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AkashGanga: The Photon Bridge of Bangalore
Where monsoon haze meets collimated light, and a memory of Saint IGNUcius ignites a revolution written in wavelengths of 1550 nanometers.
While European research labs achieve record-breaking 1 Terabit/s optical transmission, three hackers in Bangalore prove that democratized gigabit connectivity needs neither corporate budgets nor institutional infrastructure—just patient engineering and principled sharing of knowledge.
The city breathed below him like a vast neural network drowning in its own synaptic fire. From his twenty-seventh floor perch, Prakash Iyer watched eight million souls pulse through Bangalore’s arteries of glass and silicon, their digital dreams refracting through layers of atmospheric heat like light through a corrupted lens. The evening sky hung heavy with suspended particulates—a living filter that bent photons and broke promises with equal indifference.
His apartment existed as a controlled void within the chaos: minimal geometries that spoke of disciplined thought. Against one wall, a framed blueprint of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic mathematics hinted at structural dreams beyond mere shelter. But it was the bookshelf that told the real story—not random accumulation, but archaeological layers of a mind in formation.
Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics stood spine-to-spine with Shannon’s collected papers on information theory, their margins dense with annotations in three colors of ink. Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think leaned against Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines—visionaries of hypertext and human-computer symbiosis. The philosophical foundation ran deeper: Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization faced off against Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, a dialectic of technological optimism and skeptical wisdom. And there, occupying the shrine position: Richard Stallman’s Free Software, Free Society beside Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, the twin pillars of liberation through principled knowledge sharing.
Between them, almost hidden, Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game suggested something more profound than mere hacking—the vision of knowledge as spiritual practice, technology as pathway to enlightenment.
His terminal painted brutal truth in phosphor green: 5.12 Gbps. Eight kilometers away, where his collaborators waited in the digital shadows, the same test would timeout into the mathematics of corporate scarcity. The last mile—eight kilometers that might as well have been eight light-years—remained unbridged by intention, not inability.
But tonight, if photons obeyed the equations of liberation, that desert would bloom with light.
The Weight of Witness
February 2025. Jain University, Kochi. The Summit of Future 2025.
The moment Kiran Hegde saw Richard Stallman transform into Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs, something fundamental shifted in the architecture of his understanding. The packed auditorium—a hundred thousand pilgrims of the digital age—fell into cathedral silence as the golden hard drive halo caught the stage lights like a lens focusing revelation.
The sermon began not with code but with consciousness:
“With software, there are only two possibilities: either the users control the program, or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program becomes an instrument of unjust power.”
Each word struck like photons hitting a photodetector—discrete packets of energy accumulating into enlightenment. This transcended mere programming philosophy. This was the deepest layer: the source code of human agency itself.
Later, calling Prakash from his hostel room while Kochi’s harbor lights reflected off the backwaters like scattered LEDs, Kiran’s voice carried the tremor of conversion: “It’s not about the algorithms, yaar. It’s about who writes the laws that govern our digital existence. We’re architecting our own imprisonment and calling it innovation.”
That conversation lived now in the photons they would soon liberate—not just bandwidth, but proof that Free/Libre hardware specifications could bridge any distance that proprietary systems left deliberately unbridged.
The Convergence of Frequencies
The workshop air shimmered with the heat of transformative work. Kiran—“Kiwi” to those who appreciated both his precision and his quirky humor—bent over a jeweler’s loupe, aligning their beam expander with the patience of a meditation master. The optics demanded absolute precision: each lens surface, each mounting tolerance, each angular adjustment measured not in degrees but in microradians.
Beside him, Vishesh Kumar—who went by “Wish” in the forums where code and philosophy merged—orchestrated Python scripts that taught silicon to perceive through atmospheric turbulence. His uniform was invariant: faded black cotton bearing the stark white manifesto “There is no cloud, just someone else’s computer.” Philosophy encoded in threads and bytes.
Their creation violated every assumption about optical communication’s natural monopolies. Where commercial systems demanded proprietary licensing and certified installers, they were crafting freedom from salvaged telescope optics and the philosophical DNA of KORUZA’s libre hardware specifications.
“Scintillation index is converging toward stability,” Wish announced, his consciousness merged with cascading sensor data. The Kalman filter had been learning Bangalore’s atmospheric signature for weeks—a patient apprenticeship in the art of seeing through chaos.
Kiwi lifted his head from the beam expander, a hybrid creation that married Carl Zeiss surplus optics with precision actuators salvaged from semiconductor fabrication equipment. “Ten-fold magnification locked. Beam divergence compressed to 0.3 milliradians. That’s our force multiplier.”
