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by dfox 3887 days ago
These networks tend to be mostly WiFi based because the hardware is cheap enough that homegrown "low-tech" alternatives (like FSO or custom radio protocols) are more expensive.

I remember that ~15 years ago building these sort of networks involved various experiments with hooking up various home-grown radio modems or gutted laser pointers to serial ports, but today the technology of choice is either WiFi or commercial microwave PTP links operating in unlicensed spectrum (which are order of magnitude more expensive than WiFi, but have significantly better performance, also unlicensed spectrum usable for such links is not available in every country).

1 comments

RONJA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA) is one such homebrew free-space optical (FSO) link.