Hi Safe Users,
Maybe it’s a stupid question but please try to do an imagination exercise, it might be useful. Thank you! 
No. It is based on top of Internet. At least, at this time.
There is a different project, which can replace Internet: Yggdrasil Network.
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Agreed, just to note. The message refactor is actually a wee bit of a “cloaking issue”. What I mean is we are removing the “source” of messages meaning anything. A wee bit of work, but this means messages are just a vehicle for Authorised Operations and this is an important step for removing the need for a network at all, certainly a single network. i…e we can replace internet with mesh, USB drives and more.
We know we have bugs (I almost don’t care right now) and these will go but we know “it works” in terms of design and now we can now impl these improvements that will make Safe something beyond the Internet only.
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Imagining a dystopian future where the public internet has been shut down by the powers that be and they are using permissioned trash like Hedera for themselves but the rebel alliance is blending in with the commoners and passing on network authority, data, money via USB sticks, Morse code, rogue satellites, to keep themselves and the Safe Network alive, is a possibility?
My trying to be fun way of asking how epically resilient this could be.
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Between completely destroyed Internet and perfectly working one many intermediate states exists.
In some sense partially broken Internet is even worse than completely broken since many people do not understand what is happening and do not resist those changes.
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Having a bit of fun with the idea but besides resiliency I’m interested that a network could exist online and offline while also being able to utilize alternative connections such as mesh, or satellite. Not relying specifically on deep sea internet cables and fiber but obviously taking advantage of them otherwise.
I’ll hang up the idea of being a fictional writer though. 
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On ground people can use Wi-Fi to make connections. It is easy and cheap (but slow).
It does not help however to cross the seas.
Theoretically < 30 MHz radio waves can be used, but speed for the whole continent will be less than single user consumes nowadays 
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starlink for one.
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Is the plan to release a stable Safe network running only on top of the existing Internet first?
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LiFi is possible now and has huge bandwidth.
E.g.
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I think more about transferring data between different regions of a city.
Which means that lots of devices are needed, each of which will add delay.
For TCP delay means lower bandwidth.
At 5 seconds delays or so TCP stop working at all with default settings.
Light bulb will not help to solve this problem.
Except that you can concentrate light somehow.
There are devices which uses infrared beams for communications, but they are pricey.
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Don’t be so sure.
The English Channel experiment
It was the evening of 27 July 2016, Alessandro was stationed in Calais, ready to coordinate with his brother Damiano who was in Dover to try the transmission again.
The first night in fact, the police had arrived and the experiment had had to be cancelled. But then Alessandro took the ferry from France and walked over the cliffs to find a safe spot before returning to Calais. By eleven o’clock the transmitter was working, but the receiver was not. In the cold, with a torch, in the wind and in the middle of nowhere: midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, still nothing.
“For a second I said to myself: mission failed. Then I took everything apart and put it back together again. It worked. I listened to my brother’s entire playlist.”
The transmission across the English Channel, from Calais to Dover (33 km), was incredibly realised with a visible light signal produced by a single 0.1 Watt LED.
This was a milestone for Slux’s outdoors light transmission system. And it is still an unbroken record today.
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"Agreed, just to note. The message refactor is actually a wee bit of a “cloaking issue”. What I mean is we are removing the “source” of messages meaning anything. A wee bit of work, but this means messages are just a vehicle for Authorised Operations and this is an important step for removing the need for a network at all, certainly a single network. i…e we can replace internet with mesh, USB drives and more.
We know we have bugs (I almost don’t care right now) and these will go but we know “it works” in terms of design and now we can now impl these improvements that will make Safe something beyond the Internet only."
One of my all time favorite responses I’ve seen on the forum for all the implications…
On the bugs, I get that MaidSafe as a company wants to deliver a finished product that people can trust but I still think it is almost beneath MaidSafe to have to debug it- let the wider internet community do that- but I get that people know what they are talking about (which is not me) said that’s not viable or is a non starter. I understand that and sense there is a risk of losing control before losing control is a good thing.
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I get what you are saying and 
, just want to fill in with an (off topic) angle:
tl;dr; It's a valuable exploratory component of coding, and removing it from coding would leave you with a poor(er) understanding of the code :)
To me, debugging is one of the most intense parts of “coding”. Before I continue on the debugging topic, I’ll say something about the “coding” topic;
Coding is much more than pressing down keys to produce valid syntax in an IDE. Conversation is coding, thinking is coding, (sometimes not thinking is coding), sketching is coding, debugging is coding. These are all parts of a larger process that I consider coding. The typing in of key words in an IDE is not per se a final step; typically it is as much a facilitator/conveyor of (interlude between) the other parts as a partial output of a process.
So, back to debugging. It’s one of the most intense of these parts. All related cognitive functions are in high use, and it’s a mix of frustration, anticipation, curiosity, excitement, resolve, sweat, exasperation… bloody hard work! But some of the most rewarding hard work there is in coding! These intense sessions often turn out to be the most revealing, enlightning and productive in terms of learning and understanding of the behaviour of a system. It takes you down all sorts of paths - deep, wide, narrow - in your search, and you do it fast, focused and determined; gobbling in information, sifting through connections and possibilities, trying all angles you could possibly imagine, and some more…
You come back to reality after a successful debugging session (or period of sessions), feeling like you’ve internalized the code into your body, becoming one with it.
So, even though debugging has been - hands down - the most frustrating times of coding for me, it has also been the most rewarding in terms of understanding.
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Thank you all for diving on this idea, I would like to add a subsidiary question: If the same physical infrastructure remains but somehow the protocols are different and with some new rules, the internet will become limited (ex. can’t access/own sites, or do not appear to “anyone”, including with the use of VPN,etc.), can SAFE Network work?
Inside the dystopian nightmare of an internet shutdown - CNET
Safe Network can be modified to support new protocols.
If it is possible to transfer data in real time between two points with any protocol, it is possible to implement usual protocols on top of it.
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I guess we could go the route the helium lot have, and just start a huge mesh network.
I wonder how hard it would be to use their current tech but with our network, surely modding / flashing the hotspots should be feasible.
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is there even a working (production quality) mesh software that can actually scale beyond a few hundreds nodes? yggdrasil for example is a proof of concept. it uses tcp for the connection between nodes… batman, olsr etc. do really struggle with scaling.
edit: are you sure they have a meshnet? i couldn’t find anything about that. https://community.helium.com/t/please-add-mesh-network-ability/368/6 reads like it’s just a payed wi-fi access point that runs over your normal internet connection without any meshing.
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