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Afghans Build Open-Source Internet From Trash (shareable.net)

92 points by jtnl ↗ HN
Afghans Build Open-Source Internet From Trash. Fast Company reports that residents can build a FabFi node out of approximately $60 worth of everyday items such as boards, wires, plastic tubs, and cans that will serve a whole community at once.

18 comments

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adelevie
>If they create their own internet in a war torn country, what's our excuse?

Pennsylvania has a law that gives Verizon a right of first refusal to prevent "Municipalities and school districts from being able to compete with regulated phone companies".[1]

[1] http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/35702

ThaddeusQuay
If only I had some trash with which to create an Internet. I guess there is a downside to clean living.

What they did is okay, except: "The public hospital, which houses the endpoint of FabFi Afghanistan's longest link, has become a shared community resource, providing downlinks to a growing number of locations in the city center." It's not a good idea to give a major facility a large role in the network, because such a facility represents a big target for the government. It's a good start, but in the long term, any serious attempt at resisting censorship must use the utmost in guerrilla tactics.

rdl
The goal is not to get blown up; the government isn't going to try to censor. Plus, the government there isn't monolithic; aside from the NDS, I believe the provincial/city government is much more relevant than the national government, and the FabFi people have done a pretty good job of getting "in" with the local government.

(I've stayed at the guesthouse and climbed the water tower at the hospital where the antennas are installed.)

ThaddeusQuay
"... the government isn't going to try to censor."

Um, what? Our own government censors. They unilaterally take away domain names, without due process or even notice, and they create laws which make certain communication, if done in public, illegal, which leads to these crazy Terms of Service that just about every social website has today.

So, GhanStan is full of poppy fields, but the government won't attempt to censor me should I try to cause any kind of trouble with those through online postings? GhanStan is so stable that the hospital should not ever have to worry about its FabFi connection being physically taken down?

rdl
Er, I should have edited that.

The Afghan central government would censor, but has a lot of other issues to worry about, and this is about last on their list.

The local government could try to censor (and, I think has objected to porn and other stuff in the past, which got filtered); the people running it have been proactive in working with the local government.

Not getting blown up is the primary concern here, not government censorship, though. If Afghanistan gets to the point where government censorship is their biggest problem, that's success.

mahmud
heh, poor Jon Katz lost his career in tech journalism after he made up a story about an afghan geek boy who was in touch with the world throughout the Taliban rule via his home made Commodore computer powered by car battery and running linux, or some such. It was the most bizarre lie, totally pandering to the slashdot crowd and the brave new world that was post-911 interweb.

edit, see contraversy

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Katz

chopsueyar
The system works consistently through heavy rain, smog and a couple of good sized trees.

2.4 miles at 11Mbps.

What frequency is this? 900MHz? Not 2.4GHz.

kragen
Last I checked, the record for 2.4GHz links was something like 100km. Why are you skeptical?
chopsueyar
Again, heavy rain, smog and a couple of good sized trees

2.4GHz requires line of sight and has major problems with water and trees.

900 MHz is much more forgiving.

kragen
Yeah, but we're only talking about <4km here. Rain fade in the 2.4GHz band could produce up to 2dB of attenuation under flash-flood-thunderstorm conditions. 2dB is not a big deal! At 10km or 20km or 40km you might have a point.
chopsueyar
So, 2.4GHz can transmit through trees?
kragen
It depends. It doesn't penetrate very far into the trunk, but it doesn't have that much trouble with leaves and twigs. (Until they get rained on.) So you can have a line of sight that's pretty much blocked by trees visually, but quite clear in 2.4GHz.
chopsueyar
So, if it is raining and the tree gets wet, it will not transmit through the tree, correct?
kragen
It's not that simple. Attenuation increases when it rains and the tree gets wet, but whether the attenuation is enough to cut off your connection entirely depends on a lot of things. But sometimes, yes.
chopsueyar
Well, this was some useful discourse.