The project is abandoned. If you're interested in mesh, I suggest
AREDN. Here in San Francisco those of us who were interested in
Byzantium are now on https://SFWEM.NET/ Things have really
improved and there is A LOT more mesh activity than when Byzantium
was active.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Sky" (Jim Schuyler) On the web at https://red7.com PGP Keys: https://red7.com/pgp —The space between the past and the future is where the possibilities arise.
Is this project dead now?
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The AR in AREDN is Amateur Radio, yes.
We are getting 20km and farther on our links in the San Francisco Bay Area mostly using Ubiquiti equipment.
An amateur radio license is not too hard to get. Databases of test questions and learning materials are online. Testing is available online. End to end it probably takes 20 hours spread over a couple of months to get licensed.
—Sky
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Sky" (Jim Schuyler) On the web at https://red7.com PGP Keys: https://red7.com/pgp —The space between the past and the future is where the possibilities arise.
An amateur radio license is not too hard to get. Databases of test questions and learning materials are online. Testing is available online. End to end it probably takes 20 hours spread over a couple of months to get licensed.
SFWEM is a wireless emergency mesh. The goal is to be a secondary line of communication for emergency response and services across the SF Bay Area. It is not a mesh for public Internet access. That's a different beast, and yet both types of mesh must serve broad communities, which has been a high priority for SFWEM. But probably will manifest in ways not so obvious to the general public.
(Byzantium and Red Hook activities were intensely focused on community access, as I recall. Kudos! But not the same emphasis as SFWEM.)
Until March 2020, SFWEM had been building what I'd consider a backbone, and even that is not well developed yet. The next immediate plan is to broaden to what I think you'd call underserved areas. A station can be rolled out to any location, as long as a control operator can control it. SFWEM just last week received a large grant that will provide equipment that could be used for such a build-out. And that is further leveraged by SFWEM (newly) being a 501(c)3 which means companies can fund and (currently do) donate their out-of-date used equipment.
Once COVID is less of an issue, that plan to broaden to more
communities is of high priority.
Regulatory issues -- Further to the question about reaching
broader communities, as you may know, traffic on amateur radio
frequencies must not be encrypted, which means public access would
be precluded by FCC rules as most web traffic is encrypted. And it
is kind of a hot topic area whether an amateur network can even
interconnect with the Internet...except in an emergency it would
likely be permitted, especially for emergency traffic. But that
encryption restriction has direct consequences for any amateur
network.
What SFWEM "learns" of course, could be of importance for those
who develop mesh networks on non-amateur frequencies (i.e. normal
wi-fi frequencies). I believe this is only an issue of what
frequency the mesh uses and thus the allowed power limit on that
frequency. SFWEM is operating on Section 97 (amateur) frequencies
with higher power.
—Sky
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Sky" (Jim Schuyler) On the web at https://red7.com PGP Keys: https://red7.com/pgp —The space between the past and the future is where the possibilities arise.
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