Meshy Problems -- Or Stealth Marketing

from the blog-marketing dept

The fact that wireless mesh networks have problems is nothing new. We've spoken about it plenty of times before, explaining how wireless mesh networks have issues with scalability and latency. What they're good at is redundancy. You can take out a node and the others should make up for it for the time being. These aren't particularly new issues, and, in fact, many companies and researchers are working to try to solve some of the bigger mesh networking problems. Obviously, it's good to take the glowing press reports about mesh networking with a grain of salt, but it looks like someone in the wireless mesh networking space is trying to use some "reverse psychology" to promote his own company. It may have seemed a bit odd to see someone who positions himself as an "insider" in the wireless mesh networking world (the founder and CTO of a mesh networking company) hesitantly posting a comment about how he wasn't sure whether or not to post it, but mesh networks have scalability problems. What was surprising wasn't the fact that mesh networks have scalability problems. As stated -- that's well known. What was odd was that a supposed insider felt the need to "leak" this well known info in such a hesitant manner. The reasoning becomes a lot less odd when you look at the website of the "mesh networking" company the guy founded (which I won't link to) -- since it contains pretty much the same info and suggests that his company has come up with the "solution" to the problem. Right. Okay. It's also clear that he wasn't all that hesitant to post this info, since he submitted identical information to our site in the form of a comment to a post from a year and a half ago... In other words, this isn't so much an outsider "revealing" insider secrets, but a method of stealth marketing. Pretend you're leaking a "dirty secret" about your industry to a blog, and then announce (surprise, surprise!) you've got the solution.

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