[Off Topic] WiFi HaLow, Mesh, and Low Powered Devices

https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/iot/article/21164477/morse-mi
cro-whats-the-difference-between-wifi-halow-and-traditional-wifi

I bring this up less because i have any plans (I never have plans.
Never have the time or capacity to know far enough ahead of time when
I WILL have time) or Money to do any of the projects I want, but
looking at the theoretical bandwidth limits vs range increase?

Look. I live Simi-Rural. Meaning not so far out that you have hundreds
of acres for cattle, or farms or whatever. Just an eight acre piece of
land that's more of a family hobby project than anything. And yet that
is still a fairly sizeable chunk of land so far as traditional wifi is
concerned.

Fine, HaLow isn't intended to be used for netflix, youtube, etc etc.
However you look at all those older protocols, or protocols inspired
by those older things (like gemini, or AIM'S OSCAR protocol, etc) and
suddenly that ISDN level of bandwidth is looking pretty roomy.

Sure it's intended for smart devices, and I genuinely do like that as
an option since I can check my phone or theoretically make a terminal
device out of a raspberry pi (i lack the skillset and have poor vision
so all the fiddly bits are a bit beyond me) to, say, check the status
of the hot wire for horses (otherwise you get horses destroying the
fence to get to the grass on the other side, or out of pure boredom,
or because they find it funny,) send commands to turn on/off the
shop/barn lights, check a sensor that's connected to the mailbox to
see when it was last opened, state of feed/water levels for animals,
etc.

I get that a lot of these things are already products and have been
for awhile (especially geared for large farms.) I just think something
more hobby scale and or something I could build out of maybe fifty
bucks worth of parts from your choice in vendor.

Back when Egypt's main internet lines were turned off I had this idea
of what amounted to personal servers that used sftp or some other
protocol for the sake of file sharing, that also had pages and info up
for browsing along with a personal message board, mailbox, etc. The
main reason I just... never put myself into any projects (aside from
lack of knowledge) was that wifi inherently has, from the standpoint
of anyone rural, very limited range, thus restricting any sort of mesh
to densely packed municipalities, which limits usefulness.

Maybe my thinking is too pie in the sky, or 'dude they literally MAKE
those stop being daft.' I dunno.

I just find the lower end of things interesting given how much wider
the net can be cast, especially since this has far better bandwidth
than LoRA (as far as i know. Feel free to correct.)

I just... both feel out of my depth, and like I should at least toss
my two bits into the ring to see if anyone's had similar notions.

On Thu, Dec 02 2021, Andrew Singleton wrote:

> Look. I live Simi-Rural. Meaning not so far out that you have hundreds
> of acres for cattle, or farms or whatever. Just an eight acre piece of
> land that's more of a family hobby project than anything. And yet that
> is still a fairly sizeable chunk of land so far as traditional wifi is
> concerned.

Hi Andrew,

I've been interested in these protocols for a long time.  I've written
some stuff that runs atop LoRA and XBee SX, for instance, including PPP
or tun/tap IP/ethernet stacks.

HaLow looks like an interesting middle ground; not as long of a range
(1km vs 10km) but more easily integrated.

I hear you on the LoRA bandwidth.  XBee SX is better, and I've seen
effective rates of 50Kbps out of the thing.  My xbnet program at
https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet covers running TCP/IP using tun/tap as
well as PPP over it at
https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet/blob/master/doc/xbnet.1.md and I also
cover running UUCP over the thing.  The XBee SX also has a
point-to-point "modem emulation" mode in which it looks behaves like a
regular modem to the OS (no translation code necessary).  That removes
some of the possibilities of direct node-to-node communication, of
course, but could, eg, host a number of PPP connections for
connectivity.

The XBee devices are also interesting for a couple of other reasons.
One, is they support a self-assembling mesh in firmware, so you get mesh
routing without having to do anything on the software side.  Very handy,
though of course it reduces available bandwidth.  Secondly, they support
TX power up to 1W which is what allows them to achieve near-LoRA
distance while having a much faster bitrate.  However, they are more
expensive than LoRA devices, and obviously in the case of the 1W ones,
more power-hungry.

Since we're talking about old protocols, there is, of course, UUCP.
There is a more modern replacement called NNCP that has quite a few nice
properties.  It is still asynchronous, but it is fully encrypted and
authenticated, supports tor-style onion routing and async multicast, and
so forth.  I have made some blog posts about it and also offer Usenet
feeds over NNCP.  UUCP or NNCP would be perfect fits for something like
this.

Another interesting program is Syncthing.  Think of it like a serverless
Dropbox.  It is fully distributed, and every peer in a network can
propagate changes.

Both Syncthing and NNCP support a "traveler" device -- say a phone that
goes to civilization periodically and syncs up things that propagate
to/from a remote location.

And, there is NNTP, the protocol behind Usenet.  Usenet can be
exchanged via NNTP, but also via asynchronous means (NNCP, UUCP, etc).
It can be done in a very low-bandwidth way and could propagate posts,
(small) files, etc.

Finally, don't forget email.  It can be routed in all sorts of ways, too.

I have been writing and coding around some of this stuff.  See:

https://changelog.complete.org/archives/tag/nncp
https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools
https://github.com/jgoerzen/gitsync-nncp/blob/main/gitsync-nncp.org

I also have a 5-minute lightning talk video I should get uploaded one of
these days...

- John

Would be interested in that video ya.

Similarly I need to do a proper writeup of the thing I want so i can post 
to places like this so people can tell me of that exists or not.

