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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, do you know if some units are still around? The Wikipedia page isn't clear as to what happened to the existing hardware after the last acquirer's liquidation - was it just left in place, did the municipalities explicitly remove them or repurposed them for something else?

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Some were around for years, but I haven't seen one in a while. I suppose they were removed as part of normal street-light maintenance. There may be some nodes, somewhere, still trying to connect.

This give me hope. I have been struggling with starting a small scale city wide mesh wifi... that shit is hard. I don’t need the bandwidth, just some connectivity. It’s pair really well with the bare bone internet that I would like to see back. ( HN being a fancy exemple of that )

Some are -- they pop up on local government auction sites (and even ebay) from time to time. The modems themselves are actually still quite useful, you can direct-dial between two of them using AT-style commands over the serial port, or they can be operated in a packet-radio style mode using tooling like strip: http://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-6.0/strip.4

(STRIP was actually in the linux kernel, though I assume long gone or defunct -- the only things I still have talking via Ricochet are 2.4-era)

I have a couple of the lightpole radios (they listen for the modems on 900MHz and speak amongst themselves on 2.4GHz) and scored a single tower radio (talks to the lightpole radios and has an ethernet downlink) and have gotten them to speak with each other, but haven't had time to figure out the route mapping steps -- IIRC the deal is that the packet routing path information is stored upstream and delivered to the downstream radios. No idea if anyone ever decoded that format.

I messed around with this a lot in the immediate post-Ricochet era in between flashing silver WaveLAN cards to gold... fun times. It seems like it would be entirely possible now to run a simulated node using SDR.

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