6 ms·

This only presumes that you have line-of-sight or uncanny luck to have a reliable Fresnel zone to bounce signal through---but this is still constrained by dista

by sj4nz 14y ago

This only presumes that you have line-of-sight or uncanny luck to have a reliable Fresnel zone to bounce signal through---but this is still constrained by distance. I used a "Portland, ME to Portland, OR" example to emphasize that these links aren't the kind that you can use allocated low-power radio spectrum to connect as in WiFi. You may be able to max out your upstream capability with local radio, but you can't supply bits to the other side of the city, state, or country. Unless everyone has the same exact interests as you, you won't even have the bits they want---this is what the pub-sub mechanism has to address on top of the content-network. Some people will specialize in carrying the bits that everyone wants and at every step of the way, nodes will have to look at subscription demand and throughput to decided which bits are sent in a batch. Yes, we can imagine our wireless routers as a low-rate signal system with focused high-rate beams, etc, but the probability that you will reach an interested audience from your radio is low. This is why FM/AM radio licenses are so valuable, and this is why having a content channel carried by all the regional cable monopolies is so valuable and vulnerable to censorship---there are many people who would love to watch Current.tv or Al Jazeera but cannot get it in their own regional cable systems. However, radio and cable are still synchronous mediums, which I'm suggesting we should back away from. Using radio always assumes that there are other nodes interested in what you're sending. In nearly every case of radio-based Internet Service Providers I've been able to find, users always find that the service is "great" for the first month and thereafter totally sucks in every imaginable way: slow speeds, down-time, and bandwidth caps. There's only one tower and enough bandwidth for so many users, after that, there is no upgrade path because almost all the spectrum is allocated. This is guaranteed to happen for any homebrew WiFi network or municipal WiFi network---remember that you only get three separate frequencies without overlap ( http://www.bridgingthelayers.org/channel_overlap.html http://www.bridgingthelayers.org/channel_overlap.html ) The limits are obvious with FM and AM radio is regulated by the FCC to prevent channel interference between cities---you never get "new" stations, you only get "different" stations when a broadcaster changes format. My favorite example of a broadcaster changing "format" is WHFS in Baltimore, MD---one day it was a progressive rock-radio station and the next morning a spanish-pop-radio station, without warning. (The DJs working there had no idea this change was coming.) By redefining the network medium to "bits via matter" instead of "bits via energy" (SD cards in my example), and relaxing our attention-spans to something less than "instant", you get more bandwidth by adding more cards to the network as needed. We may be getting better at using radio spectrum, but it will always have a political limitation of how it is used when it has real reach to many people---in short, if you can touch many people via a medium, more than a few people will always seek to control that access for their own interests. Bandwidth for information transmission via energy I still believe is scarce and will always be scarce for any situation where you wish to send to many people over long distances. The medium has to be redefined away from energy to matter---and perhaps, just to throw a huge monkey wrench into the mix and stir the pot more---this is what newspapers (which in their print format are already sending matter instead of energy to your household) need to add to their offerings to save themselves. Now, imagine receiving a 4GB SD card with your morning newspaper every morning while the paper-person retrieves old cards during delivery---and what would happen if you were uploading back to everyone else on those same cards? 8GB/day in and out becomes 56GB/week becomes 2.8T/year of data transfer, one SD card at a time. Relaxing our need for synchrony could make newspaper profitable again. Subscribe to two newspapers and you double your network bandwidth and no one needed to climb on a roof. :)

