What "personal scale" device can be used to access the HoloNet?

A Commlink?

A Datapad?

Something else?

Once you are connected to the HoloNet, can you communicate with another person (connected to the HoloNet) who is in the other side of the galaxy?

How is regulated the access to the HoloNet?

You'll have to ask someone more knowledgeable than me for the specifics.

My suggestion to you would be 'whatever you need for the story at hand'.

As someone who simply watched the movies, I didn't even know there was a SW internet - there was no wordwideweb in 1977 -84, after all.

But my players just couldn't get their heads around there NOT being an internet in a world with star-ships and Death Stars.

For what it's worth, I always imagine the HoloNet as being similar to the WWW in its early days, especially on the Outer Rim. Bad connections, slow connections, spurious content, etc.

Go with whatever works for your game. It should never be a 'deus ex machinae' that provides all the answers, in any case.

And I draw the line at I-phones, regardless of what the players want.

I'd say a datapad would be the bare minimum required for Holonet access, since a datapad is pretty much the equivalent of a modern tablet, with perhaps a bit more processing power and able to perform limited computer functions.

A comlink (to me at least) is more akin to portable CB radio; you use it to make calls, and can listen in on various channels, but that's about it.

And I do agree with Maelora about drawing the line at smartphones or their equivalent in the SW 'verse.

As for how regulated the Holonet is, that depends on what era you're playing in. If you're gaming in either the Dark Times or Rebellion Era, the Holonet is heavily regulated and pretty much restricted to use by the Imperial military. It's not impossible to slice past those access restrictions, but it carries a lot of risk since you're effectively trying to slice into a military system, with the military in question not being known for leniency.

As usual, Wookieepedia's got a lot more information on the subject:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/HoloNet

I've already looked at the Wookieepedia, but still I had some doubts.

During the Empire, both the HoloNet and the Baobab (or alternative) HoloNet were present.

I thought that the alternative HoloNet would be a good instrument for the Rebels communications.

My main question is: without the HoloNet, how can the characters be contacted by someone outside the star system they are in?

Under the Empire? Local networks probably not so much, but from Rim to Core messages? Almost certainly very heavily restricted - the first order of a dictatorship would be to cut off the flow of information to your enemies. That's of course above and beyond the costs to use the network.

How can the characters be contacted by someone outside the star system they are in?

Couriers with physical messages - Pony Express, baby! They arrive as the plot demands.

I treat the Holonet like a beefed up RL internet with holographic communication capabilities. Something I got from Saga Edition was a more localized internet that was planet specific. During the Rise of the Empire, the Dark Times and the Rebellion Era, the holonet is heavily restricted and controlled by the Empire. I allow for news channels to report news but there are millions of retractions made at the behest of the Empire. I figure the Empire can't catch every broadcast but they can go back afterwards and retract info after it has been reported. After all that is sort of the whole point of COMPNOR.

As for the Rebellion, I would assume they would have a dedicated staff for the purpose of securing communications and slicing the holonet, possibly backed by the Bothan Spynet for access codes and what-not.

In addition there are sub-space and hyperspace transceivers, see pg. 227 CR for info. Hyperspace transceivers being rare. Imperial ships are of course equipped with holonet communications. I would assume the bulk of the rebel fleet has hyperspace transceivers.

There's a piece of equipment in the rulebook that's basically a hand-held HoloNet transceiver (like the one Cody used in Revenge of the Sith when he received Order 66 from Palpatine). Apart from those (which would be useless to anyone not a member of the Imperial armed forces, since they completely control access to the HoloNet) there are backpack "radio" units and vehicle/shipboard transceivers. Comlinks are merely walkie-talkies with a 50 km (or so) range, and datapads don't have the juice or processing power to interface directly with the HoloNet.

It should be noted that the Holonet communications network that allows the characters in the Clone Wars TV show to carry little discs that can transmit holographic signals across the galaxy in an instant is military-grade technology. The characters on that show are all Jedi, Sith, politicians, and high-ranking military commanders; ordinary citizens were hard-pressed to get their hands on that kind of tech even back then. During the time period of Edge of the Empire/Age of Rebellion, getting one's hands on that tech is much, much harder.

Personally, I infer that each planet, star system, and space sector has its own communication/Holonet relays to keep information moving. As a matter of necessity, however, these transmissions are monitored by the Empire constantly, meaning most of the transmissions are entertainment-based, and even then there's rarely any new programming. With Darth Sidious in charge civilization as a whole is on the decline, so I imagine most of what the Holonet delivers is reminicent of radio stations in Fallout 3/Fallout: New Vegas; you hear/see the same stuff over and over again, because so much of it is has been lost/destroyed/outlawed.

As for researching different kinds of information, keep in mind where the PCs are when they try something like this. On an Outer Rim world like Tattooine, it's likely that their computers haven't been swept clean by the Empire just yet, but it's also likely that they don't exactly have a university's worth of information available either. Certain kinds of information might be easier to find on Coruscant, but even there you'll find more propaganda than actual history.

During this era, simply "googling" stuff doesn't work; you need to visit learning instutions and research stuff the "old-fashioned" way. (Just like Obi-Wan had to do in Episode II, although in that case it was difficult because he had 25,000 years worth of exploration data to go through in order to find Kamino, not because there was a facist government restricting information.) This is why the Respected Scholar talent isn't nearly as useless as it appears to be.

