16 ms·
We may soon have city-spanning 900 MHz mesh networks
- sokoloff 6y ago> we can expect that Amazon will do everything in its power to lock every non-Amazon-sanctioned device out of its network I expect the opposite: for Amazon to sell this as a utility network service to all compatible devices (a la LoraWAN). If they do, they are likely to quickly eclipse The Things Network and Helium.
- minitoar 6y agoNot sure I see this as a replacement for my cellphone plan as the author suggests. I regularly stream video which I think needs more bandwidth.
- altcognito 6y agoI like the idea of mesh networks, but I think they have all the character of do-it-yourself personal data. So, wait, now I get to bear the burden of understanding how my network traffic is being routed and figuring out when I have issues? Not keen on that honestly. I might be technically capable, but that doesn't mean I'm interested or have the time to spend on it.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoI am reminded of the old Ricochet network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service) http://daedalus.cs.berkeley.edu/talks/retreat.6.96/Metricom.pdf http://daedalus.cs.berkeley.edu/talks/retreat.6.96/Metricom.... It was an idea ahead of its time.
- myself248 6y agoTruly. I used to run Ricochet.wikispaces.com and am sitting on a mountain of docs and stuff. Can't believe they managed to market it into the dirt and burn through five billion bucks.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoI still have a couple of the old modems lying around somewhere. There wasn't ever service where I live, but I played around w/ direct modem-to-modem communication. It was fun.
- jonah-archive 6y ago!! do you have the PDFs/etc that the Wayback didn't capture? If so, perhaps I can host them on the Internet Archive? Particularly interested in the Garage Gateway -- I've never seen the code and I have an otherwise working Ethernet Radio & pair of poletops I'd love to get properly running. E-mail's in my profile -
- danimal88 6y agoThats true, but it won't be some sort of open platform, it will be a utility for amazon that will come with some sort of monetization scheme. I say this as someone that has deployed 10s of thousands of 900 Mhz radios in devices over the last few years. Conceptually though, some sort of interop standard that would offer end to end encryption and access control could be quite cool. On the other hand, sending the garage door signal over an unknown network path and trusting that there is no chance for manipulation is also a tough sell compared to the relatively short wireless->wired topology that dominates most consumer IoT. I'm sure there are use cases where it could work great though.
- ACAVJW4H 6y agoI think the worst outcome of this yet one more avenue gobbled up by a large tech conglomerate. My understanding is that ISM bands are supposed to be free for personal use and are the last fronts for small scale connectivity innovation
- sneak 6y agoYou're still allowed to use them free for personal use, as are the personal users who bought Amazon-branded hardware. Nothing is being gobbled.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago>Nothing is being gobbled. I mean, I disagree with your opinion here. It's entirely possible that we end up in a world where corporations use all of the unlicensed spectrum to operate their corporate networks (on "user-owned hardware" that is centrally coordinated and controlled), leaving very little of it to alternative uses. There is only so much unlicensed spectrum so this is very much a realistic outcome, especially if the "user-owned devices" are coordinated and designed to maximize the company's use of the spectrum. I think "gobbling" is a pretty accurate description of this. What you are saying is that our current legislation around these bands permits that use, in the same way that it might be legal for Amazon to house all of its workers on public land in some states. The question to ask is whether this is actually good.
- gruez 6y ago>It's entirely possible that we end up in a world where corporations use all of the unlicensed spectrum to operate their corporate networks (on "user-owned hardware" that is centrally coordinated and controlled), leaving very little of it to alternative uses. Why does there need to be a distinction? What's the difference between amazon's sidewalk network compared to an at&t wifi router?
- matthewdgreen 6y agoThe answer to this question depends entirely on what the hardware does and how much it prevents other uses.
- asah 6y agofor a taste of citywide mesh: https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/ impressive map: https://www.nycmesh.net/map https://www.nycmesh.net/map I'm not sure about latency...
- kylegalbraith 6y agoDoes this actually solve the network hole problem though? Just because Amazon devices have this capability doesn't mean folks in rural areas have Amazon devices. Perhaps thats not the point of this article.
