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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Reading the article I dreamed of a community system were every flat / house was a wireless peer in a mesh grid.

Here's a completely random section of Texas that I found on Google Maps. Have fun making a mesh network out of the houses there. You might have more fun playing "I Spy", with the aim to find the houses.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Texas/@32.4826637,-98.4527...

As someone who lives in Texas... Thank you.

Ok, fair point, but you know, some wifi chips have range far larger than advertised. Especially in flat non crowded area where you can have line-of-sight and less noise.

Some youtube video show packets traveling a few miles on a stupid esp8266 chip. I don't know how sparse texas is, but I'm sure you can find a nice % of houses whose distance to each others is lower than 1mile.

A couple of packets barely making it, when the weather happens to be conducive, isn’t a basis for a reliable system.

ah right..

> Especially in flat non crowded area where you can have line-of-sight and less noise.

I had about a decade of wireless ISP in a neighborhood. It was ok, but speeds suffered as the number of users increased. BTW, this city of 30,000 doesn't have cable and it didn't really get started until 1999. Cable companies didn't want to build it out.

Now I'm in the middle of nowhere and there isn't a WISP to be found. Houses are to far apart and there are too many trees. Noise? I don't have any of that, but line of sight doesn't exist.

I think getting a workable mesh going anywhere would be tough, there is always something.

The latency would be horrible. Fine for email, or downloading something you need in the future. But real time interaction as chat, or browsing the web would be really slow. Streaming would be out of the question as well.

chat would be a problem, streaming is note that important

Streaming obviously matters to a great many people. The success of Netflix speak for it self, so ignoring it is dooming the idea from the start. This is something that needs critical mass, otherwise it will not work.

The mesh system could be augmented with the TV broadcast spectrum (UHF, ~650MHz), where supernodes could operate with high ERP. This would require rethinking our allocation of the EM spectrum.

I read somewhere a while ago that someone was thinking of doing this with airplanes. Not sure if this made it past the drawing board though.

It's been used in the past to deliver television signals via surplus B-29 bombers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratovision

also, just in case, https://twitter.com/motherboard/status/931269013967130624

detroit diy wifi community network

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