Comment by roguecoder
Comment by roguecoder 15 hours ago
America is sprawling, unfortunately. That kind of approach would work in cities, but would be much less effective where people aren't taking the bus or even being around other people on a daily basis.
The advantage of something that can reach 6 miles is that it could cover suburbia and rural areas with ~20-40 acre plots relatively effectively.
Yeah it's not ideal for sparse populations but I think you could get a lot of coverage by just running a node with a solar panel wherever your mailbox is and also having your mail driver put a node in their vehicle.
Really the thing I'm trying to push back against is the idea that the entire path between them must be connected all at once in order for two parties to communicate. If we design for short range, partition-tolerant, pocket-to-pocket background gossip, then that same protocol will work just fine if you attach specialty radio hardware and give it miles worth of range, and you've still got the fallback ready for cases where all you have is consumer grade hardware.
On the other hand, if you design for persistent connectivity and then try to use it in an intermittently-connected context, you're going to have a much worse time.