Hello Eugen, On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 10:23 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 02:27:29PM -0800, Matt Joyce wrote:

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The only solution I can think of for this is a modular hardware design at the physical level that allows for pluggable communication devices. Then

That's called GBit Ethernet. Some cheap switches even come with literal SFP and SFP+ slots. It would be interesting to see whether a couple of cheap aligned Newtons wouldn't cover a few 100 m, or so.

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allow individual groups to play with laser links, packet radio, gsm /

I only recently found out that Android smartphones are down to about 100 EUR in Far East. Because of small size and power envelope and ability to link up to 3G they can be rooftop-positioned in weatherproof cases for maximum range, and powered by a small, cheap PV panel to last through the night.

About 95 EUR in Australia for the Huawei IDEOS (network locked, but that doesn't matter for mesh networking) which ServalProject.org is already using as a mesh telephony platform. We also have PV panels that we can use with them. The trick at the moment is that if the phone goes flat, it won't turn back on by itself; but I am sure some clever person can find a solution to that problem. ...

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The problem is mesh networking tends to not work well legally outside of 802.xx standards and 2.4 ghz.

I think our best hope is that next WiFi standards will move towards realtime beamforming, boosting range while reducing local interferences.

This is particularly valuable if you wish to avoid purposeful interference which is trying to take your mesh down. ...

Plug computers are a nice focus, and also a point of departure. The advantage of plugs is that they're easily placed, immobile, poweful, and offer both wired and wireless access. Smartphone-based platforms are mobile, but power-limited, and hence cannot operate 24/7 unless they're dedicated immobile units, whether mains or PV-powered -- notice that they come with their built-in UPS.

Personally I think that plug computers, mobile phones and more "ordinary" wifi devices like the VillageTelco.org Mesh Potato together provide diversity and specialisation to various tasks and appplications; no one solves all problems. This is why I am passionate that ServalProject.org phone software and VillageTelco.org Mesh Potatoes be interoperable (which they are), and I hope, also that they will interoperate with what this community generates. This also distributes the maintenance and leadership of these platforms further removing single points of failure. Paul. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE