Comment by swiftcoder a day ago
On a local level, I feel like we can probably do better than just text messaging capabilities. Mesh network covering the village, with someone running mirrors of essential services in their basement (local email routing, wikipedia, etc)
Maybe for professional communications. For cases where the grid is gone, you will quickly see how quickly you stop using electricity for luxuries such as that one.
At most you will be able to charge smartphones and small devices with solar panels. Keeping a larger Wi-Fi router running only on solar? Very seldom.
The price of solar panels and batteries keeps falling. You can go an Amazon today and get a setup that can power a switch/router/AP 24/7 in winter for a few hundred dollars.
A mid range router uses about 10W or about a dollar a month.
It will not be a problem at all to power it completely on a small 100W panel.
just remember that even that won't last long. Electricity is an expensive resource and you won't get spare parts to keep the Wi-Fi running for long.
At most you will only be able to start a few Android-phone hotpspots and share files. That is the reality of it.