Best ways to ensure redundancy with no terrestrial ISPs

Hi all,

A friend of mine is trying to set up a network in a location where there is no fiber (or copper) for many miles. As bandwidth requirements are low (<1M for the foreseeable future) but uptime is important, he was looking at using multiple cell modems from separate carriers as redundant uplinks. I am concerned that different cell carriers might be using the same transport providers to a given tower, so that wouldn’t be truly redundant. Another option would be using a satellite provider as a backup for cellular. (The high latency that comes with satellite is not an issue.)

A fixed-radio solution would likely be too expensive upfront as it would require building towers.

Am I missing any other options or considerations?

Thanks,
Ross

Any existing WISPs?

Not that I know of, especially given the location. I’ll look into it though.

If we had a location (or at least a part of the world) we might be able to recommend a little better.

This is in northern Africa.

Hmmh - normally, when someone says North America, it’s one of 2 countries. Not much fuss there… North Africa (by some kind of definition) is 8 or 10 countries, depending on what you feel North Africa means. In short, you’ll have to be more specific than that… Mark.

Feel free to open live.infrapedia.com on mobile. Click on share location icon. And it will show 3D view of any fiber near by.

We are thinking about adding wireless networks too and maybe overlaying national cell phone coverage maps

In a remote area in northern africa if there are no terrestrial ISPs, and there is no budget to build towers for PTP microwave, I don’t know if there are any reasonable options.

If sufficient funds did exist, my recommendation, if they really want true diversity between two totally different services, would be a combination of a MEO o3b earth station and a traditional geostationary type earth station (Ku band) with appropriate RF chain and SCPC modem.

It is also possible to achieve full diversity through two totally separate geostationary earth stations, using different satellite transponders and different teleports on the other end.

But that’s not going to be cheap, either in a one time equipment cost or in monthly recurring cost, for o3b services and transponder kHz lease + teleport services on the other end somewhere in continental Europe.

Between overlaid ads and the thing trying to force an account, i’d Describe it as a waste of time. Now, a page that delivered the data advertised…

Sent using a machine that autocorrects in interesting ways…

Agree

thank you for the feedback. It’s quite challenging to keep a high scale, open, a free platform without having ads, they are designed to be easily closed and should you have problem with it, I am happy to help understand and hear recommendations.

I understand and share your frustration about forcing account registration. We had no other way but to implement this as constantly we had sources trying to download our data by examining our code. By having access controls we were able to stop that. My team had recommended user data controls after reviewing Geoserver, mapbox requirements, if you know any other way please feel free to recommend.

every feedback is welcome, we are trying to build a tool which is free, open, and hoping to develop and make it even better with recommendations like this.

You permit anyone to view the code running on your web server? Do you permit them to modify it too?
Nevertheless, just deny code viewing permission on your web server and only serve output of executing that code.
Quite simple. And no one can steal your code (unless you let them into the room containing the web server).

Keith,

thank you for your response, I think this is slightly becoming offtopic, I will take this offlist with you but in short, that’s not how GeoServer works (or mainly GIS when displaying things publicly) for something to be displayed to you, it needs to make it available, and if it’s available it can be downloaded with codes/programs that allow you to, we are preventing this by forcing users to log in that way someone can’t simply launch a script and get all of the data available in our platform (or if they do, we would notice, know who and stop it via rate-limits). I am neither a security nor GIS expert, I am relying on what I was told/advised.

https://openinframap.org/ works a lot better.

Tony.

there is nothing about telecoms in this map, it’s all about powerlines.

Hi Eric, thanks for this info. Very helpful.

Mark/everyone, this is in Morocco specifically. I haven’t been given the exact location but I’m told it’s near Dahkla.