[CWN-Summit] Buy this satellite

Mitar mitar at tnode.com
Fri Dec 3 18:15:11 CST 2010


Hi!

> I don't mean to say that it is not justifiable, but that I could not
> find out any technical capabilities of the satellite (for example,
> maximum bandwidth per user/channel, aggregate bandwidth), how one
> must outfit a ground station, and what the projected cost/complexity
> of a client device will be, before buythissatellite.org lost my
> attention.

You then haven't read much? Her is quite simple to understand:

http://buythissatellite.org/about.php

Currently they are collecting $ 150.000 so that they even start doing
all this things you are asking for them to do so that they can go and
raise money. As you said, without all technical details they will not be
able to raise enough money and $ 150.000 is not enough for buying a
satellite. So they will spend $ 150.000 on preparing everything to get
money for the satellite.

And then in phase 2 they will be doing development of client device and
so on. What is important to me is that it will be open source device.
This is enough for me.

So, I think they have made much more realistic plan than you are
proposing: they know that it will cost money and much expertise to
support all this to do really big scale fundraising. That proper plan
cannot be done overnight.

> I think it's important to answer the question, how would the cost to
> build fiber-optic and/or 4G infrastructure in a target nation compare
> with the costs to buy and operate the satellite, and to develop, build,
> and sell the satellite clients?  How would the technical capabilities of
> the satellite compare with the rest?  What's the upgrade path when the
> satellite stops working?

Hm. I am not sure if this is the most important question. For me the
most important question is who does have ownership over infrastructure:
big companies, government, people?

At least I see the most important thing in community networks that
infrastructure is owned and operated by people. It is true that in most
cases this also means that also costs are lower, but for me this is a
nice side-effect, but not a requirement. So I would go for a satellite
owned by people even if it would be more expensive that fiber owner by
multinational corporation.

And same goes for technical aspects. If satellite is at the end open
sourced (maybe even hardware and protocols?) this is for me much more
interesting than to have bleeding edge technology with I do not know
which capabilities, but closed and you cannot change. It is similar to
our WiFi nodes, there exists some commercial solutions which are
sometimes better in some aspects than our approaches. But our approaches
are in longer run much much better, because they can be freely improved
and build upon.

So even if the satellite is currently not the best (they say it is the
best, by some definition of the best) and it would cost more than some
other solution, I think that having it is something very very important
for the long run or community approach to networking and networks.


Mitar


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