I’m attempting to understand why there is no distributed Internet.
It seems to be that the existence of a shortwave radio based Internet would have hugely beneficial implications.
To my understanding shortwave has extreme range. Would this not allow for Internet access in rural areas where traditional Internet is simply impossible or extremely impractical?
It also seems to me that it would be possible to distribute the load, thus obviating the need for both a central infrastructure and fees.
It seems to me that one could adopt an almost bit torrent model where in those who want to share can, those who don’t don’t.
Now I am extremely ignorant on this, but I’m trying to correct that. Any comments with additional information would be great.
My question is basically the same as the one I posted to Wiki answers.
What prevents the existence of shortwave radio distributed Internet?
It seems that data transmission over shortwave is at least technically possible. According to this page anyway.
It seems that shortwave for commercial purposes is illegal, which is all well and good, indeed that may work for us here. But what about for non profit?
Would it be legal to make a Shortwave non profit radio Internet service provider?
Does it even matter? I mean, couldn’t this type of thing be hosted from anywhere in the world pretty much?
I want more data. Please comment if you have some 🙂
Update:
Apparently it exists! but it needs development.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
This page contains a particularly disgusting bit of text…
One notable detail is that 2.4 GHz WLAN band is partially overlapping amateur radio band, and thus WLAN hardware can readily be used by amateur radio licensed operators with higher power radio gear than what the general population “license free” usage allows. (“Free to receive by anybody”, “transmit only between licensed radio amateurs”, and “[2]no encryption” rules usually make these very unappealing to spend time on.) Regulation details differ around the world.
No encryption? That is simply disgusting to me. It’s like transparent backpacks, searches without warrants, wire tapping, etc.
Mayhaps it’s time to start a new form of piracy harkening back to the old days. Maybe our enemy needs to be the FCC again, instead of the RIAA and Comcast.