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Comment by batuhanicoz | Hacker News Reader

I’m from Turkey and I’ve been wandering for a while now what can I do to still have internet access if the government decides to shut everything down.

I’ll use thread to ask: what would be the cheapest way to have an emergency internet access? I guess Starlink kinda solves this problem but paying 100USD/m is a lot for a backup connection.

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How fast does it need to be? The cheapest option I can think of offhand is doing Internet via a HAM radio [1]. It's not fast, at all (I think I saw 500 kb/s in the article), but they say it's only $80 USD for the hardware, with a 300km range. You just need someone friendly, outside Turkey, within 300km who will let you borrow a bit of their WAN link, or who will let you pay them.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/build-a-longdistance-data-network-...

This is awesome. 300km is beyond the curvature of the earth by a significant margin -- I wonder how it works... Thanks for posting it.

EDIT: The hackaday page (https://hackaday.io/project/164092-npr-new-packet-radio) is talking about 10{,0}Mbit as of 2020:

> Important firmware update about Ethenet mode configuration 10Mb/s or 100Mb/s, half or full duplex; it can solve a recurrent problem of packet loss and low datarate. Refer to the new version of the "advanced user guide". Many thanks to Kevin M0AHN who discovered the origin of the problem.

I wonder if it's possible to get that kind of bandwidth...

EDIT2: Apparently you can get up to 500kbps outside of the US (https://elekitsorparts.com/product/npr-70-modem-by-f4hdk-new...) but within the US, due to regulations, you can only get 65kbps:

> Note for USA : Due to CFR 47 Part 97.3 FCC regulations, for the 70cm amateur radio band (restriction to 100kHz and 56kBaud), only the setting “modulation 20” of NPR-70 seems to be legal in USA. Please always check your local amateur-radio regulation before buying and using NPR70. Modulation 20: Symbol Rate 50kS/s, bandwidth 100kHz, raw datarate 100kb/s raw, usable datarate 65kb/s.

Still, you can do a lot with 65kb/s. Hmm.

Of course, in the US, you probably have cell service. Neat hack though.

> 300km is beyond the curvature of the earth by a significant margin -- I wonder how it works...

70cm is similar(ish) to 2 meter (which can propagate even over oceans):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-meter_band#Communications_be...

Pool the money with friends, family, neighbors that also want access? There also used to be dial-up available like from XS4ALL (you'd dial a Dutch number with your modem), but very practical I can't imagine it is.

No real solutions, just thoughts. Hope it helps a little anyhow.

Sadly, xs4all is dropping its dialup support on October 1, it's parent company is slowly dressing the brand down to the bare minimum. Use it now if you need or want to, but don't rely on it exclusively.

> What would be the cheapest way to have an emergency internet access?

How close do you live to the border?

People are doing interesting things with mesh networks.

Who is? What network(s) are they connecting to? Do you remember how slow Google WiFi Mountain View was?

is starlink available everywhere now??

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