Multihop wireless mesh networks can provide Internet access over a wide area with minimal infrastructure expenditure. In this work, we investigate key issues involved in deploying such networks including individual link characteristics, multihop application layer performance, and network-wide reliability and throughput. We perform extensive measurements in a two-tier urban scenario to characterize the propagation environment and correlate received signal strength with application layer throughput. Further, we measure competing, multihop flow traffic matrices to empirically define achievable throughputs of fully backlogged, rate limited, and web-emulated traffic. We find that while fully backlogged flows produce starving nodes, rate-controlling flows to a fixed value yields fairness and high aggregate throughput. Likewise, transmission gaps occurring in statistically multiplexed web traffic, even under high offered load, remove starvation and yield high performance.