people: "we can build a nationwide internet through the wireless!"
me, an RF engineer with years of tactical mesh network PHY experience, multiple radio licenses, and an apartment two blocks from her corner office at a leading manufacturer of wideband SDR hardware: "good fuckin' luck"
@rey we can set up some wee neighborhood nets and use tactical ferrets for backhaul?
@rey FM Internet
@Efi can't do that, it's the AM here and folks want internet before noon
@rey then make sure to put down the phone before 12
@Efi like Cinderella, but for wireless internet
@rey there is so much to download 🎶
so many many things to download 🎶
@rey i also heard that mesh networks have very limited capacities?
@Gargron Depends what you mean by that.
Mesh nets can be really good around city-scale (provided some planning and backbone and fu). Doing an actual mesh straight across the US, though, is very unrealistic (if only because your routing protocol will likely do a barf)
There /are/ wireless networks covering that kind of distances, but they are usually a bunch of repeaters between 2 locations of interest.
@Gargron
A pretty notorious example is high-frequency trading firms building microwave networks between stock exchanges... because light is about twice as fast in free space (and in the air) than in fiber, so it is basically a 50% latency gain (at the measly cost of a few bajillion dollars).
@kellerfuchs @Gargron Yeah this is what worries me about mesh networks as a solution to internet issues. What does my mom do? and everyone else who lives in sparsely populated rural areas without a concentration of technical experts or the time and money needed to maintain the equipment. If a solution only works for tech savvy urbanites it's not a solution.
I mean sure everyone build mesh networks, but do it while also fighting hard for government policies in everyone's interest.
@Gargron there is indeed a lot of overhead... keeping a mesh network from interfering with itself requires a decent amount of synchronization and coordination, and relaying packets through intermediate nodes eats a lot of time and bandwidth
@rey good to see rest of fediverse fighting the meme
it seems the NN debacle has sparked a lot of perhaps well-meaning but short-sighted ideas on how to "mitigate" it
@rey I have this same feeling with only minimal experience running a wisp
@odinsdream @rey
I have this same feeling having only shared my wireless internet with neighbors not in the same building. It's not easy peasy
@feld which is the sort of thing wireless carriers can do, and they're the ones we're trying to avoid, right? ^^
At that point, lay fiber.
I confess: I use google wifi... it's mesh networking; it works well. Does it scale beyond a handful of nodes? (Perhaps.) Is it open source? (Doubtful.) Could open source software replicate the convenience and ease of use? (Surely.)
@EdS @nonlinear you've got a decently mediocre way to avoid running a couple cables across your house. That will not scale beyond LAN range.
@rey People refuse to believe that the radio spectrum is a finite resource.
@rey It me! :D (I used to work for these guys: http://rincon.com/.)
@rey Also, this project: https://www.vadatech.com/media/pdf_SGSS-NASA-Paper-001.pdf :)
@rey <3