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Comment by noman-land | Hacker News Reader

I know this is easy for me to say but I really want to encourage you and other hardware people to innovate on extremely cheap consumer facing commodity p2p/mesh communication devices. I've been teaching myself electronics and RF to try to be able to meaningfully contribute.

It's dumb that we have these super computers in our pockets with long range antennas and in order to talk to each other they have to go through central intermediaries and paid access.

I want ad-hoc geographically local connectivity without service providers.

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That's a pipedream. Our current intermediary run cellular networks pretty much replaced all our previous infrastructure in that space because there are far fewer compromises to end user experience. Secondly, your phone doesn't have any long range antennas in it.

Do some research on VHF/UHF amateur radio. That'll give you a primer on why this is hard. Think line of sight, repeaters, traffic management.

Our current infra, even if it is paid, is cheap and miraculous.

Edit: I had a ham license once (probably still do), built VHF transceiver, only had asshats to talk to on it (locality related not technical).

Around here a HAM license is an excellent way to stay current on various cancer treatments.

Gout in my area.

The asymmetry between mobile and cell tower is important. The tower has lots of good antennas and more power.

I'm interested in LTE Direct but no one has implemented that in a phone. LTE Direct has range of 1mi which is the range of most low-power systems.

Ham radio gets longer range with higher power and better antennas. But only to the horizon with most people. Ham radio still depends on repeaters on high points.

Does the supercomputer in your pocket not have wi-fi? Who is centrally intermediating or making you pay to use wi-fi to connect to nearby peers?

I'm not sure what you mean -- I would think the ISP is analogous here, so Comcast, AT&T, Verizon et al?

You don't need an ISP to set up a wi-fi network.

The hardware is not the hard part. Routing and the software stack for meshing is.

Wireless ad hoc networks came and went two decades ago. Perhaps they'll rise again but I wouldn't bank my career on it.

The closest I've heard of to something like this is some autist creates a low cost mesh internet connection for his neighborhood, then you could use VOIP on top of that.

I don’t think it’s fair to conflate autism (a specific medical condition) with passionate (a personality trait) Where would we be without these kinds of people?

Autist is not a cool term to use. Keep that sort of stuff on Reddit please.

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