this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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I have a similar idea for one day when we can actually use the government for good again. We should build a low bandwidth nationwide digital radio network. Not owned by corporations but by the people. Include things like rtk capability by default. The telecomms and isps will try to fight this with billions of inflation dollars, but if we do manage to get this in, everyone could have access to the internet at low speeds without paying, and it would be relativly easy to maintain. An open standard that would allow many cool technologies like robotics that are much safer and precise.
Potential aplications are, nonsibscription medical devices, realtime rtk everywhere, a huge boon for construction with a standard coordinate system. Documenting things like underground cables and pipes easily. Property lines. Self driving cars that can communicate with each other and work together. Access to the internet and communications for the poor. Cheap animal tracking collars. Drones that can fly across the country without needing a data plan. So many things. It would be an efficency gain accross the entire economy.
Look at meshtastic, it’s only text messages but the underlying system could be iterated on.
https://reticulum.network/ I was looking at this the other day. It looks like there is potential to support more than just a message layer.
Who's going to pay for my extra electricity costs to run my antenna and amplifier that supports this radio network? Who's going to pay for my maintenance and upkeep costs?
Unless you are running a mesh node or joining the global supercompute cluster, you wouldnt need to run any hardware. I more mean like a network of towers run by the state using sub 1000 MGHz freqiencies or soemthing, to get good range, maybe even lower frequencies. You could maybe get like 50+ mile range with small devices at low power if you had the right spectrum. Perhaps a fallback mode of several hundred miles for low speed mode.
This probably wouldn't be something that you as a person is running the HW for, so you have no direct expense to HW or maintenance. This would likely be government driven and paid through taxes. Its basically just NPR, but with low bandwidth internet instead.
For readers in the future, NPR was a show from back when we had public radio…