A meshlocal is a neighbour-to-neighbour network allowing direct inter-citizen secure communications without involving any intermediate third-party service. It is based upon the installation in close households of a meshlocal router.
A meshlocal router is simply an unexpensive wifi router able to run the OpenWRT free and open-source operating system.
How is it used
Each meshlocal router is just plugged in the base household Internet router ("ISP box") with an Ethernet network cable.
How does the network extends
Each meshlocal router running a mesh wifi802.11s with its wifi interface acts as a node and can send and receive data to some other nodes at range. But additionnaly each node can route and pass the data to another subsequent node, allowing station to use them a a relay to reach other stations that would be unreachable as-is. Due to the "mesh" topology of this network, the more the range extends, the more the range extends.
What is a meshlocalWhat are the benefitsOverlay networksMeshlocal routers requirements and setupChatContact: mesh@clewn.orgShop?
We are actively looking for anyone familiar with compilation and cross-platform build that could help us getting an Hyperborians binary for some desktop, mobile, and moreover, OpenWRT router platform. Get in touch if you need to be involved
The arrival of Hyperborians may solve the footprint problem associated with Yggdrasil, which is too cumbersome to be hosted in most ancient (12 year old is ancient) OpenWRT'ed routers due to lack of flash mass storage memory. It may solve as well the lake of built platform that Cjdns' Rust and Node.js dependencies involved, both having been removed from Hyperborians, which is written in C. We actively seek feebback from anyone building Hyperborians for, Android, Windows, MacOS, or your favorite distro (we built it unstripped with no problem with Ubuntu and Archlinux ARM).
No matter of the plateform, testing, stripped or unstripped, Hyperborians is a priority. Get in touch if you run it, if you feel inclined to do so.
We already welcome donations of very old routers (12yo is very old) that are completely useless nowadays, if you can afford the shipping cost. Their circuit boards once dismantled are worth €5/kg while they could dodge their doomed fate and as-is be very useful in our IRL neighborhood by recruiting enthusiasts letting us plug them as mesh routers, in IRL neighbour homes. The more the range extends, the more the range extends. If you have some very old routers, and can ship them to France, get in touch.
The money is the only thing preventing us from running an actual Hyperborians public peer. It's planned somedays if this gets possible.
Past
Runing an open mesh node IRL: still online, with roughly 97% of uptime since autumn 2015.
Coding a 1-to-1 video calls apps for meshlocals, able to pass calls over IPv6 : done Nov 2025. Still requiring testing. See Codeberg: Visiophonygg
Validate Yggdrasil+OpenWRT over 802.11s wifi as working meshlocal setup: done Sept 2025. All the docs here are about that.
Validate Cjdns+OpenWRT over 802.11s wifi as a replacement for ad-hoc: done yeah maybe circa 2023, who knows?
Don't want to be boring, we used ad-hoc, we even used Olsrd as midlayer, we used computers, tablets, and so on, and the fact is that the Good Way to go is 802.11s and meshrouters. Hyperborian may replace Yggdrasil with them. Our research work is ongoing for more than a decade. Want to help? Start clicking
