Othernet short term and long term status update?

General Othernet Discussions Status reports
1

When will we get an update on the status of othernet? There have been some vague grim posts.

May 14, 2024: “There’s really no agenda anymore. Sadly, I think the project is on its last legs. I’ll have more to share in a few weeks. Sorry I don’t have better news.
Syed” Weather Feeds
Apr 5, 2024: same as below. 2024 updates - #3 by R_N
Aug 29, 2023: “What I’m still trying to figure out is how the broadcast can be an ongoing, self-sufficient service. What currently pays for the broadcast is the margin from Dreamcatcher sales. Well, that’s not actually true. I personally subsidize the broadcast and margin from Dreamcatchers offsets some of the costs.” […] “then we are stuck with the existing broadcast-only service, which just isn’t a viable business.” What is the plan for IGG Lantern backers as of today, 28 August 2023

Discussing the satellite costs would help the othernet community understand the state of the project, as long as that information can be shared.

2

I don’t think the posts are vague–at least I didn’t mean for them to be. I assumed it was common knowledge that the project has failed.

The reason for releasing the Dreamcatcher chat and FT8 transmit code is so that the Dreamcatchers will still have utility in the event that the broadcast is shut down. At this point, it does seem like the broadcasts will come to an end at the end of 2024. SES recently stated that Astra 3B is going EOL and they have no plans to move Othernet to another satellite.

We could continue to operate on SES-2 in the US, but only a few Dreamcatchers are sold per month, which doesn’t come close to offsetting the costs for maintaining the broadcast. SES doesn’t like their customers sharing pricing information, but I can say we need about $12,000 per year to offset the cost of each beam. This cost includes the satellite lease, hosting a server and modem at the teleport, uplinking through the teleport, virtual machines fees, and a few hours of software maintenance and support.

3

Hi Syed…it is a sad news.
Do you think will be possible to send my own lora signal to the othernet D.C. in the future?
I mean the right lora parameter and frequency , type of file (tar-gz) and so on…appreciate any help on doing this in the future ( end of trasmission here in europe). Thank’s for the job on othernet project… hope the bullseye lnb will on production anymore.
alberto

4

@iw0hjz Do you mean to transmit a file over a stream of LoRa packets, from one Dreamcatcher to another?

5

Hi,I’m sorry about my English, I hoped it was like wine that improves with time. But it’s not like that.
no not exactly…but close
I would like to transmit a Lora signal ( files yes) on 2 GHz with hackrfone that replaces the one that now arrives from the satellite. That’s all… it has no specific purpose, just don’t let the D.C. gather dust.

6

Oh, I don’t know anything about the HackRF One. We use a modified Dreamcatcher for uplinking to the satellite.

7

@Syed

Thank you for the update.

Continued content from the satellite through the end of the year is good news.

The chat feature on the dreamcatcher is a nice addition, will we be getting directions on how to use it?

It is interesting that a modified dreamcatcher is used at the satellite uplink. Could you explain how and why it is modified, the software stack involved, and maybe include diagrams of the content and signal flow.

8

@stvcmty A set of instructions for the chat application is a good idea. Hopefully in the next month or so.

The documentation for the teleport equipment is a bigger task. Hopefully I have time after the summer.

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9

3B is currently replaced by 3C in the same orbital position. Didn’t they offer to move you to the newer bird?

10

@caveman99 No, they didn’t offer a transition. They actually created a contract that ends in December, rather than going a full 12-months.

But even if they did offer to move us, it’s just not financially viable for Othernet to continue the service.

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11

Well, i was thinking about this last year. When a satellite gets older and is taken out of broadcast service it is usually relocated to a new orbital slot and is rented out for ‘ocasional use’ like feeds and short term data traffic. Also the fuel to keep it in its spot is slowly running out so the position accuracy is reduced. It’s still in the same orbital slot but with an oscillating decination of a few degrees to the north or south. This would be an ideal constellation for othernet boradcasts since when receiving with the bare LNB, the focus is not THAT important. Of course if you use a small dish to improve reception, this won’t work.

I know for sure SES has a couple of these old birds flying around (see https://gso-satellites.nl/, the ‘incl.’ column) and they might be willing to support an experimental broadcast of one or more signals on one of these birds. Hopefully for free or a greatly reduced fee.

12

Ways to move forward with Othernet

@Syed

Have you shopped around to look at prices for using other satellites? Have you contacted other providers of beams that cover Europe? From your posts it sounds like SES does not want to do business with you. Have you talked to other providers of satellite service? Capacity is for lease at 121 or 105 from EchoStar. EchoStar Satellite Services

The OLPC G1G1 program was a method OLPC was able to get cash and get their devices into the field. If othernet could identify users who would benefit from getting content without internet and a donor/user base that would want to play with othernet, that could bring in funds to sustain the service. For example, buy a dreamcatcher and a dreamcatcher gets sent to someone in Ukraine; or buy a dreamcatcher and a dreamcatcher gets sent to a broadband-desert in the US.

Use the recent cell outages to sell an idea of an independent way to receive content. For example, It is hurricane season so send up NWS hurricane/tropical storm content(https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/).

Content could help interest people. Midi files are tiny but in the absence of other content pleasant to listen to. University of Arizona has a database of public domain MIDI files MIDI Database - University of Arizona School of Music. XKCD is a webcomic that is black and white images distributed under a creative commons license https://xkcd.com/ “you’re free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them”. Sending out Daily puzzles (crossword, word search, sudoku etc) would be fun if off the grid. Books over satellite from different fandoms may lead to people buying a dreamcatcher to get to say it came from space: Fire with fire, first book is free (Fire with Fire by Charles Gannon - Baen Ebooks, fandom Redirecting...); Sci fi free content from drivethroughrpg DriveThruRPG, ect. Find a homebrew game to send over satellite and generate publicity on the game’s forum. Talk to authors and see if any would write serials where it is a small part of a story sent over the satellite daily/weekly (possibly in combination with analog science fiction https://www.analogsf.com/). Add a Recipe of the day. Send people daily cat pictures, from space (that should not be a selling point but it sounds like it might).

The more passionate hobbies you could appeal to the bigger your audience. Find a way to appeal to geocachers. Use the UART to add a serial port, for a text terminal for retro hardware. Seriously, retro hardware geeks would eat up the ability to read modern content delivered by satellite on their green monochrome CRT monitors. Similarly adding gopher (a light early web protocol) support would appeal to retro computing enthusiasts (https://www.floodgap.com/, xkcd: Not Enough Work, Gopher (protocol) - Wikipedia ). Having an internet independent way for gopher content to be delivered would excite them, and the same text that othernet uses to serve web pages could be used for gopher.

The Spectrum Monitor has published 4 articles on outer/othernet, you could see if they would condense them text only to send over the beam (https://www.thespectrummonitor.com/).

To increase the number of people using othernet you could sell the dreamcatcher/LNB on tindie (https://www.tindie.com/), ebay, amazon.

To have any hope of saving othernet you cannot break compatibility with your hardware again. All current dreamcatchers need to keep working even if you release new versions of the board or a LNB/board integrated in a tube to finally be a lantern. You can probably get away with needing a different LNB if you go to a different band/polarization but the core hardware needs to stay the same.

The firmware needs some work. For example, simplify the web interface to work on old browsers on old hardware, it is mostly text (OLPC, kindle, w98 laptop, old android phones, etc.) Fix the software so the thing can be set it and forget it. Demonstrate a LNB/board/battery(power bank?)/solar in a weather resistant case setup in a public place with people able to connect and look at content without using their data. Need to set it up so not everyone who connects can mess with settings.

If everything came together to keep the satellite going, plan a version that can plug into a pi and lets the pi do the content hosting to improve performance. Put a GPS receiver a dreamcatcher or make it so a user can set location. Grab NWS alerts, have dreamcast able to show relevant alerts to the local area. Add a Barometer, generate local weather at location of dreamcatcher (might want to talk about working with ASI DBX2 barograph order page )

I don’t really want to see it, but sponsored political content would bring in funding.

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13

Not saying I know absolutely anything about this, but have you considered converting to a non-profit and applying for grants? Or as a NP, requesting deeper discounts on sat time from SES and ASTRA owners? Taking direct donations instead of relying on sales? Negotiating with other govs around the world as an NGO since you’d be providing a possible education and news source that wouldn’t depend on the vagueries of that countries infrastructure?

I’ve been going strong with othernet (outernet) since the IGG, still have my lighthouse and dish, my dreamcatchers running the last Linux version, and now the newest D. C. I’d hate to see the service discontinued

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14

IF there is a new way to Rebuild the othernet project better unfortunately we fall and have to try again @Syed you mentioned something about Satellite IOT networks making this better? what was your idea behind this one?

15

@tylerhoot I was hoping to work out a commercial agreement with Lacuna Space, but I don’t think that will happen any time soon. It may not happen at all.

@caveman99 Yes, SES surely has several satellites in graveyard orbits that are no longer station kept. In the early days of Othernet, we had a full transponder on satellite that had a pretty steep wobble, but that was with a different operator and at a different time. We’ve been an SES customer for several years now, so they no longer consider Othernet to be novel or experimental. More than anything, we are a nuisance customer because the revenue is so small and they still have general support costs.

