| backlog | ||
| fabricators | ||
| img | ||
| 260517-1439-darkmesh-project.md | ||
| AGENTS.md | ||
| cgg-task-board.html | ||
| city-mesh.html | ||
| deploy.sh | ||
| fabricators.html | ||
| freecad.html | ||
| green-tech-security.html | ||
| index.html | ||
| interns.html | ||
| justin-aquinoCV.html | ||
| national-mesh.html | ||
| RA-12234-Konektadong-Pinoy-Act.txt | ||
| README.md | ||
| sbc.html | ||
| SOURCES.md | ||
| sovereign-tech.html | ||
| underground-explainer.html | ||
| underground-utility-infrastructure.html | ||
| unified-tasks.html | ||
National Mesh Project
Status: Research & Advocacy Archive
Last updated: 2026-05-17
What This Is
A research compilation on decentralized, resilient mesh network infrastructure — drawn from real-world deployments worldwide. This repository exists to document what is possible and what stands in the way of building internet resilience in the Philippines.
The detailed implementation plans, bill of materials, and costing models have been moved to backlog/ after legal and regulatory assessment.
Why This Matters
The internet is not as resilient as it appears. Recent history proves it:
- Iran, Jan 2026 — Total internet blackout. All VPNs, Tor, and Psiphon failed. Only peer-to-peer mesh and satellite worked. (ArXiv 2603.28753v1)
- Bangladesh — Repeated blackouts during political unrest.
- Tonga — Complete isolation after a single undersea cable break.
- Ukraine — Communication void before Starlink intervention.
- Typhoon Odette, Philippines — Islands silenced for weeks. No cell, no internet.
The Philippine archipelago is uniquely vulnerable: a handful of submarine cables, centralized ISP towers, and a regulator (NTC) that protects incumbent monopolies rather than public resilience.
What Works Elsewhere
| Project | Scale | Proof |
|---|---|---|
| Guifi.net (Catalonia) | 40,000+ nodes, millions in annual turnover | ACM SIGCOMM 2016; Computer Networks 2015 |
| Freifunk (Germany) | 775+ nodes in Paderborn alone; city-scale BATMAN-adv | CMS-Labs simulation study |
| Westminster, MD | $23M municipal dark fiber, leased to Ting ISP | IFC Municipal Broadband Report |
| Wilson, NC | $33M municipal fiber, paid off by 2025, $10/mo for public housing | NLC Digital Equity Playbook |
| Meshtastic, Mindanao | 9.3km links through bamboo forest post-Typhoon Odette | Field deployment reports |
| Project N.O.M.A.D. | One-command offline server: Wikipedia, AI, maps, education | Crosstalk Solutions; Apache 2.0 |
These are not experiments. They are proven infrastructure.
Why This Is Blocked in the Philippines
Regulatory Capture
The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) functions as a gatekeeper for incumbent ISPs — PLDT, Globe, Converge — not as a public-interest regulator. Any framework that threatens their pricing power or market share faces procedural death.
Legal Threats
Industry lawyers have made it clear: cheaper internet options will be litigated, delayed, and regulated out of existence. The incumbents have no interest in a resilient "Island Mode" that operates without their paid gateways.
Corruption as Friction
From right-of-way permits to spectrum allocation, every step of infrastructure deployment in the Philippines is a rent-seeking opportunity. A project that eliminates centralized gatekeepers is a project that eliminates those rents. The incentive to kill it is structural, not personal.
Spectrum Policy
LoRa operates at 920–925 MHz in the Philippines. Mesh backhaul at 5 GHz requires regulatory forbearance that the NTC has no incentive to grant. Emergency "open spectrum" provisions — common in disaster-response frameworks abroad — do not exist here.
What Survives
Despite the blockers, pieces of this vision are being built anyway — just not at LGU/national scale:
- Meshtastic deployments by ham radio groups and barangay disaster teams (no NTC approval needed for unlicensed ISM-band LoRa)
- Community Wi-Fi in remote barangays, often funded by OFW remittances, operating quietly under the radar
- Off-grid solar + local servers at schools and churches, running Kiwix or Project NOMAD, with no ISP dependency
- Fediverse instances (Mastodon, PeerTube) self-hosted by tech collectives, independent of Facebook/Google narrative control
These are not "National Mesh." They are survival infrastructure built by people who know the state will not save them.
Research Archive
| Document | Contents |
|---|---|
SOURCES.md |
150+ sources: academic papers, case studies, protocol docs, hardware references, shutdown analyses |
AGENTS.md |
Workspace guide for AI assistants working on this project |
RA-12234-Konektadong-Pinoy-Act.txt |
Full text of RA 12234 — the Konektadong Pinoy Act enabling community mesh networks |
backlog/National-Mesh.html |
Interactive simulation, detailed BOM, costing models — archived |
backlog/Notes on National Mesh.txt |
Technical development log — archived |
city-mesh.html |
City Mesh Dark Fiber Initiative — interactive simulation, BOM |
national-mesh.html |
National Mesh Federation — inter-LGU peering, cluster strategy |
Original Submission
- BetterGov.ph Issue #592: https://github.com/bettergovph/bettergov/issues/592
- Project pages: https://sites.comfac.net/city-mesh.html · https://sites.comfac.net/national-mesh.html
Deployment:
sites.comfac.netis served by PC03'sgemini-static-hostfrom/home/user/static-sites(root-owned). Pushing to git is the backup, not the publish — rundeploy.shto rsync the site to PC03 (needs remote sudo to the root-owned webroot). See the script header. Any newly added page must also be deployed here.
- Forgejo (citfj): https://git.comfac-it.net/justin/National-MESH
This is not a call to action. It is a record of what was tried, what was learned, and what was blocked.