Using IPFS to mitigate low and intermittent bandwidth

[erlend-sh]

Many places, especially in rural areas, the internet connection is low throughput and very flaky. @jbenet has used some such places as examples of where information distribution becomes especially innovative, like the USB drives being passed around in Cuba.

I spent some months as a volunteer in a refugee camp and I observed a similar ingenuity there. A small group of networking savvy residents had set up some kind of cache that was hosted by them locally in the camp. That way, lots of the data the 50k residents of the camp were downloading wasn’t actually hitting their constrained internet bandwidth, as they were getting a lot of their data straight from the “local library”.

I can imagine IPFS playing a useful role in such a setup as well. Exactly what I’m not sure yet. I’ll try get in touch with the developers to get their thoughts on this 🤔

[terichadbourne]

Totally agree, @erlend-sh! We actually had a discussion about Offline First approaches specifically for refugee camps at the most recent edition of Offline Camp (as well as at our Berlin event in 2017), which will hopefully be covered in an upcoming post on the Offline Camp Medium publication. There are specific sections of that publication on the crossover between Offline First and decentralization and on Offline First for developing world applications (although of course not all refugee camps are located in the developing world, and decentralization is one among many approaches to Offline First).

As someone who lives in a place with very good internet access and public utilities, one of the elements I often forget about in this puzzle is how much unreliable infrastructure in other areas (electricity, for example) can have a domino effect on internet access in certain communities.

[arky]

+1 I build solutions for offline access of digital content in Cambodia and Kenya (and few others) using low-cost ARM based SoCs and OpenWRT routers powered by 12v car batteries/solar panels. At the moment I have deployments delivering +120GB of video and multimedia content. The limitation is only the size of affordable sdcard.

I think most people are using their mobile phones in place of USB drives 10 years to share information (this system is lovely called sneakernets ).

The biggest challenge for deploying offline first applications for me has been captive portal systems and their reliance on DNS. I have to use lot of hacks to get stuff working but it is really not very intuitive.