@stvcmty I started working on Othernet in 2014 and have actively kept up with wholesale market pricing. On a per-MHz basis, we don’t get the best price, but that’s because the bandwidth that we lease is laughably small. It’s not even a full megahertz. Most operators won’t lease less than a megahertz anymore (power equivalent bandwidth). Those that do force small customers to purchase from resellers, who drastically increase the price (they really have no choice but to). EchoStar is not particularly cheap.

I’m not saying that there is not a single funding source in the world, but I spent almost a decade trying to find these funders, with no luck. A long time ago a church wanted to spread the word over Othernet, but they refused to pay their bills, which almost put the company out of business.

The ideas that are mentioned are interesting, but I have not seen anyone who wants to actually pay for broadcasting their content to specialized hardware. The only reason the free-to-air satellite tv industry works is because there are tens of millions of receivers all over the world.

After almost ten years in existance, I think the reality is that Othernet is only appealing to a small group of hobbyists. It could have been different, I know, but too many mistakes were made along the way (mistakes made by me).

@DyfflinViking I have definitely considered a conversion to a non-profit, but the only real benefit to that is to apply for grants, like you said. But those grants are really competitive and I really don’t have the time or energy to go through that process again. In the past, I applied for numerous grants through a sponsoring non-profit, which could accept the funds if the grant was awarded.

SES does not care about the non-profit status of its customers. In order to have any negotiating leverage with anyone, you need scale or volume, but that’s something we have never had. Changing the legal status of the organization doesn’t really move things forward.

@tylerhoot There is a small chance that a cubesat will launch next year. This cubesat will have a software defined radio payload and also operate at bands that should be compatible with existing Dreamcatchers-without the LNB. But this is a big if and nothing guaranteed as of now. Even if it does happen, it’s still something that will only be interesting to hobbyists; it’s not really solving the original problem of information access across the world.

16

I kinda feel like the specialized hardware is also what hurt the project too. I kinda feel like it was an availability issue. I noticed several times that the dreamcatchers have been sold out and unavailable for purchase. If it was something commonly available like an RTL-SDR type deal, it might be more viable but you miss out on the funds created by selling the hardware unless you sell an " Out of the Box" Kit. The Hurdle would still be the Server upkeep, broadcasting,ect.

Personally, I think the RTL-SDR and a Raspberry Pi ( or linux based alternative) would have been a better hardware route. Although I enjoy the dreamcatcher, my personal preference is the RTL-SDR.

I also agree with @ stvcmty. More Content would have been nice. The NWS Products would be a pretty valuable asset to have. but… again, you would need a more robust broadcast hence increased cost.

One reason that I think the Dreamcatcher was a turn off to many was the setup… for many, non-technically inclined individuals, the setup can be quite intimidating and confusing.

Unfortunately, dreamcatcher has some big competition right now with Starlink which is very pricey but it provides an exponentially more robust experience.

My last words… Skylark OS was and still is the best UI for this project.

17

Have you considered turning the project over to the UN Information agencies? The UN has satellite resources already available covering all the inhabited continents. Maybe useful to spread information from various news sources to the world. Just a thought. Good luck.

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18

The best iteration was over KU band on Galaxy 19. There was plenty of open source hardware and projects available. It had the greatest bandwidth potential as well. The later iterations with L band and Lora were more and more exotic with less data transmission ability…

The idea of directing an lnb without a dish seemed like a great idea, because the idea was it saves money on setting up a dish. However, 1 meter dishes are very common in poor regions, like Africa and South America. In NA, they’re very easy to obtain on Amazon or eBay. I

I think it was a mistake to change models so many times.The project could have stayed alive if it simply remained on KU band and open source hardware like the raspberry pi ORx project. Switching hardware models was like pulling out the rug from those that did adopt early on, as well as the open source developers that volunteered time to make software.

Close sourcing hardware was a bad idea. Relying on selling closed source hardware for revenue generation and not replenishing stock was a poor model… It prevented wider adoption. Revenue should have been collected by donations and advertising revenue. Kits could have been sold, but relying on them as the main source of income was a bad idea.

I would have bought a lantern, but they were never available. There were no open source projects either. Its very sad to see this go.

19

In retrospect, I completely agree with you. We should have just stuck to data broadcasting over DVB-S. It was very cost effective to provide a global service and although dishes are annoying, they are cheap and people all over the world have figured out how to point them. Donations probably could have sustained the model long-term, though I don’t think advertising would have made any money at all.

Reception by a small antenna, which was the whole point of L-band/Inmarsat and Ku/LoRa was better in theory, but worse in practice. But even if we never went down that path, I think Ku-DVB-S would also have died in the coming years. From my vantage point, I think Starlink (or one of its competitors such as AST SpaceMobile or Lynk) will provide the long-term solution with direct-to-cellphone broadcasting.