Begin forwarded message: From: Jock Gill <jg45@xxxxxxx> Date: August 26, 2005 3:23:59 PM EDT To: Farber Dave <dave@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Jock Gill <jg45@xxxxxxx> Subject: Broadband Perspectives Dave, For IP if you like. I have today posted a new entry to the Greater Democracy blog: <http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/archives/000399.html> August 26, 2005 Broadband Perspectives It's the applications enabled by the connection’s qualityNot everything can be photographed in natural light. In photography, you can set up a camera in a very dark room and leave the lens wide open for ever and get zero exposure on the negative if the number of photons falling on the film per unit of time is below some threshold. This has a fancy name: Reciprocity Failure - which describes certain non-linear aspects of film's response to light levels.
Well wireless bits are just electromagnetic photons. So, by analogy, if not enough bits are available per unit of time, some things are simply impossible. The "exposure" is never realized and is meaningless.
Consider, if you will, the situation in the Pacific island Kingdom of Tonga. On Tonga it costs a local ISP about $13K per month for a link that provides 2 Mbps down and 1 mbps up - with the increased latency of a geosynchronous satellite connection as opposed to a terrestrial connection. An islander will pay about $2,500 per month US for 512 Kbps down/128 Kbps up. With this very limited capacity, how realistic is it to expect that people living on Tonga will find it “normal” to work with applications that use large files, such as the Democracy Now files mentioned below? The flow of bits as electromagnetic photons, combined with their substantial latency, is such that it prevents the islanders from benefiting from modern applications running on high capacity, high quality connections.
Note: Latency is another dimension of a network that must be taken into consideration when evaluating the sorts of applications a connection can support. Some readers will remember the “latency” that made overseas calls so interesting in the past. Others may have experienced problems introduced by latency in VoIP conversations. The latency dimension is usually overlooked in discussions of the quality of a connection. In general, the lower the latency in a packet switched network, the higher the quality. Too often all that is discussed is the cost of a connection and the bandwidth of a connection. To keep this brief note simpler, latency is not further considered here. It needs to be more fully addressed in another paper.
To explore the implications of very large files, we can look into Democracy Now's new recommendation that the members of their network use bittorrent/Azureus to down load the daily TV show they produce. These are about 700 megabyte files in high definition AVI format -- not simple video postage stamps ala Rocketboom.
-------------- snipMany thanks to Dewayne Hendricks who contributed greatly to this effort.
I have attached a PDF copy for your use. Jock Gill The Power of Wireless Cooperative gain from collective behaviors at the edges (781) 396-0492 ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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