If traditional wireless networks work like fire trucks, mesh networks are more like a bucket brigade.

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Right now, the GOP is racing headlong into a three-alarm fire with a bucket brigade.

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The change came as Itron's research group in Paris realized it could exploit inexpensive new wireless chips and open-source software to create a so-called mesh network of electric meters that passed information among themselves, like firemen in a bucket brigade, instead of relying on expensive and less reliable individual connections to the Internet.

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