Rural Internet connectivity
In the context of Organic Design, Internet refers to the problem of maintaining IP connectivity amongst the people independently of the large-scale corporate infrastructure. And also to maintaining the information content of the web amongst ourselves via independent caching solutions. This has a lot of crossover with the peer-to-peer concept, but while that article is concerned with the bottom-up distributed aspect of the net, this article focuses on the actual connectivity issues.
Our rural installation project
We're moving down to our land soon and have started to order some parts to prepare for getting connected to the 3G Vivo cell tower about 10Km away from us. I decided on the Huawei B970b 3G router connected to a Yagi directional antenna. The 3G router has an amplified signal which is much better for areas of low coverage than the small USB modems, and also has the advantage of handling the 3G connection internally and providing standard Wifi and LAN interfaces. The LAN interface is particularly useful because it allows us to place the whole device at the top of a pole away from the house if necessary, since there's no problem having a long length of LAN cable and AC power cable, but a USB cable required by a standard 3G modem is restricted to only a few meters of length.
Related projects
- Byzantium Linux - The goal of Project Byzantium is to develop a communication system by which users can
connect to each other and share information in the absence of convenient access to the Internet
See also
- Wifi - useful related info here such as "cantenna" designs
- Mesh
- Cypherpunkd: MondoNet - a Global Decentralized, Ad-Hoc, Wireless, P2P Mesh Network (Mondonet)
- 10 Projects to Liberate the Web
- IP over Avian Carriers