I doubt it. You have to get the consent of every owner of property for a connecting 100+ miles. You pretty much have to either have an uninhabited wasteland or eminent domain to do that. Plus, you have to hire people to do hard manual labor for 100+ miles. You can try to just lay it on preexisting poles without permission some places, but who knows how long that will stay up.

And ultimately, fiber is something anyone with a shovel can destroy in 2 minutes. If the government doesn't want you to have Internet, a mesh network is a much more robust method if you can get it in place.

You wouldn't be able to get a high-speed mesh network, sure, but LoRa[1] (or something LoRa-like - it's proprietary) provides in the range of kilobits per second across tens of miles. RONJA[1] trades throughput for range, with 10 megabit throughput over 0.8 miles).

Sure, you won't be able to even really download images through LoRa, but it'll do for textual communications in case of an emergency e.g. natural disaster.

A smart meshnet that has billing/transactions built in would allow nodes to charge based on bandwidth and data used (so a LoRa node could charge you more than a node that uses fiber, you can use the fiber node while things are normal, and then when things go sideways you can pay more to get an emergency message to your relatives through LoRa).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA

Or you just use free-space optics. If you use lasers you can even (in theory) use DWDM and get xxx separate connections of 25, even 40 Gbps each. Line of sight is required but at some point someone will get it working with satellites. I believe line-of-sight >100km 400 Gbps links have been done.

Oh and once you get past ~900km the fact that via the satellite you have a straight line with ~100% the speed of light (as opposed to 2/3 speed of light with fiber) the satellite connection to LEO is actually faster than fiber. In practice it's less since there are no zero-delay zero-loss regen stations. Every 300km the signal needs to be converted to electrical and back, which adds (a lot) of latency. With satellites this isn't done, saving further time. And all of that is ignoring that when putting fiber of the surface of the earth you cannot just follow a straight line, so you have to add distance for avoiding other people's property too.

And perhaps relevant to an internet shutdown article: laser free-space optics cannot be located unless you're directly in the path of the laser. These links cannot be "denied" to anyone with sky access.

It's just reliably aiming a beam at a moving satellite that's currently beyond our technology.

Currently 40-50gbps to a satellite is the practical limit.

To clarify: are you intentionally differentiating between what RONJA is and "free-space optics"? My impression was that that's what RONJA was - a particular open-source implementation of a FSO setup designed for ease of assembly and robustness.

I agree with the latter part, but for the former note that Earth's surface is 2d: you can go around holdouts; unlike roads you don't care about the fiber being straight.

Actually you do. Longer fibers need more repeaters, and the ideal fiber on land is strung down pipes (this allows later capacity upgrades). Both of these are cheaper if existing roads are paralleled.

Sure, you want to optimize for total length. However, you don't have any meaningful restrictions on turn radius, which do exist when you want to build a road and which make building a road around holdouts oftentimes impossible.

Simple, cheap mesh networks based on consumer WiFi hardware are very short range. To get any reasonable distance between nodes you need towers and directional antennas.

Probably better to use spread spectrum radio. Stations can be mobile and move to minimize tracking and interference. Fiber is fixed and the link can be severed with $20 bolt cutters.

Any practical grass-roots mesh wireless network would have to be built using commodity consumer WiFi hardware. People aren't going to go out and purchase spread spectrum radios, especially not in developing countries where governments are most likely to kill Internet access.

On the other hand, a shortwave radio is dirt cheap to build and can interface with the audio / mic ports on your smartphone / laptop. And the range is on the order of hundreds of miles.

can be used as a stealth backchannel to C&C compromised devices out of band from the internet/cellular connection

> Alternately, I wonder if there's any way to lay down fiber long distance that doesn't require govt authorization...and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

That’s a hard no.

Just the materials for a 100+ mile fiber network is hundreds of thousands.

Then there is the matter of right of way across all those miles. It would be nigh impossible to find a route that does not cross a road or land parcel that isn’t government owned.

Can confirm. Worked for an ISP. Do any of you even know how much it costs to rent a trencher for a couple of weeks? There's a reason the government has to subsidize internet infrastructure build-out (ie. via CAF, ACAM, etc.) is it's so prohibitively expensive that it wouldn't happen otherwise. As it stands, a new suburban neighborhood that's relatively dense won't see a ROI for at least 10 years (on avg).

You bring up a good point.

