someone will need to create laser communications as well for rural areas, I've worked with targeting lasers before that's the easy part... building them as home projects is harder alone.
There is a conspicuous gap in the commercialization of the exact technology needed to enable such a network. How can
this NASA laser transmit 238,900 miles, while the only commercial terrestrial solution I can find will only go 2 km? Where are the laser tranceivers that will go 500 km? They can't be that difficult to build.
edit: found
thisIt's the communication hubs, using what we know from terrestrial observations of the Earths Geoid(earth gravity map) along with gps UTM co-ordinates of base stations, the laser transceiver is able to find an exact point to target, taking care of the rotation movement, the curvature of the earth etc using a least squares method to account for the movement.
The laser would be targeting a moving target, this target has gps the Receiver that is communicating it's coordinates to the base station through the mesh and being auto corrected by the base station for millimetre accuracy targeting at several km, using this technique I could hit a target 50km away with an error margin of only 5cm, 2 inches; A rural target I can hit from land up to 100km away with 10cm accuracy .
It involves calculating, atmospheric refraction, pressure, temperature, distance to horizon etc to calculate an effective point to further take that 5cm and drop it down to mm.
for those Nasa space shots it requires the entire GPS reference station grid to calculate the stratospheric delay and distortion from all the GPS and Glonass satellites, very complex and very time consuming... but this data is available for free.
I could hit the moon if a I wanted to with a laser so distance is not a factor, beam diffraction is, but that is awesome for communications! It'll get absorbed by the atmosphere if not calibrated properly, and to bypass any danger, just use an infrared laser, trust me the communications part, how to get a message through is the hard part
Radios are a solution as well but we are limited to 5 watts within the city, unless you are on a tower that will only propagate 10km at best, very weak intermittent signal. there are radio spectrums that allow you to use 30+ watts within the city but... who cares... that would give us a 100km range maximum.
