Have you made progress since this thread started? I was reading elsewhere about an open hardware movement, with one project being design of an open source router by a peer-to-peer network led by a group in Germany, about a year ago. Now there is the router in the OLPC XO, which is all open source. This needs to be available to build primary communication networks in the developing world, to drive distribution of knowledge of sustainability, and support economic activity at the grass roots. Ideally, the Intel bridge router will also be available for long links (to 60 km or miles) between concentrations of rural people and villages. The structural system for the towers was invented in the 1960s — it is the Captive Column, U.S. Patent 3,501,880, , and you can make towers out of bamboo and silk or wire or vines if you have to — or kevlar and carbon, or fiberglass and balsa wood (like the tractor test beam in the website photo). It’s all in the intelligent use of geometry.

There is a nascent movement to create a new curriculum for the XO and any other computer that can run Sugar; I’m helping get it started.

Do you have any interest in this, and / or any thoughts of guidance?

Regards,

Mark

And if you have a community-wide LAN, then yes, if the traffic is local, there’s no need to use Internet connectivity at all. One of the “killer apps” for this is, of course, VoIP — basically, if everyone is covered by the community LAN, then there’s no need to pay for local phone service at all, and the calls would be routed directly to each local participant, so no need to utilize that external bandwidth at all.

Jesse lays out the next logical step — tying together these community LANs to form a national infrastructure. Sound far-fetched? I’ve been working with several groups to do exactly this — we’re hoping to go public with the effort within the next few months, so stay tuned.