Without satellites or trans-oceanic cables or fibers your carrier is limited to what can be bounced around the curve of the earth. For radio using the ionosphere to bounce off (technical detailed redacted, yes, I know its not bouncing) you’re pretty much limited to frequencies less than 30 MHz, so you’re not going to get signal bandwidths over any one path of much more than 10 mbps.

Using bounce off of the short-lived ionized trails of meteors entering the atmosphere, is cool but the trails last such a short time, your net bandwidth is more in the audio-modem range.

There’s always moon bounce when the moon is up, and EME paths have been worked out to 27 GHz, so as long as the moon is up, a corporation with the money to invest in large dishes (steerable dishes on the order of 20 meters) can result in dish-to-dish bandwidths on the order close order of 6000 to 8000 mbps. that’s an alternate backbone for you from Avogadro site to Avogadro site.

For the farmsteads in central Kansas tho, you have to recognize that surface-wave propagation is line-of-sight for WiFi signals, and those ten-mile-gaps are just death. Farmsteads aren’t built on hilltops, and even using careful attention to UHF tv signals, originally broadcast at thousands of watts through multi-thousand watt capable antennas, bent down towards the farm by diffraction from the edge a well placed ridge or water tower or building, receiving digital tv signals much beyond 70 miles is essentially impossible.

Those record-setting long-range WiFi examples all used extremely highly directional antennas (30 dB and more) and even the Peruvian long-range network requires 80m tall towers to get the line-of-sight across the flat landscape to get their 10 and 15 km links with highly directional antennas.

As to GSM, remember that a 10 mile GSM link is dependent on a very tall tower with multiple antennas and a power transmitter and sensitive receiver. Look at any of the zoomable maps of the US coverage by any of the national cell companies and look at the big, oddly ameboid shapes of the no-signal areas in Kansas and Nebraska, Northern Missouri, Indiana, Montana, Wyoming, etc…

(Oddly, because of oil drilling, there are no uncovered areas in north and south Dakota.

So, anyway, back to the question we started with, without a cable or a fiber to link with, those trans-oceanic links are -very- difficult.

-_ Rick

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

– Donald Fagan (I.G.Y Steely Dan)

PS. If this happens, the machines will make all the same stupid mistakes we do… they’ll just do them faster.

Thanks for doing the math. I agree with you, there’s substantial problems to achieving it with the technology we have today.

But a couple of thoughts:

Another way to think about it. Let’s say that it’s Google that provides the mesh boxes. They just need mesh connectivity to their own data centers. Once the data gets there, it can be routed over Google’s own backbone connections. So there’s no need to cross Kansas and Oklama the slow way.

At any rate, thanks for doing the math! It’s a fun mental exercise.

Will

900 hops from NYC to LA purely by mesh means that the average hop is 2.7 miles. Of course in NYC and in LA, the hops are shorter due to buildings and stuff. Then, once we’re out of New York and the eastern seaboard, how do you propose to cross Kansas or Oklahoma?

Assume you used half your hops avoiding the Great Plains, but we now have to get the 500 miles from Kansas City to Denver. There are many stretches in Kansas where it is more than ten miles between commercial buildings and residences, ditto Oklahoma and Nebraska and Texas and the Dakotas.

Are you suggesting that a mesh box, sitting on top of a tv in Cottenwood Falls can reach out a couple of miles to a mesh box in Elmdale, and then Clements and then Cedar Point and then Florance… That’s quite an achievement for a set-top-box inside a building with no external antenna. What sort of RF power and what radio band are you thinking of?

When you do this attempt at 2 to 5 mile mesh across the central US, 500 miles wide and 1500 miles tall, you are going to have a hard time justifying more than about 700 continuous paths across the great plains. What is the potential bandwidth of a mesh box running in the middle of a gap over two miles wide on each side of it?

Basically, about 700 or so mesh boxes in small towns and farmsteads across the great plains are the sole connection in this scenario between the east and west coast. Even if they have 100 mpbs bandwidth (which I can’t see out of a set-top-box) you essentially HAVE to have backbones linking the meshes between urban centers. Rural America just won’t be served by this and rural America provides a giant gap in your mesh.

It’s a mistake I see made by Europeans and US city dwellers on a regular basis. You know the old joke: Americans think a hundred years is a long time. Europeans think a hundred miles is a long ways.

Have you heard of the Mesh Potato? It is a mesh network telephone system which supports data transfer too:
http://www.villagetelco.org/

Two differences from your proposal are (1) the potato is totally open-source and hackable, and (2) any two people can set up their own network at $100 per house. No need for Google or any other sugar daddy.

I’d really like to find a mesh data network project that addresses the issue of net neutrality specifically.

Good luck with publishing, I enjoyed reading the excerpt above…