Hard problems have a way of cropping up in lots of places...
I'm thinking in particular about the rule that encryption is banned on amateur bands, which really makes it not suitable for general internet access. More sensible people just ignore those rules, and that creates animosity with the above-mentioned group.
This article almost exclusively deals with unlicensed, spectrum and consumer grade hardware.
Sort of like sending Morse Code over a radio hooked to a 9 volt battery. Twenty words per minute seems slow until that's all you have.
The other important point to take away from the article is that most of humanity is in slow/no internet regions.
I was going to run the numbers for Elon Musk's 4000 satellite low-latency global gigabit pizza-box phased-array rooftop antenna internet, but I think that's even more dependent on those conditions. SpaceX is shooting for a new hardware spin every 5 years.
Musk's 4000 satellite low latency global gigabit
pizza box phased array rooftop antenna internet
I don't think you can give a better description than that.By 1901 we had a global network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable... (all this for ~10–12 words per minute.)
And the rest of the article is naive at best and seems to ignore that PTP radio has been used in telecoms for decades.
I think these definitions need a bit of a rehaul, flying baloons are much more low tech then WiFi antenna IMO.
I remember that ~15 years ago building these sort of networks involved various experiments with hooking up various home-grown radio modems or gutted laser pointers to serial ports, but today the technology of choice is either WiFi or commercial microwave PTP links operating in unlicensed spectrum (which are order of magnitude more expensive than WiFi, but have significantly better performance, also unlicensed spectrum usable for such links is not available in every country).
Also, I'd imagine if the people setting up the network leave, others will have an easier time maintaining if the network uses a very popular link layer.
Additionally there is a whole raft of IoT enabled devices making this possible too - think the future is bright :)