
Othernet: A multi-media broadcast to small, portable receivers - tlrobinson
https://othernet.is/
======
bullen
What we need is a P2P radio mesh on the ground.

Satellites are not a sustainable decentralized way of building Internet 2.0.

Unfortunately bandwidth is going to suffer and distance latency will be
proportional to the number of hops; so services will be sparse and local,
think async. walkie-talkie SMS for request/response communication.

You have to imagine a continental google search taking days if not weeks, and
probably be expensive in some other tangible way to avoid spam.

~~~
sansnomme
The issue is not tech, it's regulatory. Even now the free bands have anti-
encryption rules.

~~~
q3k
Which free bands? Ham bands? Or ISM bands? Because it seems like nobody cares
about any anti-encryption rules on 2.4GHz and 5GHz.

------
jcims
One of the folks from Othernet helped me understand what they are doing here -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21759819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21759819)

------
aaron695
Having be in a place with Internet.org, which was implemented for mobile phone
users.

Users didn't know they had it, and didn't care when told they had it.
Wikipedia was useless to them. So was the weather. So was everything else the
NGO's made for it. It was an ugly ghost town, people just didn't want it and
NGO's couldn't make anything not crap even with their expensive grants.

The only thing users used and loved was Facebook. It was a big thing in their
lives. (Video and multimedia wasn't free)

Satellite radio would be why you'd look at this but it would have to beat
local stations.

No one wants to listen how to grow crops or about elections they want to hear
from the latest Bollywood actors

------
peter_d_sherman
Is all of the software and all of the hardware used to implement Othernet open
source, and well-documented?

If not, then what parts are not?

------
qubex
Interestingly, their hardware is fully capable of transmission as well as
reception; two or more OuterNet devices can be configured to communicate
wirelessly over frequencies of the user’s choice (subject to local regulation,
of course). (And though I assume it’s obvious, I’m going to point out that in
this mode communication is not intermediated by satellite but ordinary point-
to-point.)

[https://youtu.be/KPsQn06TM4M](https://youtu.be/KPsQn06TM4M)

------
JorgeGT
For those confused, this was previously known as Outernet.

------
tpmx
"Our satellite broadcast is currently available in much of North America at
20kbps and Europe at 10kbps. We broadcast from SES-2 and Astra 3B."

