Back to the original post: you might be interested in checking out the #moinho-mesh project as this exact approach of point-to-point radio is already being trialled in places. I was also talking to Mike Cohen from Sensorica some time ago who has been working on some ultra minimal, low-power (5V IIRC), high range (several kilometers) radio transmitter tech. Bandwidth is naturally not very high but for systems like SSB it could indeed be a workable transport medium. I'll try to get some info from him and loop back here- could be invaluable for those interested in #mesh-networking.

This brings up an interesting debate as to whether a high-bandwidth, always-on digital lifestyle is something that people really need. On the one hand I really love the #solarpunk assertion that no, we don't, so long as we can connect to each other somehow then speed and availability does not matter.

But on the other, I've been to outback Australia and I know how much people there suffer for lack of connectivity. Education suffers, business owners suffer, emergency services suffer and many more to boot. Whether that suffrage is 'real' in an objective sense or just relative to the high-speed lifestyle we enjoy in cities and the penchant we seem to have for making all things 'smart' is another question.

Maybe fibre changes the equation. It costs nothing to put light down a piece of glass. The manufacturing process probably isn't that sustainable, but if we could find an ethical way to spin fibre then we might be able to have our cake and eat it too.

I've actually done the rounds on a complete solution to the ISP 'carrier enclosure' problem with someone who had a hand in building the majority of Australia's telecommunications infrastructure, and you can't solve the whole issue with radio. For one it doesn't have the bandwidth to connect large population centres at any decent speed once you subdivide the available bandwidth by the number of people at each end, and for another you can't cross continents with radio hops. Undersea cable is really the only option there- the bottom line is, if you want a globally interconnected system then at some point you're going to need fibre and someone is going to have to own it.

Interested to hear if anyone would challenge that assumption- could be a consequence of our team's background. Certainly our plan was always to provide best-in-class internet at less than half the cost of Big Telco, not to create minimally acceptable low-bandwidth connectivity.

So, here's how we planned to do it:

1. Get seed funding to buy some tier 1 routing equipment. These are expensive boxes, starting at around $250K. They live in datacentres in major cities and connect to the inter-continental fibre lines. If you own one of these machines and can get a lease on the fibre, you own the internet backhaul and can prevent things like net neutrality being undermined.

2. You set up the company that owns the backhaul as a cooperative, and make representatives from community ISPs the governing members. If you get a big enough group of them invested they could even provide the seed funding. This was in my Ethereum days, so we planned to do this using tokenised ownership models.

3. Now you need to start laying fibre out of the major cities into other localities. In urban areas, mesh networking using wifi and 5G is no problem. You could probably hop most of a city via repeaters connected to the datacentre that houses the backhaul fibre. Innovative crypto-based pay-on-demand services like AltheaMesh may also be useful for sharing your personal internet connections with strangers. But inter-city connectivity is a problem, especially in Australia. When Telstra (think AAPT or Comcast) was privatised we ended up with a situation where the carrier and the service provider were the same company. Unsurprisingly, they are hostile to anyone who wants access to that fibre. There is enough already laid in regional Queensland to connect the state 5 times over, but they won't let you touch it and they will straight out lie about its availability. So it's either do a deal with the devil or lay your own fibre. The deal may be doable (last mile connectivity out west costs them a fortune and yields little return, so really we'd be taking a liability off their hands), but it would be better to own the fibre ourselves. You achieve that by getting each community ISP to foot the bill for their section of the fibre line, and you do it in stages. First city along a line pays from the capital city to their junction. Second city pays for cable from the first city to theirs, not all the way from the capital. And so on.

4. Now you've got fibre connecting every locality and the final legs can be done with point-to-point microwave radio. With good placement you often don't need many transmitters to connect a town, and the Cambian kits are both good quality and affordable. The calculations we did ended up at about 80/80/80: if a rural village can get 80 people paying $80AUD a month for their internet on day one we can conservatively provide 80mbps up & down and cover our costs. $60USD a month for internet might seem expensive, but for Australia it's actually very cheap. People currently pay $75-90USD a month for guaranteed bandwidth of 1.4mbps. Yes, you read that right. From there, once you start getting more communities online you can begin to develop bulk buying power that makes leasing fibre cheaper. We think we could get the price down as low as $30AUD/mo for the same speed internet service.

5. The rest comes down to building the community ISPs: training them in how to do technical support and manage the network. In our model they were going to pay for backhaul using Ethereum tokens, which would have the effect of increasing the value of the backhaul company due to demand and thus increasing the value of the shares those ISPs own in it. But the best part is that the community ISPs get to own the profits and inject capital back into the local economy. Again with the tokens, but we thought having everyone paying their internet bill into a system that converts into an Ethereum token for each locality would have been amazing- then you could put a governance DAO around the cash pool and have the community vote on where the funds should be spent. But, y'know, you could do that in town hall meetings too.

At least, that's as best as my non-expert memory serves on the details. Any corrections or questions welcome (: