Time to start building long distance (100+ mile) mesh nets.
Alternately, I wonder if there's any way to lay down fiber long distance that doesn't require govt authorization...and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Alternately, I wonder if there's any way to lay down fiber long distance that doesn't require govt authorization...and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
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.
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).
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.
That’s a hard no.
Just the materials for a 100+ mile fiber network is hundreds of thousands.
Then there is the matter of right of way across all those miles. It would be nigh impossible to find a route that does not cross a road or land parcel that isn’t government owned.
Additionally, just doesn't make sense to install a network that has long fragile potential points of failure (aka attack surface) like fiber cables to replace the network that is or may be shut down by bad actors.
The One Laptop Per Child project tried to use such a network to serve remote areas but it never really worked.
"The range of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is around 10 metres, depending on obstacles. Clearly this isn’t enough for communicating across a city or even a large building. So when Briar receives a message from a nearby contact, it stores the message and can later pass it on to other contacts when they come within range (for example, when you move from one place to another)"
It always, always, comes down to the the rubber hose decryption.
Australia and New Zealand have banned lots of content that can be easily found, at worst you need a VPN.
Or even just being painted to camouflage into the roof it was mounted to.
There'd be reasonable aesthetic reasons to do these things, from a deniability standpoint. Though I guess that doesn't help if you're under a regime where accessing an unauthorized satellite service is straight up banned.
They don't need to visit everyone's home. As I said drone and UAV photos, then you know which home has it. Then re-education for those owners.
No mesh or satellite internet solution will fix a government.
Community mesh networks are hard to run and require real effort even if the local govt is not hostile. With a hostile govt it gets much harder. Unwirerer is a nice fantacy, but unlikely to become reality anywhere.