Tech refugee

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[–]yetanotherone_sigh 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

MeshNet has major problems that haven't ever been solved. I've been following it since the early days. You have trunking problems between major far-flung cities. I live in the Western CONUS and my major city (30 miles from here) is over 150 miles from the next major city. Even if you could get the neighborhoods interconnected, you'd never get the cities interconnected. You need long distance microwave trunking and extreme high bandwidth, which requires point-to-point microwave dishes, multiple tower hops, and FCC licenses. No way is Joe Sixpack ham radio operator going to do that for free. Those dishes are HUGE. The equipment investment would be very large (hundreds of thousands of dollars per 40-mile hop) and the licenses are not just available to anyone. The spectrum is very crunched up and in use already.

My plan for the off-grid cabin is going to be Starlink, once they get a semi-portable unit that doesn't use 250 watts.

[–]bobbobbybob 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

i was thinking as more of an infrastructure project for the region. Government backed, emergency response initiative.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Thank you so much for this response. I've always thought meshes were interesting but the logistics involved in anything larger than a college campus or small town WAN just grow exponentially. Scaling up is near impossible, I may try to set up a mesh in my neighborhood with the neighbors I know, but it would just be for kicks if anything.

I have a friend who just got approved to be the first Starlink tester in our area, I'll try to remember to report back when he get's his gear installed. I really don't know what all is involved, I guess some kind of DirectTV style dish?

[–]yetanotherone_sigh 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

That's the idea. It looks like a small UFO on a stick. You point it at the open sky and you get internet out the cable. The first consumer version they have out draws too much power for off-grid use (on the order of 250W). If they can get it down to half that or lower, it'd be good for all kinds of uses such as people living in RVs, etc.