For some time now, as someone has had an objective to get broadband in remote areas of the world, I have been looking at some lonely islands 50Km off the coast of San Francisco known as the Farallon Islands. Back in 2001 or so, at a past Bay Area Wireless Users Group meeting, Simon Barber, suggested that we hook the island up as the main island is staffed and they just had basic two-way radios for communication to the main land. For various reasons it never quite happened until this year when a number of different interests and funding fell into place.
I was introduced to folks at AirJaldi who were looking for locations in the Bay Area to test their radio deployments. I have access to a number of hill tops around the Bay Area and suggest to them that we put a link into the Farallons. I called US Fish and Wildlife and was pointed to the Point Reyes Bird Observatory as they do the day-to-day operations and science on the islands. At the same time I reach out to them, the California Academy of Science was looking to put a high-definition web cam out on the island to stream back to the public. Bingo, we have funding and very interested parties that want fast bandwidth to the island.
After much work in planning, purchasing and deployment, the Farallon Cam was turned up a couple of weeks ago.
It hasn’t been smooth. Some of the problems encountered have been links failing due to interference or hardware failure. This has caused the stream to be down more than we wanted to, but it did show for a small budget, that consumer grade unlicensed radios can provide decent bandwidth tens of km to provide the infrastructure for applications like streaming video, voice, data, etc.