Can we create a connection to the internet ourselves without having to use a cellular 3g/4g subscription / wifi subscription?
In: Technology
Look at this, I’m sure this answer your question and demystifies some thing about cuba
https://hyperboria.net/
/r/darknetplan
Folks have been working on a separate network for a while. What it really needs is users and content.
Yes.
You can pay for a link, through the phone company, of install your own dark fibre, paying the city and utility costs, connecting your house to the nearest peering point. Then you can buy a cvrrier class router ($150K) to install at the peering point. You may need to pay peers for traffic, unless you connect a sizeable number of users.
This is what ISPs and community broadband companies do.
If you are asking about having a connection to the internet that does not require some sort of service that is already in place, then no, all connections to the internet that exists have to be done through some sort of existing connection. This connection allows access to the network of computers that the internet exists on. You do not necessarily need a “subscription” as there have been ways to “hijack” an existing connection, but again this is using an already in place connection.
The Internet is not a single thing. It is just a bunch of networks of different Internet Service Providers that happens to be connected together allowing data packets to move between them. It is very similar to a road network, postal network or telephone network. So in order to be connected to the same network you need some sort of subscription to a connection or another form of agreement to exchange Internet traffic with some of the other networks. The subscriptions you normally see is intended for private individuals and have a service that is very good for this purpuse. However there are similar subscriptions for businesses and other Internet service providers which have a few different terms. And companies like AT&T, Sprint, etc. have to buy these subscriptions from each other to allow their customers to access all the other networks on the Internet.
And technically you can buy one of these subscriptions but it might not be for you. Firstly it is unlikely that anyone deliver to your home. They expect you to hook up to them at some sort of colocation facility intended for this purpuse. The easiest way to do this is to rent a dedicated line from your phone or fiber company. And they might not have the equipment needed for this at your local phone central as this is usually things they only expect in business parks and such. So you might have to pay them to upgrade your local neighborhood equipment. And then when you get a line from your home to the colocation facility and connected to the other network provider they do not give you any sort of router or other equipment. You have to buy this yourself. And they do not set it up for you but you. This is not as easy as setting up a normal home router though as this is intended for professional networks and uses entirely different technologies. Even if you manage to teach yourself how this all works and how to set it up they still expect you to bring your own IP address allocation which you have to apply for elsewhere. And we are all out of IPv4 addresses so if you want those you have to convince others to give their up. So at the end of the day it have costed you minimum tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of time and you still have to rely on the same companies to provide you Internet access as before.
If you’re willing to go through the process for gaining government approval to create your own infrastructure for data communications between customers and get enough people to use your network to make it worthwhile, i guess.
That’s a very steep mountain to climb
The Internet is largely built on trust. No one really likes to admit it, but its true. Trust that no-one will fuck things up. And that makes people twitchy.
Do the people you want to connect to trust that you are who you say you are? If so, in theory it boils down to a wire connected to a comms cabinet, connected to an exchange, connected to a data centre connected to everywhere else in the world.
HOWEVER in the real world, almost everything is hosted by a depressingly small number of organisations. AWS hosts nearly half the WWW. Google took over Usenet many years ago. If you can’t get to them, you can’t do jack. And if they say “no” you’re fucked.
Setting up your own connection is possible, but unbelievably expensive, will require massive negotiations with major corporations and frankly really not worth it.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s maybe. Not now.
The internet isn’t a resource like wood or water that can be “produced”. It’s a connection to the rest of the computers/servers/sites on the network.
It’s a bit like, “can we create our own, separate road network?” Yes, you certainly can, but you’d need to build your own connections to each place that you go to. You’d need to ask your supermarket if they would let you build a separate road connection to their property, with a separate parking lot, just for your users. Same for the drug store, Amazon warehouse, and any other company/location you’d be interacting with. You’d need to get approval from the town/city/national governments to build your road system in parallel with (but not interacting with) their roads.
It’s not impossible to do it. But that’s about the best argument that can be made: it’s not physically impossible.
You could setup a network of packet radio modems/computers via shortwave radio.
Or
You could setup a mesh network of XBee Pros connected to computers that have up to a two mile range each outdoors.
Get an on off switch. Two lanes of communication choose a medium. A set of standards and protocols. Some packet layering and protocols to help with loss. Easy peasy. Or just vote and advocate for the end of ISP network monopolies. And vote for and advocate for expanding existing networks to areas that do not have internet access. Or invest in starlink.
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