Afghans Build Open-Source Internet From Trash (shareable.net) 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. |
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]
edit, see contraversy
2.4 miles at 11Mbps.
What frequency is this? 900MHz? Not 2.4GHz.
2.4GHz requires line of sight and has major problems with water and trees.
900 MHz is much more forgiving.
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.
(I've stayed at the guesthouse and climbed the water tower at the hospital where the antennas are installed.)
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?
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.