- pmorici 6y agoCheck out Helium it’s a proof of coverage crypto currency. The “mining” is proof of coverage. Believe it operates in the 900Mhz ISM band. Something like this could probably solve the hole problem because it incentivizes people to run access points were there isn’t coverage https://www.helium.com/ https://www.helium.com/
- Natales 6y agoI find Althea [1] a lot more interesting than Helium, where their crypto is used basically as an incentive model for bandwidth, with no proprietary hardware or software in the mix. [1] https://althea.net/ https://althea.net/
- ja27 6y agoAround makerspaces, mesh networking plans rank slightly above perpetual motion machines. It's not impossible but there are substantial challenges. Ask any ham involved in packet radio for the past 40 years.
- mproud 6y agoGood old Hydrogen… Mozzerella?
- mnemotronic 6y agoHondo-mega? hega-mertz? Ronna-hertz & Quecca-hertz just doesn't do it for me.
- nsb1 6y agoI love the idea, but this has Tragedy of the Commons written all over it IMHO. It won't take very many bad actors before it's ruined for everyone. That said, it's not stopping me from participating.
- londons_explore 6y agoWe need a mesh networking standard which is trustless. Ie. anyone can join the mesh, but not easily disrupt it and be evil. Today 802.11s is a great mesh standard, but it isn't trustless - all mesh nodes need to know the network password, and if you shared that password with the world, then someone could join and make the entire mesh stop working (and steal all your data).
- sneak 6y agoIt's ridiculously easy to disrupt low power wireless networks of any kind, no matter what the protocol or standard. Anyone can make the whole mesh stop working today, even without a password.
- 177tcca 6y agoA big one set off from a mile up is the normal way science fiction predicts the chaos begins.
- londons_explore 6y agoWith Wifi, I can easily disrupt within a few hundred yards of my house. But disrupting something a few miles away is much harder. With a mesh network, the network is much bigger, which makes it important an attacker can only disrupt their small corner of the network.
- ac29 6y ago> But disrupting something a few miles away is much harder. If you follow the rules. Presumably an attacker wouldn't care about that, and would be happy to dump a few orders of magnitude extra power into their jamming signal.
- jessaustin 6y agoYeah, and if they had gasoline and matches they could go around and burn down everyone's houses. The point is that the protocol shouldn't have a flaw that allows local traffic to have harmful nonlocal effects. I think FCC still cares about jamming signals, although they might make an exception for inexpensive mesh networks...
- londons_explore 6y agoThe internet and the IP protocol is kinda incompatible with mesh networks. A city-spanning mesh network which connected to the internet at peoples home broadband connections couldn't reasonably function. Someone who was downloading a file over the mesh wouldn't be able to have their data use any connection to the internet - they would have to keep using the same gateway from the mesh to the internet, because if they switched gateways their IP would change and existing connections would fail. It's the same reason switching from WiFi to Mobile data and back causes a reconnect in video calls.
- ajsfoux234 6y agoThere's the Multipath TCP protocol for use cases like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP For example, Apple already uses it when you ask Siri a question on an iOS device. Hopefully this standard gains more usage.
- londons_explore 6y agoMultipath TCP sadly seems to have died... I believe it was incompatible with internal load balancing systems at some big companies, so nobody deployed it.
- toast0 6y agoApple deployed it in iOS and macos. You can access it as a developer of either. There is a load balancing issue, but I don't think it's any worse than http/3 which also allows for peers to change IP (http/3 has a much limited scope of changes).
- ryukafalz 6y agoI mean, I haven't deployed it on my own servers just because it still requires a kernel fork to enable on Linux. There was an effort to upstream it as of late 2019 though; not sure if that's stalled, but I can understand it taking a long time as I believe it's a pretty big change to the Linux networking stack.
- londons_explore 6y agoLong range isn't a necessity for mesh networks. Regular wifi would be fine - the vast majority of the world's population lives within 100 yards of another person. Shorter links actually increases spectrum utilization. The issue is that wifi never managed to make a decent mesh networking standard. No router you buy today acts as an open mesh node for anyone to mesh with.
- sebow 6y agoI would say that's mainly a software/vendor issue(standardization, because we're not necessarily gonna wait years for ISO here).Not to mention routers/similar hardware are not robust enough for becoming part of a mesh infrastructure: usually low-quality and very rare updates, shitty software, most often than not locked-down access to them,etc.(Obviously exceptions like ~Asus for ex. exist, but the vast majority of people have something way worse that is not "hackable") If anything a dynamic and robust mesh network through mobile devices seem more potent. Of course this would only work in massively dense areas.And with Wifi-6 we're reaching a point where the accumulated bandwidth could be enough.
