this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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Solarpunk technology
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Technology for a Solar-Punk future.
Airships and hydroponic farms...
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First off - loved hunt the wumpus when I was little.
Second, I'd consider what's possible as well - as in mesh network solutions that would apply to a community.
You can get over a gig with a 24ghz point to point for around 50W max draw. For point to multi, you can do something like the prism station for only 10W or a simple AP for less noisy environments. You can then extend with mesh for another 10W max or so.
Its perfectly viable imo to get 100mbit or more on pretty low power. You could get more than 24hrs of backup off a wheelchair battery for even the point to point stuff which will require more power for the long distance transmission.
With a bit more money into equipment, speeds can go even higher, but even at the lower price point you can get quite a bit more than 10mbit with large scale mesh. More than enough for most use cases!
If it's a community being built out along solarpunk lines, then there's likely other infrastructure that has to be laid in the ground, like power and water. That being the case, you should be able to wire up most dwellings and not have to deal with the issues around wireless networking.
Then there's external connections from that community to others. It shouldn't be difficult to get 1Gbps within a community, but it's going to be far, far less between communities. The idea of a CDN helps here, but in a mutual aid way where everyone pitches in to cache content locally.
Ground up, sure, wired becomes an easy solution. Ad-hoc growth though (which is what I would expect to be more likely) wireless becomes advantageous. Running new lines is going to be way more than the couples hundred for an antenna stand and couple hundred to low thousands for gear (distance dependant) if there isn't a pathway already there and usable.
And yeah, the pipe out is the kicker always. That would either need to be a bunch of locations with a solid, but lower speed connection, or a high speed line (with fail over ideally). Which mostly means a shared cost and management.
I'd love to see something like this for a community, though you'd have to have enough folks to get it started.
I remember years ago there was a town/small city, I think in NZ, that started doing fiber distribution to everyone in town. It was optional to light it up, but with distribution like that it was real easy for them to have a singular community wifi solution as folks went around town, and they used (again, iirc) copper on utility poles for distribution to homes where they could, antennas on poles for those further out. That was super exciting to me, especially as a locally run initiative.
I'm hoping to find a community when we next move that has that sort of local drive to get projects done (and also has decent schools for my kids), though still searching on that.