There's a piece of equipment in the rulebook that's basically a hand-held HoloNet transceiver (like the one Cody used in Revenge of the Sith when he received Order 66 from Palpatine). Apart from those (which would be useless to anyone not a member of the Imperial armed forces, since they completely control access to the HoloNet) there are backpack "radio" units and vehicle/shipboard transceivers. Comlinks are merely walkie-talkies with a 50 km (or so) range, and datapads don't have the juice or processing power to interface directly with the HoloNet.

From it's cheap price and reduced size I didn't thought that the Holo-messenger was actually a HoloNet transceiver (i.e. an hyperwave transceiver).

I thought it would need to connect to a "local" hyperwave transceiver (normally a nearby station or ship on the planet) by radio waves to be able to reach the HoloNet.

Just now, I'm taking a look at the informations on the Saga books.

Here it says that a slicer using a computer (or a datapad) connected to the HoloNet (or connected to a local network that has access to the HoloNet) can hack the HoloNet to send or receive transmissions to/from private user's ID, feeds or other "non-public" sources.

So it's very dangerous during the Rebellion Era.

A portable HoloNet/hyperwave transceiver that can be installed in a droid, costs 50.000 credits.

A portable subspace transceiver costs 2.000 credits and has an effective range of some light years.

So, subspace communications is much "slower" than hyperspace communications, but is the standard method used during the Rebellion Era. Still, it can be used only be "near" systems. Otherwise you need to hack the HoloNet.

My group's take on the holonet (ranging back to the WEG days of gaming) is that it was a communications network that was past its prime anywhere except the core. Over the years of SW gaming, it was supported by raid-striped nodes called "Data-trees" because they were bundles of interwoven computer matrices that were spread throughout the galaxy.

Holonet, I'll try to keep this as simple as possible rather than terrorise anyone with too much network engineering theory

The "holonet" is basically the big bearers that carry bulk traffic from point A-B and at the end of each point is the main traffic exchanges that the bearers go into. From the main traffic exchanges it would be going into smaller networks, its at those MTX's that they have the go-no-go access to individual networks and devices. Your network device (computer, datapad, droid etc) needs to be a registered device with a verified ID, it connects to the network, the network checks it out via the MTX and then gives you the ok to connect, or Compnor triangulates where you are and then angry men come around kerb stomp your skull.

Some of these MTX's are portable, Star Destroyers for example, carry one in them so they can directly connect to wherever they need to communicate for military purposes.

By the rise of the empire, Mr Palps has decided that "nah, the majority of peons in the outer sectors really don't need to speak to one another, because then they get delusions of granduer or start to conspire against the Empire."

Hence, large bits of it get turned off and the maintenance costs channelled back into more useful things, like Star Destroyers you can just park in a sector and bludgeon the residents into a dark ages of data about what's happening in the galaxy. For this purpose there are two main Compnor sub-divisions that manage data.

Media- which sends out the blurbs to the galaxy at large for propoganda purposes and checks that the end transmissions are legit and politcally correct.

Signals- which packet-sifts everything through the network to make sure its got a legitimate source and turn off access if its not.

Fun times! But if that wasn't enough, there is also the Ubiqutorate which also has a finger in the pie so to speak and likes to use the Holonet for its own purposes... spying and counter espionage to make sure no one else in the Compnor structure is mucking around or getting sympathetic to rebel scum.

[Classified]

There's a couple of things the Ubiqutorate has at its disposal to make people's lives 'difficult'. While anything like a SD's MTX can be found anywhere by triangulation, they also like to put little devices in people's ships which basically ping the network whenever they go through a bearer's transmission. From there they can figure out 'where' the device is in the galaxy and the direction its headed. Oh, they're also fiendishly small, don't really show up on conventional scans and probably in your tramp freighter somewhere... hah!

[super Secret Squirrel Classified]

Because not every planet or system is hooked up to the Holonet, doesn't mean they still don't want to know whats going on locally. The great cost saving from this means they don't need an active holonet connection to the area, just one nearby.

What they do is put a little satellite in orbit of the planet, sitting in hyperspace and its mass is hidden by much larger objects so you can't find it (ever!), it just sits there spinning around the planet and scanning.

What is it scanning?

Computers on the planet or near orbit get scanned by the satellite and then the hyperspace particles used in the computers systems get analysed and sent off to the relay stations. From there they can break down the raw data and extract what exactly that computer was doing, any files on the computer and a bit of a fingerprint of 'who' was using that machine... up to 78% of it exactly.

So if you use a computer on a planet, the Ubiqutorate can figure out about 78% of whats on it at any given time. Oh you like ships computers, hyperspace computers, datapads, comlinks and, yes droids and who doesn't love that kind of stuff? Good, good, keep using them princess...

For particuarly big data dumps or maintenance, they will send out a remote droid with its own hyperspace engine to find the satellite and then it drops out of hyperspace for a few minutes, gets fixed up, some power, dumps data, gets software upgradeas and then pops back into the hyperspace mass.

Finding one of these is essentially like trying to find a soccer ball, painted black in high orbit of a planet with a pair of binoculars and you get a 5minute window to do it once or twice a month.

Have a nice day.