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Comment by throw2022110401 | Hacker News Reader

throw2022110401·

You arrive at the village. You've been separated from your family and you are desperate to get some kind of Internet access so that you can try to get in touch with them. Your phone still has 20% battery but no reception. You finally find a Wi-Fi hotspot! You connect... and it turns out to be one of these things instead of the real deal.

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Just wondering aloud: once a region has a number of villages with these services going well, perhaps a low bandwidth mesh network between them would allow a slow messaging service like email to exist?

Low bandwidth mesh for email ought to be viable, I'm sure that used telecoms equipment could enable a 'good enough' network, although perhaps using QRP APRS equipment would reduce the cost when starting from an energy demands point of view, and better account for the fact that packets will occasionally have to wait a few hours until the batteries in other nodes are charged.

The solution between villages could be LoRa since it is cheap, less than 50 euro per device albeit too high-tech.

A lower tech option is plain old radio, for example: https://frn.dc4fs.de/

Text does not consume meaningful bandwidth, so a mesh network should allow IM. (You’d need to limit torrenting, video, and hi-res audio)

Email and ssb can be supported by having a bicycle and a thumb drive.

Either use gsm or ask the locals to relay a message via radio?

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