You raise good questions. I originally tried to keep it simple and wrote the documentation with my (prospective) partners in mind. They already work in this space, so they know the problem very well, and we'd usually have a few high-level conversations before getting into that kind of details, so I didn't want to bore them with things they already knew. However, things are changing now and we're opening things up to the public in the coming days, so these are things I need to document better.
> how such a network would be useful
We're trying to establish connectivity in regions where the national/local government, or an adversary in a conflict zone (e.g. Gaza, Tigray), deliberately cuts off the population from the Internet.
I'm talking about places where satellite Internet services, like Starlink, won't work:
- Conflict zones where the enemy controls the sky, as they could "triangulate" the location of the terminal. This is why Starlink can be used in most of Ukraine, but is too risky to use in other conflict zones.
- Regions where the government won't give a licence to the operator. For example, Starlink in parts of Sudan: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/...
> who the couriers are and how they actually deliver the cargo
A courier is an individual or a group of people who volunteer to transport the data physically, between the region without access to the Internet and a location with access to the Internet. They can charge people if they want to and people agree, but Awala itself doesn't handle anything to do with that, so it'd be more of a verbal agreement amongst them.
That location with access to the Internet can be a place within the disconnected region that the government is intentionally keeping online (e.g. hospitals, international hotels), or a place/subregion whose ISP is taking too long to take offline. Worse case scenario, it could be:
- A place near the border with another region/country, where they can use the 4G/5G cell towers from that place. For example: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2019/01/10/...
- Another region that the couriers can travel to. For example: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/1/13/how-internet-ex...
> Or why that's desirable over just caching the messages until the internet is available again.
Because in many cases you never know when the Internet will be restored. And during that time, you have diaspora communities absolutely horrified after not hearing from close relatives for weeks or even months. Or, in the case of many North Korean escapees, potentially ever.
> And what about reliability? How long does cargo take to get to its destination? How often does it actually make it there?
Every situation will be different. For example:
- In non-conflict zones where the government doesn't have the capability to triangulate unlicensed Starlink devices, it'd take whatever it takes for the courier to drive/cycle/walk to that device. People have smuggled these things even in Iran, where the government does have some capability to detect them: https://iranwire.com/en/technology/133773-iranians-defy-inte...
- In places like India (the world's capital of Internet blackouts), where blackouts are regional, couriers could catch a train to another region as shown in the link above.
Awala is built to withstand delays of up to 6 months.