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I'm curious what the license-free options are that you're referring to. I thought I'd done my research, but I missed that.

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U-NII, mostly. The drawback from amateur radio or another licensed service is that you won't be able to use anything like the same power output. Whether that works for you depends on your definition of "long distance".

Yeah, that doesn't really fit the bill. I'm talking about HAM radio definitions of 'long distance', where one of the shorter hops is ~150 miles. I might as well stick with Part 15 as use U-NII.

That's the problem - hn regularly has threads talking about how decentralized infrastructure is so important. Having a (dialup speed) p2p network that is built on long range connections would be insanely reliable and would probably revolutionize what we think of as the Internet.

- ISPs would be optional

- access to the internet would be the one-time cost of the hardware

- a totalitarian government trying to shutdown the internet would have to hunt down portable repeaters over hundreds of square miles

- the infrastructure would be in the hands of the people, not megacorps like verizon and comcast.

But that requires encryption, and spectrum allocations that can cover the distance.

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