The mathematics were unforgiving but elegant. Eight kilometers meant approximately 6,400 times the path loss of KORUZA’s designed 100-meter specification. Their 10X beam expander and amplified transceivers closed that impossible gap through patient engineering and principled physics.
The numbers resolved into audacious possibility: manageable, achievable, revolutionary.
The Architecture of Digital Liberation
Technical Specifications: The Poetry of Liberated Photons
The system specifications read like verses in the liturgy of optical physics:
- Foundation Platform: KORUZA libre hardware, enhanced for high-power operation
- Beam Expander: 10X Galilean telescope (salvaged Carl Zeiss precision optics)
- Tracking System: Voice coil fast steering mirror, integrated with multi-constellation GNSS fusion
- Operating Wavelength: 1550nm—invisible to human vision, eye-safe, optimized for atmospheric transmission windows
- Link Latency: 26.7 microseconds (fundamental speed of light) plus computational overhead
- Control Software: Pure FLOSS stack (Python/C++ hybrid with GPL v3 licensing)
The Moment of Optical Truth
Tuesday evening arrived wrapped in monsoon silence. The atmospheric conditions stabilized into that rare window when light could travel unimpeded across the digital divide. Prakash initiated the link sequence from his climate-controlled sanctum, while eight kilometers away, Kiwi and Wish prepared their receiver on a rooftop that still radiated the day’s accumulated heat.
“Beam acquisition initiated,” Kiwi announced through their voice channel, his hands steady on the alignment controls. The distant laser appeared through their acquisition telescope as a point of coherent light dancing through atmospheric turbulence.
“I’m detecting multiple interference patterns,” he continued. “Scintillation index is… volatile.”
“Kalman filter is adapting,” Wish confirmed, his attention locked on scrolling diagnostic data. The algorithmic mind was learning to predict atmospheric chaos, finding patterns within the unpredictable. “Hold the beam steady while the system achieves lock.”
The voice coil actuators sang their mechanical hymn—microsecond adjustments compensating for atmospheric distortions in real-time. Through the receiver telescope, the distant transmitter transformed from chaotic dancing light into stable coherent signal.
“Link established,” Wish announced, his typical reserve cracking into something approaching wonder. “I’m seeing 4.1 Gbps stable throughput with error correction active.”
Prakash’s terminal awaited the moment of proof. The command was elemental in its simplicity: ping 192.168.1.42
The response arrived at light speed:
64 bytes from 192.168.1.42: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.087 ms
Eight kilometers. Eighty-seven microseconds. The exact latency of liberated information.
The bandwidth test painted its digital poetry across the terminal: 2.847 Gbits/sec... 3.956 Gbits/sec... 4.123 Gbits/sec... The connection stabilized at 4.1 Gbps—over eighty times faster than any commercial cellular service, carried by photons that obeyed no corporate authority.
“Welcome to AkashGanga,” Kiwi’s voice transmitted through their optical link, crystal-clear across the impossible distance. “We just democratized the speed of light.”
The Economics of Photonic Democracy
Their creation proved that complexity masked artificial scarcity. The complete system—transmitter, receiver, tracking, and control electronics—cost €2,600 through Kiran and Wish’s network of Chinese suppliers and surplus dealers. Equivalent commercial systems demanded €50,000-€75,000 plus proprietary licensing agreements that locked users into vendor-controlled upgrade cycles.
The deeper revolution was temporal. Commercial optical communication systems arrived with planned obsolescence encoded into both hardware and software. Their libre specifications ensured perpetual maintainability—documentation that enabled anyone with sufficient technical knowledge to repair, upgrade, or completely rebuild their design using globally available components.
The Propagation of Light
Word propagated through the networks where real innovation flowed—forums buried in internet backchannel traffic, mailing lists maintained by volunteers, IRC channels where knowledge moved at light speed between minds ready to receive it.
Their documentation, released under the GNU Free Documentation License, inspired implementations across continents:
- From Dhaka: “Successfully established 3km link using your beam expander calculations. Connecting rural educational cooperatives to university networks.”
- From São Paulo: “Modified your design for 5km favela-to-downtown connection. The libre specifications enabled rapid deployment faster than authorities could respond.”
- From Lagos: “Voice coil tracking system maintains lock through harmattan dust storms. Teaching principles to local electronics students through hands-on construction.”
Each successful deployment validated the central thesis: technological complexity could be democratized through patient documentation and principled sharing of engineering knowledge.
