Solarpunk technology

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Technology for a Solar-Punk future.

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A Solarpunk Internet: How Much Bandwidth? (www.wumpus-cave.net)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] realbadat 3 points 6 months ago

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.