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Ask Slashdot: Could We Reconnect Eastern Libya?
GrumpyBagpuss writes "We all know that the internet is supposed to route around damage, but currently eastern Libya is off the net because all their connectivity goes through Tripoli. How difficult would it to be to reconnect eastern Libya via a microwave link to Crete? It's less than 200km away, on the Libyan end there are mountains up to 850m and on Crete they're higher than 2000m. People have achieved distances of over 300km with simple WiFi equipment, but would it be possible to increase the bandwidth to handle a whole, or at least half a country? How would you connect the link at both ends? What other problems would there be? How many Pringles cans would we need?"
It's completely infeasible.
Even a 1Gbit Ethernet link will degrade severely over these kinds of distances (remember even regular 100Mb Ethernet is not recommended for distances over 100 metres using regular Cat5 cable.
No idea how much by, but I'm betting the extreme temperature differences between day and night in a diurnal region like this could cause the internal copper to become damaged pretty quickly with tiny fractures leading to a break.
And besides, do you really think they'll have 200KM of Cat5 to lay to the border?
This isn't a country where many people can even afford computers.