: Broadband Perspectives

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Jock Gill <jg45 () mac com>
Date: August 26, 2005 3:23:59 PM EDT
To: Farber Dave <dave () farber net>
Cc: Jock Gill <jg45 () mac com>
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 quality

Not 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.

-------------- snip

Many 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


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