Spread Spectrum Nets (Way to do safely)

[Robert J Woodhead <trebor@foretune.co.jp>]

Succinctly, use the purloined letter technique -- hide it in plain sight.
There are RF bands set aside for unlicensed low-power operation; some
new phones use spread-spectrum techniques in these bands.

Build and sell wireless ethernet nodes that talk using these techniques.
Customers will demand strong encryption to prevent their data leaking
out and outsiders sneaking in, so you have a good reason for adding
this to the product.

Develop a robust set of protocols that automatically manage the net,
which is logically dynamic (movement of nodes and episodes of interference
are logically equivalent to dynamic modification of the topology of the
net. You can consider each node to be on N ethernets, where N is the
number of nodes it is currently able to talk to, each ethernet
having only two members.)

Now the kicker; the nodes can be programmed to only talk to other nodes
known to them (ie: the office work-group, building, etc), or to freely
accept and route messages from "alien" nodes.

Given a population of "liberal" message passing nodes, one can then
add a new layer of routing protocols that do regional networking,
with dynamic re-routing as needed.

Purchasers of the wireless nodes should be encouraged to enable the
"pass-through" option, and the protocols should guarantee that assisting
in the passing on of messages does not affect local net performance.

If you do it this way, you'll succeed much faster because people will
be paying you to do it.  You'll have more money for R&D, and you'll
have a lot more people bitching if someone tries to take your toys
away.

The protocol design is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.
It isn't all that difficult.