Dec 2, 2021 2:24:32 PM John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>:

> On Thu, Dec 02 2021, Andrew Singleton wrote:
> 
>> Look. I live Simi-Rural. Meaning not so far out that you have hundreds
>> of acres for cattle, or farms or whatever. Just an eight acre piece of
>> land that's more of a family hobby project than anything. And yet that
>> is still a fairly sizeable chunk of land so far as traditional wifi is
>> concerned.
> 
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> I've been interested in these protocols for a long time.  I've written
> some stuff that runs atop LoRA and XBee SX, for instance, including PPP
> or tun/tap IP/ethernet stacks.
> 
> HaLow looks like an interesting middle ground; not as long of a range
> (1km vs 10km) but more easily integrated.
> 
> I hear you on the LoRA bandwidth.  XBee SX is better, and I've seen
> effective rates of 50Kbps out of the thing.  My xbnet program at
> https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet covers running TCP/IP using tun/tap as
> well as PPP over it at
> https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet/blob/master/doc/xbnet.1.md and I also
> cover running UUCP over the thing.  The XBee SX also has a
> point-to-point "modem emulation" mode in which it looks behaves like a
> regular modem to the OS (no translation code necessary).  That removes
> some of the possibilities of direct node-to-node communication, of
> course, but could, eg, host a number of PPP connections for
> connectivity.
> 
> The XBee devices are also interesting for a couple of other reasons.
> One, is they support a self-assembling mesh in firmware, so you get mesh
> routing without having to do anything on the software side.  Very handy,
> though of course it reduces available bandwidth.  Secondly, they support
> TX power up to 1W which is what allows them to achieve near-LoRA
> distance while having a much faster bitrate.  However, they are more
> expensive than LoRA devices, and obviously in the case of the 1W ones,
> more power-hungry.
> 
> Since we're talking about old protocols, there is, of course, UUCP.
> There is a more modern replacement called NNCP that has quite a few nice
> properties.  It is still asynchronous, but it is fully encrypted and
> authenticated, supports tor-style onion routing and async multicast, and
> so forth.  I have made some blog posts about it and also offer Usenet
> feeds over NNCP.  UUCP or NNCP would be perfect fits for something like
> this.
> 
> Another interesting program is Syncthing.  Think of it like a serverless
> Dropbox.  It is fully distributed, and every peer in a network can
> propagate changes.
> 
> Both Syncthing and NNCP support a "traveler" device -- say a phone that
> goes to civilization periodically and syncs up things that propagate
> to/from a remote location.
> 
> And, there is NNTP, the protocol behind Usenet.  Usenet can be
> exchanged via NNTP, but also via asynchronous means (NNCP, UUCP, etc).
> It can be done in a very low-bandwidth way and could propagate posts,
> (small) files, etc.
> 
> Finally, don't forget email.  It can be routed in all sorts of ways, too.
> 
> I have been writing and coding around some of this stuff.  See:
> 
> https://changelog.complete.org/archives/tag/nncp
> https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools
> https://github.com/jgoerzen/gitsync-nncp/blob/main/gitsync-nncp.org
> 
> I also have a 5-minute lightning talk video I should get uploaded one of
> these days...
> 
> - John

John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
> Since we're talking about old protocols, there is, of course, UUCP.
> There is a more modern replacement called NNCP that has quite a few nice
> properties.  It is still asynchronous, but it is fully encrypted and
> authenticated, supports tor-style onion routing and async multicast, and
> so forth.  I have made some blog posts about it and also offer Usenet
> feeds over NNCP.  UUCP or NNCP would be perfect fits for something like
> this.

Hey, thanks for the writeups on NNCP. I've been interested in NNCP for a
year or two, but haven't actually used it because the existing
documentation isn't very concrete. I am *very* interested in building a
Usenet/post-Usenet feed on top of NNCP, so I'll be reading your writeup
with much interest.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | “Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray@carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.”
                    | ― Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

> John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
> > Since we're talking about old protocols, there is, of course, UUCP.
> > There is a more modern replacement called NNCP that has quite a few nice
> > properties.  It is still asynchronous, but it is fully encrypted and
> > authenticated, supports tor-style onion routing and async multicast, and
> > so forth.  I have made some blog posts about it and also offer Usenet
> > feeds over NNCP.  UUCP or NNCP would be perfect fits for something like
> > this.
> 
> Hey, thanks for the writeups on NNCP. I've been interested in NNCP for a
> year or two, but haven't actually used it because the existing
> documentation isn't very concrete. I am *very* interested in building a
> Usenet/post-Usenet feed on top of NNCP, so I'll be reading your writeup
> with much interest.

I suppose I come across as a cranky old fart, but I had a quick
look at it, and it is a project written in Go, shipping 11Mb
of source.

Now, the reason I interested in gemini is that I'd like
to understand and simplify my computing world as well as
disentangle myself from the sticky surveillance web. Installing
yet another large runtime associated with a surveillance
capitalist is not how I like to go about that. So regrettably
this isn't for me.

Which is a pity: A number of ideas in it look neat - eg the
chunked file fragments which are encrypted at rest. And the
use of NaCl also seems a positive. 

I see this issue (and frankly, worse) in so many cases:

- Nice articulate article explaining the need for privacy - but
  the html contains vast amounts of JS to google analytics, fonts, apis, etc

- New meshnet project all in favour of decentralisation - but runs
  its development chat on slack

- New software claiming to implement some simple, lightweight
  infrastructure - but its critical dependency is a "modern" web browser,
  hands down the most complex piece of software in common use

I suppose everybody has different priorities or maybe the
enthusiastic newcomer just doesn't know about all the nuances,
the politics embedded in their infrastructure...  but from my
vantage these things are critical.

[ALSO: not replying to the gemini list only, but CC'ing it. Is the 
list even operational ? The last message I received from it was on 
the 3rd]

regards

marc