- sgt 6y agoFits perfectly with the technology I imagined for the post-apocalypse: Gopher, lynx and text messages!
- bri3d 6y agoWorth noting that the maximum bitrate of the base LoRa encoding is not going to replace your cellphone anytime soon, even for a fantasy re-hash of the text-based Internet that this article suggests. I believe the maximum speed of LoRaWAN on 900Mhz spectrum is a blazing 27 kbps (that's bits), so the cited 80Kb/s in the linked article for Sidewalk-to-IP communication is several orders of magnitude higher and must contain a lot of (unsurprising) overhead. LoRa is good for applications where it used, like meter monitoring, control systems (oilfield etc.), and RC airplane control (R9/Crossfire/Ghost). It could certainly be used for the proposed motion detection and lighting use cases. With modern codecs, you could maybe complete 1-2 voice calls at a time over it, maybe. But my guess is that Amazon's play here is "smart home without the WiFi configuration," not "replace your cell phone." It's not going to replace your cell phone data plan.
- icedchai 6y agoAlso, with LoRaWAN, devices have duty cycle limitations. They can't hog all the bandwidth for a extended period of time. It is really intended just for short, bursty, infrequent transmissions like you describe.
- d21d3q 6y agoThat limitation is not specific to LoRa but to anything transmitting in ISM band e.g. ~868 MHz in EU, ~900 MHz in US. It limits single transmitters air time to 1% so that one can build radio communication with any modulation, any protocol and limits probability of collision with different devices in range. I wonder if ISM band will provide dedicated spectrum for LoRa with unlimited airtime.
- rmoriz 6y agoRegulatory duty cycles/time on air (ToA) will prevent the legal use for highish bandwidth applications and are necessary to keep the frequency open for everyone. See https://lora.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://lora.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- darig 6y agoActual laws and regulations have nothing to do with why this will be prevented. Telecom lobby money on its own has been working for decades.
- ac29 6y agoThere are no duty cycle limitations for 900MHz in the US. Its regulated largely like 2.4GHz (see 47 CFR § 15.247). There are rules for frequency hopping systems that limit the amount of time you can dwell on any given channel, but there are less restrictions on non-hopping systems. High-ish bandwidth 900MHz radios are pretty common and can do multiple megabits per second (at least with enough signal-to-noise ratio, which isnt always practical over non-trivial distances).
- jeffypoo 6y agoCan you share some examples of high bandwidth 900 radios? In my experience, it’s difficult to get bitrates above ~100kbps on 900 over any meaningful distance.
- jamiek88 6y agoYeah I’d be very happy to be pointed in the direction of a multiple megabit per second 900 radio. Take my money!
- KirillPanov 6y agoI have the Ubiquiti M900 radios. With a (~5-foot) yagi they definitely deliver the advertized 100mbit/sec.
- 6y ago
- porsupah 6y agoFor a good example of how such a mesh network can indeed function well, consider Ricochet, which once offered service in a few metro regions, including the Bay. The relay units were typically mounted on utility poles, by arrangement with the relevant agencies. True, 128kbps wasn't anything that'd compare with 4G, but this was 1999. It wasn't great at handoffs either, but still, I was able to use it on BART regardless. Imagine, connected to the net - on the move! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)
- spullara 6y agoIt was amazing. And then we went on a dry spell for a few years after it was shut down and tethering wasn't a thing.
- Animats 6y agoI had Ricochet. It was OK, but slow. It used little units bolted under street lights, with a little spiral antenna pointed down. It was abandoned in place some years later. You could still use it to talk to nearby locations, but the connection to the external Internet was gone. It's certainly possible to build a 900MHz mesh network, but it can't deliver much bandwidth. Email and SMS, yes. Voice, only on slow days. Today's web, no way. It would be like building a network for Blackberries. One of the more successful off-grid comm systems is SailMail.[1] This is worldwide email, over 10MHz, for boats. Down at 10MHz, radio can cross oceans. This was a side project of Stan Honey, who invented car navigation systems. He's seriously into sailing and holds records for crossing the Atlantic, sailing around the world, and such. So he developed this for the long-distance sail community. They maintain about 25 fixed stations around the world, and if you can connect to any of them over HF, you can send and receive email. [1] https://sailmail.com/ https://sailmail.com/
- Nextgrid 6y agoOut of curiosity, do you know if some units are still around? The Wikipedia page isn't clear as to what happened to the existing hardware after the last acquirer's liquidation - was it just left in place, did the municipalities explicitly remove them or repurposed them for something else?
