On 6/3/20 12:42 PM, Ben Greear wrote:
If you are trying to lift up a broad swath of the world, then you need scale and vision, and part of that is how to make it self sustaining. Giving a few crumbs to folks is less useful in my mind than helping give them the means to make their own bread. Think someone starting a company that wants to deploy 10k hotspots with 40k satellite wifi mesh nodes....
Your vision is deeply correct, but so is mine. One difference between the two ideas is that yours is top-down, with the purpose of offering a service, while mine is bottom-up, with the purpose of developing community and neighborliness, regardless of service provider(s). (I'm an admirer of the late Fred Rogers, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.)
But you are right, too. I'm also an admirer of the Indian cataract surgery guy (can't remember his name) who insisted that all patients pay for their surgery "because charity doesn't scale". He ultimately built a mind-boggling practice that, among other things, presumably now manufactures most of the world's intraocular lenses.
Open source software (and maybe hardware) with high volume, affordable, and solid hardware is one of the core aims of TIP. Think of a price and minimum hardware that meets your goals, if I find someone that can make such a thing at such a price, I'll let you know.
Fair enough. How about a *delivered* price, i.e. an out-of-pocket cost, of $50. Obviously a minimum of 2 radios, 128 Mb, and reasonable CPU power. Since we're forward-looking, here, with support for the new channels now presumably forthcoming from the FCC.
If you want wave-1 ath10k to mesh, my advice is to use 7 virtual station vdevs and one AP on each radio. ath10k-ct firmware and software will support this nicely. Have those 7 stations connect to peers' AP vdevs. Do routing mesh magic through this topology. Then you don't care about anything other than STA + AP working. This might also scale to other platforms that don't support IBSS or MESH well.
Many thanks, Ben. This is a helpful idea, and I daresay not many people could have come up with it. (Certainly not I!) You have just given me some homework to do, and I'm grateful for it. Bravo. If I get anywhere with it, you'll be the first to know.
Steve