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Re: [opennic-discuss] Ferorum FTTH/FTTP Broadband


Chronological Thread 
  • From: "Alex M (Coyo)" <coyo AT darkdna.net>
  • To: discuss AT lists.opennicproject.org
  • Subject: Re: [opennic-discuss] Ferorum FTTH/FTTP Broadband
  • Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2013 17:42:59 -0500

On 04/13/2013 01:21 PM, Christopher wrote:
On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Alex M (Coyo) <coyo AT darkdna.net> wrote:

Do you mean unlicensed WiMAX? I could certainly do that, but Alcatel-Lucent
and Motorola base stations (basically WWAN access points intended for
mounting on a cell tower) are not exactly commodity items you can buy off
the shelf, and generally are something they wholesale suppliers expect you
to take out extensive financing for.

Ballpark figure is several hundred thousand dollars EACH, and an access
tower generally needs at least nine of them. That adds up quickly, as you
might imagine.
The person I was talking with, who was setting up a long range
wireless network, might have been doing something else then. He was
looking at some "higher power" base stations and they only cost a few
hundred dollars a piece. My mistake, then.

I have a few friends into ham radio and wireless electronics.

I imagine it's possible (in theory) to design and cobble together your own radio circuits and make use of ridiculously expensive spectrum that way, and according to an electronic engineer friend of mine, you can make printed circuit boards with a sheet of black schoolboy construction paper and a standard 60 watt incandescent light bulb.

I'm told integrated circuits are only slightly more difficult, but from what I've read, if you want to make your own microcontrollers at home, you need a clean room, bunny suits, your own power supply, and a chemical deposition chamber, along with many specialized tools.

From what I've read, you also need to either acquire or refine your own wafers of silicon. Purifying, refining, and recrystallizing silicon and etching it in a clean room and chemical deposition chamber is not exactly trivial, and even assuming you can make all of that yourself in some huge ambitious DIY @ Home in your backyard project, it'll still be extremely time consuming and labor intensive, and still pretty expensive, unless you happen to be sitting on several different ore deposits.

In minecraft and terraria, ore is everywhere, you just have to look for it. No so in the real world.



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