dalke 14y ago
Large data transfers are still best done through physical shipping of encoded atoms. Take a look at AWS Import/Export for one real-world example. But the threshold for that being useful is rather high. Have you worked out the breakpoint for where a person moving cards is more effective than a network connection? What information, other than DVDs, would be appropriate for this? Why do you focus on radio-only connections? The highest bandwidth devices can easily be plugged into a wired connection. Why do you assume that bandwidth will get more congested? I think instead that there will be a move towards smaller cells, with lower power. The network provider could have an antenna on every other streetlight or power pole, where each only handles a few dozen devices in range. Your comment about suburb wifi congestion doesn't feel right. The most cluttered wifi I've seen has been in big apartment buildings, where the transmitters are much closer to each other. One possible solution there is to move towards per-building based cells rather than per-apartment ones. Though this would mean that the hardware has to be as reliable as the building wiring, which isn't yet true. Where I've heard uucp being useful is for things like "drive-by wifi" for rural parts of the world, for example http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/ http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/ . But the idea that "relaxing our need for synchrony could make newspaper profitable again" is just strange. If people want their news less frequently then that just gives more time for their local network aggregator to download that news. Where's the cost savings or revenue boost for the newspaper?
- sj4nz 14y ago
  I focus on non-radio solutions because I'm looking to see how we can do it without radio, period. So, there is no "live" connection for aggregators to download from. News is perhaps a bad name for the kind of content, think about it more in the sense of magazines or programs that aren't strictly time-sensitive, but entertaining and informative. This is kind of related to the "Slow Web" movement I just read about in http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web . I'm not interested in seeing regional radio-ISPs blanket cities with smaller radio. I'm coming from this with the view point that some people won't have an "active" Internet connection, period. This can be very rural or situations where the density is just too low to bother with radios---who's going to build a network for 5 customers? The networks create their own scarcity of bandwidth because they're only profitable where there are enough people---where there are enough people, there isn't enough bandwidth to give everyone a good experience. A asynchronous hypernet is something that is "instant-on" for any location where people desire to have it---there's no permitting required, building agreements to negotiate, pole rights to acquire, or hardware to buy-install-maintain. If you want it, a few SD cards, a USB SD card reader and software similar to UUCP to manage it will make it happen for everyone---the cost to start is less than $50 or even $25 for anyone wanting to start a node. Instead of being potentially online 24/7, I'm imagining these asynchronous hypernet users are /never/ online with the Internet. What they receive is what comes on the memory cards or other mediums. If some content does come from the Internet, it's because someone elsewhere on the asynchronous hypernet is providing a gateway for it. For a news paper that isn't increasing their readership of physical papers and struggling to convince readers to pay for the online version (again, only useful to users of synchronous networks), a daily memory card of batched data will be attractive in any area where the local Internet monopoly starts charging significant money for GB of data above their "approved" threshold. If the newspaper can deliver data cheaper to the user than the synchronous Internet provider can, people will use it. If the newspaper makes their own original audio/visual content (which is already happening at newspapers like the NYTimes) and makes it available only via the cards, they have content that people can't get anywhere else---and a reason to subscribe.

by sj4nz 14y ago

dalke 14y ago

Large data transfers are still best done through physical shipping of encoded atoms. Take a look at AWS Import/Export for one real-world example. But the threshold for that being useful is rather high. Have you worked out the breakpoint for where a person moving cards is more effective than a network connection? What information, other than DVDs, would be appropriate for this? Why do you focus on radio-only connections? The highest bandwidth devices can easily be plugged into a wired connection. Why do you assume that bandwidth will get more congested? I think instead that there will be a move towards smaller cells, with lower power. The network provider could have an antenna on every other streetlight or power pole, where each only handles a few dozen devices in range. Your comment about suburb wifi congestion doesn't feel right. The most cluttered wifi I've seen has been in big apartment buildings, where the transmitters are much closer to each other. One possible solution there is to move towards per-building based cells rather than per-apartment ones. Though this would mean that the hardware has to be as reliable as the building wiring, which isn't yet true. Where I've heard uucp being useful is for things like "drive-by wifi" for rural parts of the world, for example http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/ http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/ . But the idea that "relaxing our need for synchrony could make newspaper profitable again" is just strange. If people want their news less frequently then that just gives more time for their local network aggregator to download that news. Where's the cost savings or revenue boost for the newspaper?

sj4nz 14y ago
I focus on non-radio solutions because I'm looking to see how we can do it without radio, period. So, there is no "live" connection for aggregators to download from. News is perhaps a bad name for the kind of content, think about it more in the sense of magazines or programs that aren't strictly time-sensitive, but entertaining and informative. This is kind of related to the "Slow Web" movement I just read about in http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web . I'm not interested in seeing regional radio-ISPs blanket cities with smaller radio. I'm coming from this with the view point that some people won't have an "active" Internet connection, period. This can be very rural or situations where the density is just too low to bother with radios---who's going to build a network for 5 customers? The networks create their own scarcity of bandwidth because they're only profitable where there are enough people---where there are enough people, there isn't enough bandwidth to give everyone a good experience. A asynchronous hypernet is something that is "instant-on" for any location where people desire to have it---there's no permitting required, building agreements to negotiate, pole rights to acquire, or hardware to buy-install-maintain. If you want it, a few SD cards, a USB SD card reader and software similar to UUCP to manage it will make it happen for everyone---the cost to start is less than $50 or even $25 for anyone wanting to start a node. Instead of being potentially online 24/7, I'm imagining these asynchronous hypernet users are /never/ online with the Internet. What they receive is what comes on the memory cards or other mediums. If some content does come from the Internet, it's because someone elsewhere on the asynchronous hypernet is providing a gateway for it. For a news paper that isn't increasing their readership of physical papers and struggling to convince readers to pay for the online version (again, only useful to users of synchronous networks), a daily memory card of batched data will be attractive in any area where the local Internet monopoly starts charging significant money for GB of data above their "approved" threshold. If the newspaper can deliver data cheaper to the user than the synchronous Internet provider can, people will use it. If the newspaper makes their own original audio/visual content (which is already happening at newspapers like the NYTimes) and makes it available only via the cards, they have content that people can't get anywhere else---and a reason to subscribe.