- tmiahm 6y agoThe author is conflating max allowed bandwidth from the bridge to Sidewalk server with per-end-node bandwidth. The 80Kbps includes the bundle of all of the LoRaWAN messages it has received for all end-node-devices within range. This is a marketing point to show the Amazon device owner that this won't consume large amounts of their bandwidth. The Things Network suggests a maximum expectation of 250 BITS/s. This is not going to replace cell networks. https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/limitations.html https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/limitations.ht...
- lwhi 6y agoWhy do I want this as a consumer?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Scoundreller 6y agoWhat I’m looking forward to is low-cost, mid-bandwidth and ultra-high-latency store-and-forward LEO satellite constellations. Something that you can use in the middle of anywhere and send/receive text news, messages and short voice recordings. Maybe a handful of photos per day if you want to point your antenna to the sky manually and follow the satellite for a few minutes for max bandwidth on an upload. There’s a few projects out there, but still out of reach of the consumer because I guess... they can charge more to a corporate user.
- ultrarunner 6y agoThis is interesting. Do you mean services like Iridium, or something newer? What projects did you have in mind?
- lxgr 6y agoMyriota [1] sounds very interesting. It's exactly what GP describes if I'm not mistaken! [1] https://myriota.com/ https://myriota.com/
- Scoundreller 6y agoThis is one I’ve seen: https://www.keplercommunications.com https://www.keplercommunications.com Iridium is a « live » network... with much high costs of construction and operation.
- haarts 6y agoWhat would you use it for? Some IoT project?
- Scoundreller 6y agoA cabin or hike without (or poor) cell service where this would provide just enough connectivity to real life. I like the idea of being able to read the news and maintain comms but can live without live 2-way video. Also cool to imagine there will be a nano/micro cubesats with a enough gbs in SSDs circling earth every couple hours making that possible. Could have different levels if priorities to balance supply/demand.
- choeger 6y agoIs there any benign scenario that explains why amazon should do that? They have essentially put listening devices into every home and now they bypass the home owner's network? Am I the only one that thinks this looks like it is about surveillance? What's the next step? Mandatory amazon smart meters? Smoke detectors?
- londons_explore 6y agoAmazon isn't in the business of being evil to the public. If they did, they would lose massively more revenue than they gain from a few smart meters. You should be more worried about companies where you are the product not the customer...
- bobitsaboy 6y agoI don't even know how a person could type your third sentence and submit it. Amazon already gathers, utilizes, and monetizes data gathered from devices it's sold to customers. It's been doing it for years.
- kumarvvr 6y agoWhen the apocalypse comes, these mesh networks might be the only way to communicate. We must have an alternate web that serves these networks. Systems for email, notifications, etc.
- anthk 6y agoEh, no. You must be young. Email works perfectly on low bw conns. So does IRC, and Gopher.
- notriddle 6y agoEmail’s fine for low-bandwidth, high-latency mesh wireless. IRC and Gopher are not. The latency, and potential unreliability, would kill it.
- anthk 6y agohttps://hackaday.com/2020/12/12/irc-over-lora-for-when-things-really-go-south/ https://hackaday.com/2020/12/12/irc-over-lora-for-when-thing... If not, maybe icb uses less bw. EDIT Also: https://github.com/dmahony/LoRa-AX25-IP-Network https://github.com/dmahony/LoRa-AX25-IP-Network
- pomian 6y agoBut, what will power it? Would each installation have a battery and solar panel? Maybe a good idea, small units should be installed, similar to those cheap night lights, if some fail ok, but enough for basic Comms.
- varispeed 6y agoI can see that this could be exploited by drug dealers creating local anonymous marketplaces or by any resistance movements to coordinate their actions against oppressive governments. Ergo it will be quickly outlawed...
