[Tfug] Remote networking communications and Internet gateways aqumuhyr

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Zack,

On 4/15/2014 7:26 PM, Zack Williams wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 6:26 PM, Casey Townsend
> <Casey.Townsend at tucsonaz.gov>  wrote:
>> I would like to build (and then put together a how-to manual, with specific hardware recommendations and setup/config cookbooks) a system that can be deployed remotely to allow citizen journalists to be able to communicate with each other and upload video in real time from remote, no cell phone, no WiFi areas. My goal is to have this be almost as simple for the users as using their cell phones, while requiring minimal training for the technical people to set this up for them. Does this already exist?
>
> There are commercial products that work over satellite that do this,
> but they're quite expensive to purchase and operate.

Also tend to be large (i.e., when contrasted with someone shooting
a spur-of-the-moment video with a cell phone)

> I have a fair amount of experience working with video encoding and
> live streaming, and all the systems I've seen similar to this have
> used either point to point wifi with a wired connection, or the cell
> network.
>
> Going without already built backhaul infrastructure is going to be the
> most difficult limitation to deal with.

That makes me rethink my earlier comments...  I.e., I have assumed
Casey is looking for a "spur-of-the-moment" tool.  Or, a tool that
a determined "citizen journalist" hauls out to some specific site
(e.g., to cover a balloon fest in the New Mexico desert).  As such,
he would have to rely on some existing infrastructure (even if that
was the presence of satellites in orbit!).

On the other hand, if this was some sort of "special event" (i.e.,
subject to some amount of preplanning) whereby some *temporary*
infrastructure could be erected and (possibly) shared by *many*
"citizen journalists", you can arrive at a different answer.
E.g., the balloon fest example... a "scheduled" event (pre-knowledge
allows planning/staging); spread over a reasonably large (balloon
deployment) area; in a reasonably "remote" setting (i.e., it's not
"downtown"); and potentially "covered" by many such "citizen
journalists" -- all sharing that temporary infrastructure to do the
heavy lifting (and, amortizing the cost over multiple "clients").

> Scaling back the requirements to audio only, text, or non-realtime
> video or low framerate image streams would lighten the backhaul load.

I guess some knowledge of the types of *content* is important.
E.g., you can locate a surveillance camera in the mountains to
watch for certain wildlife (e.g., bobcat/bear) and do this
far less expensively (i.e., most of the visual scene is static
a very large portion of the time) than you could cover a stock
car race!  And, still end up with lots of "fidelity" in the
signal.

--don