Bob George wrote: > A few years back, there was some discussion on the list about using > low-resource systems to provide services in areas with little > infrastructure. While this article is mostly about neighborhood > wireless-phone access for toll-bypass (beating the phone company), there > are plenty of ways that the same technique could be adapted to areas > with almost no wired infrastructure to start with. > > In short: Linux has been adapted to inexpensive (< $70) Linksys wireless > routers to provide VoIP capabilities in a low-power, rugged form factor: > > http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040527.html
Very interesting, thank you. But the problem with areas of little infrastructure, is that quite often they have rugged terraine and forests. 802.11b is useless. And when I think about the global market for a low power pc that would run off solar panels out beyond the grid, and use lower frequencies for long range thru difficult terraine, I havta wonder why I aint in some kind of "Truman Show"- because nobody else is already doing it. The amount of money to be made would make Bill Gates look like a used car dealer. Cringely is right, we could bypass the TELCOs, and as he suggests, setup (on flatland with 802.11b) wireless networks of local hackers that would have so many users that the FCC would be exposed as the paper tiger that it really is. You could do it in dos, and be bullet proof. No spam, no Carnivore, no court ordered wiretaps (no wire), and no popups. The users could design the system to meet their needs, rather than the transnational honchos designing a system to maximize profit. We'd only havta put up with crazy ranters like me. And you could put me in a twit filter cause I dont change my identity. Cringely is right, that local entrepeneurs could provide much lower cost service. But he dont see that these entrepeneurs could also network globally with each other, and like FIDO, form a *user owned and controlled* network. And rather than just using the slivers of bandwidth the transnationals have left available, we could take over the whole spectrum, and return the power to the people. There is a clue in the 70$ price tag. FCC regulations were established in the era when hardware costs were daunting, and they threatened regulation violators with seizure of equipment. They aint gonna bother with a wireless platform that is so cheap, any more than they tried to seize the CB radios being used without registration, even when some Jackass was putting a thousand watts on a CB channel. The emperor has no clothes, much less armor.