- amelius 6y agoBitcoin is used by criminals, and it still exists, and it is legal.
- DanielR31D 6y agoSo is cash
- amelius 6y agoNot nearly as convenient.
- varispeed 6y agoIt is also used to facilitate corruption so it will stay.
- eevilspock 6y ago{off topic} I don't normally like pink but I'm loving this black serif text on this shade of pink (#FFD4F5) background.
- KaiserPro 6y agoIf you're looking for an open lora-wan network, you might want to investigate helium (https://www.helium.com/ https://www.helium.com/) its got some block-chain hypermegadrive bullshit, but at its heart it looks like a super cheap quite widespread lora network
- spiritplumber 6y agoAlready do in San Rafael, CA. http://f3.to/cellsol/ http://f3.to/cellsol/ here's firmware and schematics, add to it! :)
- rkagerer 6y agoI use a wireless phone headset from Plantronics that operates in the 900 MHz range. It works so much better than Bluetooth since the range is farther (especially indoors) and the band is less crowded with interference. The last thing I want to see is a bunch of new random consumer junk cluttering it up.
- lxgr 6y ago> new random consumer junk Like wireless phone headsets? What makes your use of this public band more important than that of others?
- rkagerer 6y agoIn fairness, that headset is something I rely on every day, for hours of the day. The article says Amazon began shipping this feature in its products secretly, so 'junk' in the sense that consumers didn't ask for the feature and it's crowding the medium mainly for Amazon's benefit. (Ps. This was authored before you edited your comment)
- lxgr 6y agoArguably, being able to find a lost pet or wallet is not only Amazon's benefit. (Yes, it's a for-profit company selling the equipment, but isn't that true for headsets as well?) As long as spectrum fairness is ensured (and I think there are pretty strict rules on duty cycles for the 900 MHz band, i.e. any given device can't be transmitting more than a few seconds every few minutes), I think it is up to the owners of the band to decide what's critical and what isn't: The public. If you think about it, hours of phone calls every day are probably a more significant use of that spectrum than all lost cats and dogs of a city combined.
- amenghra 6y agoNit: HMz in title looks like a typo. If anyone wants to fix.
- dang 6y agoFixed. Thanks!
- decker 6y agoThere's no reason to build a LoRa mesh network if all the devices are connected on WiFi. Instead, it sounds like Amazon is building out a network of LoRa access points where their customers pay for the hardware and operate the access points. It's hard to say what their plans are for the network, but if they wanted to make a tile competitor that could find your stuff in an entire city, this would make it possible.
- lxgr 6y agoIt would really be great to see license-free 900 MHz radios come to smartphones. Text only store-and-forward would be more than fine for many use cases.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoAny form of Non-Cellular Internet is good as telecommunication industry is at best oligopolies or at worse monopolies in most countries; But unfortunately wireless Internet is still largely dependent upon them. Apart from other reasons discussed here on why mesh Networks aren't the go-to choice yet, there's another problem I'm noticing in India; 4G(LTE) Internet is cheaper than any other form of Internet delivery here. It's well-known that India has the cheapest 4G data plans, So in-spite of innovative startups trying their best to crack into city-wide mesh network they just couldn't compete with the pricing of cellular Internet besides 4G data is the means to Internet in most households here and they are not going to change to WiFi when they leave the house. P.S. I've been tracking the need gap in 'Non cellular network mobile Internet' & I welcome related resources. Link in my profile.
- Triv888 6y agoA true open wireless mesh network is what the internet needs to become to overcome censorship and similar issues.
- dboreham 6y agoAnd it will be slow with crappy QoS.
- dmqctx 6y ago"One must also assume that Amazon will do its best to encrypt its network traffic and make its devices as hard to hack as possible." Somebody feel free to disuade my fears, but all I'm able to think about this weekend is the Microsoft Exchange hack that just ravaged "30,000" organizations we're told. And here Amazon is building a publically usable network based on our Ring doorbells and "Hey Alexa devices". What could possibly go wrong?
- throwanem 6y ago> This means in two to five years we may be able to surf the internet or talk on our [phones] while walking down the sidewalk in nearly any city What a prospect! Can you even imagine?
