Hacker News Reader

Comment by mminer237 | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it. You have to get the consent of every owner of property for a connecting 100+ miles. You pretty much have to either have an uninhabited wasteland or eminent domain to do that. Plus, you have to hire people to do hard manual labor for 100+ miles. You can try to just lay it on preexisting poles without permission some places, but who knows how long that will stay up.

And ultimately, fiber is something anyone with a shovel can destroy in 2 minutes. If the government doesn't want you to have Internet, a mesh network is a much more robust method if you can get it in place.

View on HN

You wouldn't be able to get a high-speed mesh network, sure, but LoRa[1] (or something LoRa-like - it's proprietary) provides in the range of kilobits per second across tens of miles. RONJA[1] trades throughput for range, with 10 megabit throughput over 0.8 miles).

Sure, you won't be able to even really download images through LoRa, but it'll do for textual communications in case of an emergency e.g. natural disaster.

A smart meshnet that has billing/transactions built in would allow nodes to charge based on bandwidth and data used (so a LoRa node could charge you more than a node that uses fiber, you can use the fiber node while things are normal, and then when things go sideways you can pay more to get an emergency message to your relatives through LoRa).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA

Or you just use free-space optics. If you use lasers you can even (in theory) use DWDM and get xxx separate connections of 25, even 40 Gbps each. Line of sight is required but at some point someone will get it working with satellites. I believe line-of-sight >100km 400 Gbps links have been done.

Oh and once you get past ~900km the fact that via the satellite you have a straight line with ~100% the speed of light (as opposed to 2/3 speed of light with fiber) the satellite connection to LEO is actually faster than fiber. In practice it's less since there are no zero-delay zero-loss regen stations. Every 300km the signal needs to be converted to electrical and back, which adds (a lot) of latency. With satellites this isn't done, saving further time. And all of that is ignoring that when putting fiber of the surface of the earth you cannot just follow a straight line, so you have to add distance for avoiding other people's property too.

And perhaps relevant to an internet shutdown article: laser free-space optics cannot be located unless you're directly in the path of the laser. These links cannot be "denied" to anyone with sky access.

It's just reliably aiming a beam at a moving satellite that's currently beyond our technology.

Currently 40-50gbps to a satellite is the practical limit.

To clarify: are you intentionally differentiating between what RONJA is and "free-space optics"? My impression was that that's what RONJA was - a particular open-source implementation of a FSO setup designed for ease of assembly and robustness.

I agree with the latter part, but for the former note that Earth's surface is 2d: you can go around holdouts; unlike roads you don't care about the fiber being straight.

Actually you do. Longer fibers need more repeaters, and the ideal fiber on land is strung down pipes (this allows later capacity upgrades). Both of these are cheaper if existing roads are paralleled.

Sure, you want to optimize for total length. However, you don't have any meaningful restrictions on turn radius, which do exist when you want to build a road and which make building a road around holdouts oftentimes impossible.

Simple, cheap mesh networks based on consumer WiFi hardware are very short range. To get any reasonable distance between nodes you need towers and directional antennas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com