How to Build a Low-Tech Internet (opens in new tab)

The problem is you're not allowed to use Amateur Radio for anything "useful". You can chat with your friends, but for instance you'd never want to use it for email or online banking because encryption isn't allowed. You also can't conduct commercial transactions over it, except to occasionally sell a radio.

In my experience there is (or at least was) very strong animosity between HAMs and people who build networks of this kind. To some extent I view that as conflict between doing things "the right way" and "it works, so what".

I agree that it should be mentioned. But afaik you often have to be certified to even use packet radios.

This article almost exclusively deals with unlicensed, spectrum and consumer grade hardware.

>The internet as we know it in the industrialized world is a product of an abundant energy supply, a robust electricity infrastructure, and sustained economic growth. It cannot survive if these conditions change.

I was going to run the numbers for Elon Musk's 4000 satellite low-latency global gigabit pizza-box phased-array rooftop antenna internet, but I think that's even more dependent on those conditions. SpaceX is shooting for a new hardware spin every 5 years.

Many places with declining GDP still have great internet because it's just not that expensive. Also, bandwidth's utility is generally a log function. Don't forget the telegraph was valuable enough to run under sea and cross country cables starting in 1850 and that's ~10bits per second with several cables being run in the next few years.

By 1901 we had a global network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable... (all this for ~10–12 words per minute.)

The internet is not a high energy industry when compared to a steel or aluminum plant.

And the rest of the article is naive at best and seems to ignore that PTP radio has been used in telecoms for decades.

"sustained economic growth" is the most likely of those to be interrupted, which is concerning. As is the extent to which we're dependent on free VC-funded ad-supported services.

It seems fitting that this event is taking place in Slovenia. I read a bunch of stuff recently about how there's an excellent homebrew packet radio network in the mountains there - http://www.hamradio.si/~s51kq/PACKET.HTM

These networks tend to be mostly WiFi based because the hardware is cheap enough that homegrown "low-tech" alternatives (like FSO or custom radio protocols) are more expensive.

I remember that ~15 years ago building these sort of networks involved various experiments with hooking up various home-grown radio modems or gutted laser pointers to serial ports, but today the technology of choice is either WiFi or commercial microwave PTP links operating in unlicensed spectrum (which are order of magnitude more expensive than WiFi, but have significantly better performance, also unlicensed spectrum usable for such links is not available in every country).

More like low-resource networks, or maybe hobby-grade infrastructure?

Perhaps "low-cost" is a better adjective. Wi-Fi hardware and knowledge are ubiquitous — the article says the buying Wi-Fi hardware is cheaper than rolling your own.

Also, I'd imagine if the people setting up the network leave, others will have an easier time maintaining if the network uses a very popular link layer.

what about flying balloons with wifi antennae - Seen a working version yet?