- augusto-moura 6y ago> between 500 meters and a mile in urban areas Good way to confuse both imperialists and metricists
- Filligree 6y agoIn some metric countries, a "mile" is 10 km.
- brokenmachine 6y agoWhich countries?
- folmar 6y agoWikipedia lists Norway and Sweden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Scandinavian_mile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Scandinavian_mile
- m463 6y agoin the OpenWrt source tree, a large section of the repo is devoted to Freifunk ("Free Radio" in german) It is a giant mesh network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk
- msla 6y agoI get the sinking feeling this will replace wired Internet connections and then we'll all have to learn hard lessons about rain fade and packet collisions all over again. Hooray!
- ghshephard 6y agoI'll let you all in on a little secret - for the last 15+ years there have been lots of cities with 902 Mhz FHSS networks covering every little inch of them. Any of the Utilities (predominantly electrical, but some water) - that have remote meter reading often use that part of the spectrum with enough duty cycle that they can trap nearby GFCI breakers. In the case of companies like the old Silver Spring Networks (itself, a descendent, technologically in many way from Richochet) - it's IPv6 for consumer distribution. 25 Million+ nodes when I left them in 2017. Since merged with Itron, so I'm sure it's doubled or tripled since then.
- VectorLock 6y agoI still have some Richochet modems. They were nice because you could use them as point-to-point radio modems after the Ricochet network became defunct. But with so many options for low cost and more compact radios in a such a huge plethora of spectrum options they're totally defunct now.
- Layke1123 6y agoOh boy do I love the free market!!!!
- dopidop 6y agoWe have the same where I grew up. Electricity is a national monopoly. Water was one under a national mandate of small provider until the early 2000.
- Layke1123 6y agoCurious to hear more about this if you don't mind sharing.
- dopidop 6y agoI was thinking of France, where the national Electricity provider is rolling out « linky », a 900Mhz capable meter. My understanding is that the 900Mhz range is already in production for french meter since a while as well.
- heyrhett 6y agoHelium network has been growing fast. Just crossed 20,000 hotspots and will probably reach 100,000 this year. It uses a crypto mining incentive so the network expands without any central corporation needing to spend a dime on infrastructure. People are already building cool IoT projects with it from adafruit kits. https://explorer.helium.com/coverage https://explorer.helium.com/coverage
- VectorLock 6y agoWow, I've never heard of this before but it sounds super interesting.
- gonesilent 6y agoIt's a copy of the open things network that lora such a rise in popularity. Now with "blockchain".
- VectorLock 6y agoLooks like trying to use cryptocurrency mining to incentivize people running hotspots, which actually sounds like a useful application.
- jamez1 6y agoThis would be far better if the currency was used to pay for connectivity, and the router was reimbursed for routing. Connectivity has a cost, and none of these networks will amount to anything unless the model can incentivize all aspects of the infrastructure necessary
- datameta 6y agoLoRaWAN's use case isn't that of cellular data or wifi. It is what will be the backbone comm network of billions of edge ML devices by mid-decade.
- mmaunder 6y ago“Soon, the mobile phones for which we are now paying $40 US per month or more may work for practically no cost. Won't it be interesting to watch our widely-hated wireless telecommunication companies struggle to stay in business?” Competing using a shared chunk of 900Mhz? Not likely. 5G uses millimeter bands (20Ghz to 60Ghz) that provide up to 20Gbps of bandwidth. A public shared scheme using 900Mhz isn’t going to compete with that. Spectrum is the pipe and whoever has the biggest pipes wins. It’s a bit like telling the public they can compete with an oil pipeline using a shared straw.
- person_of_color 6y agoHow does 802.11ah fit into this?
- unnouinceput 6y agoQuote 1: " Lately, however, the number of goTennas in operation seems to have declined. Aside from the cost ($189 for two units) ..." Quote 2: "...using the LoRa protocol for extending ..." Based on these 2 points I have a question / proposal. How about RaspberryPi, as mesh network, using its WiFi capabilities and definitely faster than LoRa, which is snail in comparison? I mean RPi's are like ~$30 each, 3 times lower than goTennas and WiFi speed, yes?
- untech 6y agoMesh networks are cool, but they are a bit of overkill for solving problem of crappy $40/mo internet :) (Writing this from my $8/mo 300 Mbps home connection. My 4G is $3/mo.)