Additionally, just doesn't make sense to install a network that has long fragile potential points of failure (aka attack surface) like fiber cables to replace the network that is or may be shut down by bad actors.

Strong communities + mesh is a vision for a bright future. The former has become a difficult hill to climb, though.

Grass roots wireless mesh networks are a nice concept in theory but no one has ever made them work well at scale. It's just a very challenging technical problem with nodes moving around around, going offline, intermittent radio interference, etc. So the routing tables constantly change. And unless people are willing to buy specialized hardware such as towers and antennas, the range between nodes can't be more than about 100 m.

The One Laptop Per Child project tried to use such a network to serve remote areas but it never really worked.

That's only if you assume you need lots of bandwidth. RIOT TOMORROW CAPITAL NOON or FREE FEARLESS LEADER HELD AT $BLACKSITE would be easily transmitted over any number of mesh networks, including the ones used for utility billing in many countries.

I’m not associated with the project and don’t follow it super closely, but I think this is the idea behind the briar project (at least for messaging)

https://briarproject.org

There are many projects similar with Briar, they all have the same limitations:

"The range of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is around 10 metres, depending on obstacles. Clearly this isn’t enough for communicating across a city or even a large building. So when Briar receives a message from a nearby contact, it stores the message and can later pass it on to other contacts when they come within range (for example, when you move from one place to another)"

BRIAR's how it works page depicts Wi-Fi and Tor also, so range isn't necessarily an issue.

Go back to 70s era radios. Long wave and medium wave antennas. Few kbps bandwidth... unstoppable.

And highly susceptible to jamming.

I wish - but if that was going to happen, it would have happened already. By the time enough people wake up to the necessity of an uncensorable communications network to make it feasible, it will be too late to make it happen.

technical solutions to political problems are always doomed.

It always, always, comes down to the the rubber hose decryption.

Still better than what we have now.

This has already been done at scale in Europe.

https://guifi.net/en

Would starlink help or is that too expensive? Or would governments block import of starlink terminals anyway?

Unregistered satellite phones and satellite internet terminals are already illegal in India.

No mesh or satellite internet solution will fix a government.

Community mesh networks are hard to run and require real effort even if the local govt is not hostile. With a hostile govt it gets much harder. Unwirerer is a nice fantacy, but unlikely to become reality anywhere.

Those Starlink dishes are pretty obvious. It would be very easy to photo an area using an Drone/UAV to see who has them. Those who have them will experience some fun time in the local re-education camp.

You're assuming that the government blocking the internet is especially oppressive. It could be that the country is relatively free, but the government sees internet shut downs as easy to implement and thus uses them often. This seems to be the case in India, as discussed above. In that case, a solution that requires the government to visit every individual's home to get them to shut off the internet would actually be quite hard to implement, and would likely be infeasible.

Why would it be hard to implement? Remember that unregistered satellite phone and internet terminals is illegal in India. The Starlink dish is not small nor easily hide-able if you want to access the Internet.

They don't need to visit everyone's home. As I said drone and UAV photos, then you know which home has it. Then re-education for those owners.

Do they need line of sight? I assume the dish would still work with some kind of blanket or plastic shroud over it, provided it was kept in the acceptable temperature range.

Or even just being painted to camouflage into the roof it was mounted to.

There'd be reasonable aesthetic reasons to do these things, from a deniability standpoint. Though I guess that doesn't help if you're under a regime where accessing an unauthorized satellite service is straight up banned.

The countries mentioned in the article pretty much falls into the 'we can do whatever we want with you' category. Russia, Myanmar, Sudan, etc. There is no deniability standpoint.

Yea I imagine there is a fairly easy solution to this problem. And if there is not - I guarantee you creative people in India are going to figure it out!

But there's no solution to the problem of people voting in governments that think frequent internet shutdowns are OK?

It depends on the government, many of the "bans" are not very technologically advanced and easily circumventable with a bit of knowledge (however, doing so is usually quite illegal).

Australia and New Zealand have banned lots of content that can be easily found, at worst you need a VPN.

We are talking about internet shutdowns not "bans", so how are you going to "circumvent it with a bit of knowledge", unless you plan to break into isps buildings and you need a license to operate an ISP in India in case you didn't know.

Starlink still uses ground stations which would fall under the local Internet control.

Or just Starlink or something else similar

i believe the hax have started for the starlink platform. once there is local control of the hardware, its academic to create a mesh device.