9 billion people who are completely detached from the internet, accounting for more than half of the global population. It is expected that in the next decades, the population of the Earth will exceed 10 billion units. The concept of achieving a cost-efficient system with the ability to provide advanced network coverage to a population of 10 billion is a difficult challenge at least, for the future of Internet development.

Here comes MeshBox, an emerging telecommunication company using distributed ledger technology as their basis, to provide the world with a solution. Before we dive into details and realize why did they manage to fundraise more than $13 million in a matter of seconds, let us understand what exactly a mesh network is and how it works. Unlike traditional blockchain platforms and IOTA‘s (MIOTA) Tangle Network, mesh networks are a bit more complicated.

A mesh network is a local network topology in which the internal nodes (for example bridges, switches, and/or other infrastructure devices) connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many other nodes as possible, depending on the exact device’s technical capabilities, range etc., and interfere with each other in order to efficiently route data between “clients” using the network.

This lack of dependency on one node allows for every node to participate in the intel exchange as mesh networks have the ability to self-organize and self-configure the information to be exchanged and the routing itself. This ability contributes to fault-tolerance and reduced maintenance costs.

Last year, Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, stated an opinion on the issue of network neutrality on Twitter. In a nutshell, he explained that the issue of network load-bearing could not be resolved through VPNs and instead required Mesh network adoption on a grand scale. The upshot is that Mesh networking ranks first among the most anticipated trends that blockchain technology geeks have their eye on to push the boundaries the decentralized realm. The Mesh-Blockchain combination has now become the very frontier that the entire blockchain and internet are heading into.

So how MeshBox is taking the lead on this one?

SmartMesh, is an underlying blockchain based networking protocol company and it is backing MeshBox both with resources and technical expertise. It can enable smartphones, vehicle devices, and other equipment to attain network connections that otherwise would not have the ability to do so. SmartMesh has built-in blockchain Light Nodes, and expands the Lightning Network protocol to enable offline and off- chain crypto micropayments.

MeshBox is based on the development of the SmartMesh protocol, decentralized open source hardware protocols, and is a mining capable hardware box device. It combines Mesh network routing with content storage and distribution functionality and is the next generation decentralized version of HUAWEI and CISCO technology interfacing directly with social users and enabling everyone to become operators. Put simply, MeshBox is the equivalent of a router that runs a SmartMesh protocol as opposed to a traditional TCP/IP type protocol.

Can you imagine a world where people are connected to a decentralized network, granted the ability to access the internet, transfer information and exchange data in an instant, only by using their neighbors? We do. Mesh networks could really be the door to creating worldwide telecommunication coverage and MeshBox is the key.

Learn more about the project here.

F. Lewis for The Independent Republic