Despite China’s best efforts to censor them, Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are finding ways to talk to one another and organize without Wi-Fi access or going through a central network. Instead they’ve been creating their own with a phone app that lets nearby devices communicate under the radar.
Droves of protesters have turned to an app called FireChat, run by Open Garden, which links smartphones to create mesh networks, or temporary Internet networks to circumvent outages and government monitoring.
More than 100,000 protesters have gathered since Sept. 26 in Hong Kong’s major through-ways in response to China blocking once promised democratic elections for Hong Kong’s top officials. Protesters used Instagram to broadcast and organize the demonstrations and the violent police response to peaceful protests, until China partially blocked the photo-sharing site Monday. China also tried to contain news reports by shutting down media outlets and television channels that attempted to show footage of the pro-democracy protests.
But FireChat bypasses China’s censorship firewall. FireChat works by letting users within 70 meters (230 feet) of each other send messages back and forth through the smartphones’ built-in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth hardware, creating a mesh network.
Mesh networks aren’t new, and have been useful in crises, emergency situations and protests where Internet access is scarce. Ad hoc mesh networks use a host router that connects to a hot spot through an antennae or a paid subscription to an ISP. People with host routers then open up their networks, which can potentially deliver wireless access to a several block radius or further, siphoning off traditional ISP access shared through one or more paid accounts.
Other local mesh networks are decentralized, and privately connect a series of computers. Neighborhoods and communities can use this private network to create their own social networks and trade messages within the group. These decentralized models remove big telecommunications companies from the equation and make it much harder for the government to access. They are also more secure; in order to shut down a mesh network, you’d need to shut down every single node on every device in the network, rather than one central server.
People in Taiwan and Iraq have used FireChat to combat unreliable Internet access and government restricted, respectively. Another mesh network in Athens, Greece supports about 1,000 community members through a series of rooftop Wi-Fi antennae and routers that’s virtually off-the-grid, undetectable by the U.S. National Security Agency, according to a Mother Jones report.
Mesh networks, whether through an app or with routers and cables, have become critical in filling service gaps that ISPs can’t. Big telecommunications providers like Verizon and Comcast frequently are unable to build infrastructure to carry the Internet closer than 300 feet of customers’ homes. That can lead to sluggish upload and download speeds.
Anyone can set up infrastructure for a mesh network to link computers directly to one another without using a big name ISP. But many are community based, and simply run by opening one house’s Internet access to an entire neighborhood. That way residents who may not be able to pay close to $100 a month for Internet can perform simple tasks such as checking email or reading the news with plenty of bandwidth leftover to share.
But mesh networks’ chief accomplishment has been allowing people to communicate when there’s a widespread Internet outage due to natural disasters and emergencies. After Hurricane Sandy ripped up the East Coast in 2012, the Red Hook community in Brooklyn, New York relied on mesh networks to give citizens a way to communicate when central cellphone and ISP (Internet service providers) towers or Wi-Fi nodes were down.