Comment by 7373737373
Comment by 7373737373 14 hours ago
WiFi (with extra hardware, mostly antennas/routers, not too expensive anymore either) CAN offer (even tens of) kilometers of range, at least point to point: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lYJFwXw1ZIc
https://eu.store.ui.com/eu/en/category/wireless-ltu-5ghz/pro...
only 9W max power consumption too! well, that's not a few hundred milliwatts, still, better then ye olde lightbulb
PLUS gigabit throughput
if only our network stacks and protocols didn't assume hierarchical (local) networks by default, and kernels included p2p network stacks, then i'd feel more confident about blackouts being handled more gracefully
well, i suppose all this depends heavily on the nature of the emergency
generally i'm surprised that the sheer computational power of modern smartphones are not used more for this purpose, i haven't come across much true p2p software
on another note, there is still no (truly) cross-platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirDrop standard (especially one without artificial limitations), which is a shame
also i want to note that smartphones can even communicate directly with satellites now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=v30z-0bGbHQ
Yes, I use my phone over satellite regularly now. It's still amazing to me that it's possible. Phones are a great tool here because everyone truly does have them, they're portable, and they have large rechargeable batteries that can charge from countless sources over USB. So, it does seem like we could use them to great effect to create networks when other systems go down. I'm not sure they can handle long range comms due to requiring antennas, but close-range in cities might work well. I'm not sure what routing on that mesh would look like, or how busy it would get and how well phones could handle that.
Satellites could be an important component here, but there's always the need for redundancy. They can be compromised too, and you don't own them.
The LTU Extreme Range hardware is way, way more expensive than a LoRa radio, and it still uses quite a bit of power (relatively). It still seems far from ideal in situations where you can't depend on power utilities. Great point though, I wasn't aware that exists. It appears you need the one you linked as well as the Rocket as its base station, which puts it close to $800 CAD after taxes.