Epilogue: The Persistent Bridge of Coherent Light
The beam continues its silent journey across eight kilometers of Bangalore’s atmospheric medium—an invisible bridge carrying more than mere data packets. It carries proof of concept for a different kind of world: one where the distance between technological possibility and human reality can be measured in wavelengths of coherent light.
Eight kilometers. Twenty-six microseconds. The exact distance between what is and what could be, bridged by three hackers, some surplus optics, and the revolutionary proposition that knowledge, once liberated into the commons, tends to remain free.
In the glass towers where corporate telecommunications architects plot the next generation of artificial scarcity, AkashGanga’s photons pass undetected—carrying the quiet revolution at the speed of light itself, written in wavelengths that no patent office can capture, no licensing authority can control.
The future is already here. It’s just traveling at 299,792,458 meters per second.
PS: The people involved in this story may be inspired by real individuals or archetypes, but are products of the imagination of this blog post’s author.
Technical Appendix: The Engineering of Liberation
System Architecture Overview
Base Platform: KORUZA-v2 libre hardware design, modified for extended range operation Link Budget Analysis: 6,400x path loss compensation through 10dB beam expander and +20dBm transmit power Atmospheric Modeling: Real-time scintillation prediction using multi-layer Kalman filtering Hardware Cost: €2,600 total system cost (both endpoints, Chinese surplus sourcing) Performance: 4.1 Gbps sustained throughput with <0.1ms latency (theoretical potential up to 10 Gbps with next-generation modulators)
Critical Components Specification
Transmitter Module:
- 1550nm DFB laser diode (+20dBm output power)
- 10X Galilean beam expander (0.3 mrad divergence)
- Voice coil fine steering (±5 mrad range, 1kHz bandwidth)
- Multi-constellation GNSS positioning (RTK-corrected)
Receiver Module:
- 80mm collector lens (f/6 Zeiss surplus optics)
- Quadrant avalanche photodiode (InGaAs, 1GHz bandwidth)
- Fast steering mirror (voice coil actuated, sub-microradial precision)
- Real-time atmospheric turbulence compensation
Control Electronics:
- Raspberry Pi 4 (primary control and networking)
- Arduino Due (real-time servo control)
- Custom PCB for high-speed data conversion
- Python/C++ hybrid control software (GPL v3)
Performance Characteristics
Link Availability: >99.7% under typical atmospheric conditions Bit Error Rate: <10^-9 with forward error correction Current Throughput: 4.1 Gbps sustained (upgradeable to 10+ Gbps with next-generation optical modulators) Power Consumption: 35W total system power (both endpoints) Operating Range: -10°C to +50°C ambient temperature Maintenance Requirements: Monthly alignment verification, annual optics cleaning
Libre Hardware Documentation
All mechanical designs released under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 Complete electrical schematics available under CERN Open Hardware License v2 Software components licensed under GNU General Public License v3 Documentation maintained using GNU Free Documentation License
Repository: Available through libre hardware collaboration platforms Community Support: Active development community across six continents Derivative Works: 47 documented implementations in 23 countries
References & Further Reading
Optical Communication Theory
- Hecht, Eugene: Optics, 5th Edition - Comprehensive treatment of Gaussian beam propagation
- Saleh & Teich: Fundamentals of Photonics - Atmospheric transmission modeling
- Andrews & Phillips: Laser Beam Propagation through Random Media - Scintillation theory
Free/Libre Hardware Development
- KORUZA Project Documentation: Complete libre optical communication platform https://koruza.net/
- Open Source Ecology: Libre hardware methodology and community practices https://www.opensourceecology.org/
- CERN Open Hardware License: Legal framework for libre hardware distribution https://ohwr.org/cern_ohl_w_v2_2.pdf
Philosophical Foundations
- Stallman, Richard: Free Software, Free Society - Foundational philosophy of software freedom
- Winner, Langdon: Do Artifacts Have Politics? - Technology and social power structures
- Hesse, Hermann: The Glass Bead Game - Knowledge as spiritual practice
Technical Implementation References
- European 1 Terabit/s Optical Transmission Records: Horizon Europe research achievements
https://www.vertigo.europa.eu/news/1-terabit-per-second-optical-transmission/ - Atmospheric Turbulence Modeling: Real-time Kalman filtering for optical communication https://www.osapublishing.org/ao/abstract.cfm?uri=ao-54-10-2976
- Voice Coil Actuator Control: Sub-microradial precision tracking systems https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8371829
- Free Space Optical Networks: Community deployment strategies https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3717.txt
“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” - John Gilmore
Light finds its own path through the atmosphere of artificial scarcity, carrying the revolution one photon at a time.