Comment by Ginden
Electricity is not really an expensive resource for communications. You need like a single rooftop to provide WiFi for the entire village.
Electricity is not really an expensive resource for communications. You need like a single rooftop to provide WiFi for the entire village.
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.
It isn't about the price.
Try to avoid understanding this difficulty from your own shoes, but rather from the shoes of communities very limited on what is reachable to them from a technical, financial and logistical point of view.
I know you can solve it easily. I can solve it even more easily myself.
Now see any disaster area, see any remote area. Setting up Wi-Fi is invariably never a priority for those in such situations. Even as things settle, it is still more practical to share files directly with each other.
When you see from that perspective then you are on the domain of realistic solutions rather than keyboard level on virtual forum.
> Setting up Wi-Fi is invariably never a priority for those in such situations
The point here is to have it setup before the proverbial shit hits the fan.
Resiliency preparations are a fundamentally different ballgame to disaster recovery - you have more time and resources to prepare, your supply chains aren't broken yet, etc.
I don't disagree with that, but this point has nothing to do with the comment I replied to.
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.
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.