On 6/3/20 8:48 AM, Ben Greear wrote:
I'm working with the TIP project, which aims to provide stable
OpenWrt capable hardware, among lots of other things.
I know some others in that group are interested in low cost
solutions, so curious to know what price you think is
viable for your market...
Ben, your question is appropriately industrial, but I've already given my answer, which is: "Less is more." The lower the price, the more human capital is protected from the abyss of the digital divide.
True, the primary problem is not so much the one-time cost of a cheap radio. However, one way to address the primary problem is to give public-spirited digital-haves a way to lift up their digital-have-not neighbors. With mesh computing, that means purchasing multiple routers and making gifts of at least one of them, along with the gift of access. What can the digital-haves afford to give, besides access? Typically, not much.
What follows is a rant. Advice: skip it.
---------------------------------------------
Let me explain my perspective, here.
Personally, I believe that there is no difference between the information highway and any other public highway. The digital divide is compelling evidence of oppression of the poor by the wealthy. The nature of the oppression is comparable to highway tolls that restrict the mobility of the poor. Since the capture of US federal regulatory bodies by the telecom industry, and in the absence of effective telecom regulation in the public interest, the only course available to people who want to relieve the damage caused by the exclusion of the dispossessed is to work around the edges, which is what I'm doing. While I would welcome industrial help, I expect none, because I'm only interested in the prosperity of the *entire* public. (In my retirement, I can just barely afford to be.)
I'm unfamiliar with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP). However, I spent more than 20 years voluntarily working on ANSI and ISO information interchange standards (ISO 10743, 10744, 13250), and I know exactly what I'm talking about when I say that the public interest is unlikely to be served by industrial consortia who say things like what the TIP website says:
"We believe that accelerating innovation coupled with new business approaches and cost efficiencies will help the industry build the networks of the future and create business opportunities for new and existing companies, alike."
Such information technology consortia are typically violators of the spirit, and generally the letter, of the antitrust legislation that has been on the books since the end of the gilded age that preceded the current gilded age, and which no recent U.S. administration has seen fit to enforce. They are simply dog fights in which the public interest has no dog. The reason for their existence is to form alliances between aggregations of capital as they conspire against the market-leading aggregations of capital.
ANSI (the American National Standards Institute) promulgates rules for such activities that keep all participants from violating antitrust law -- from being "conspiracies in restraint of trade" -- but you never hear about ANSI standards any more because nobody bothers to avoid antitrust prosecution. There isn't any, basically. Why put up with burdensome transparency rules? Why put up with the sandbagging machinations of representatives of the actual market leaders? Open societies are expensive, frustrating, and annoying.
The purpose of a business is to make a profit, and that incentive *does* serve the public interest, but only in the context of regulation that forces the public interest to be served by it. In the case of the US telecom industry, and basically since the Consent Decree of 1982, regulation has served the interests of its investors, but not the public interest. The history is appalling, really, and the story keeps getting worse.
That's just how things are these days, as we flush whole sections of each generation's human potential down the toilet. It bothers me a lot. For each succeeding generation, the cost of each generation's loss is exponentially increased. Try not to think about it.