> Browsing the modern web would be a nightmare from Mars Getting website articles and other media via rss feeds would be easiest. Email and usenet style nntp,

> Browsing the modern web would be a nightmare from Mars Getting website articles and other media via rss feeds would be easiest. Email and usenet style nntp, also. There's been work done on protocols optimized for inter-planetary networks, taking into round trip times when it comes to retransmissions and windowing, etc. Gateways can be setup between those protocols and earth's tcp internet. But every communication back and forth still takes many minutes. Interactive websites would take at least one round trip minutes for every request, every form submission, every javascript call to a back-end server, etc. Remote desktop solutions would encounter this same problem, too. At the moment the fastest link to Mars is about 6 megabits per second. Presumably that could be scaled up quite a bit, but I assume bandwidth will be a consideration for a while, too. Early on it will make sense to bring a lot of your own entertainment media and reference materials via thumb drive or other storage media, to have instant access and save bandwidth for other things.