From: Dan Clemmensen (Dan@Clemmensen.ShireNet.com)
Date: Wed Nov 25 1998 - 18:53:55 MST
This is mostly for Ken, but othres may be interested.
I sympathize with the irritiation Ken and others have shown
RE the structural monopoly the phone company has on the
"last mile", and I'd really love to find a way to break this
monopoly. Let's agree on the goals:
--bottom-up networking to replace the Phome Company.
--fully-distributed switches under control of individuals
--Massive bandwidth available at nearly zero cost
--full support for mobile users
The problem is that radio is expensive by comparison to wireor fiber,
and that the radio spectrum is limited. Therefore, I feel that
we need to reserve the radio spectrum for mobile applications and
use point-to-point connections where possible. Your concept of
neighbor-to-neighbor connections is worthwhile, but don't use
radio: use either fiber or point-to-point through-the-air
lasers. This is much cheaper and provides much higher bandwidth.
so, where you can do it cheaply, you run a fiber to your neighbor's
house. Where this is infeasible, you try for line-of-sight laser.
on your own property you certainly want to run fiber or coax to
your own security cams, etc. This preserves radio bandwidth,
decreases your and costs, and increases your own security. With
fiber, you basically get as much bandwidth as you want to pay for
on each fiber, with 100Mbps being incredibly cheap even today, and
40Gbps costing a bunch. Now all you need to do is work co-operatively
with your neighbors to buy a line to the internet since your neighborhood
is now fully interconnected, you have enough bandwidth and purchasing
power to attract the nodice of the bypass folks.
Now what do we do for mobile? I reccomend that we use radio for this.
Unfortunately, a sophisticated cellular system costs a bunch. However,
we may be able to beat this by adding smart point-to-point laser systems
to the call system. When your mobile unit can "see" a fixed laser
installation, it can hop onto the laser link just as it hops between cells.
This preserves the radio cells for the units that are not in laser
line-of-sight, which means that you need fewer expensive radio cells to
serve the same mobile population.
Now, let's think about the evolution from today's system to the
system outlined above. Frankly, I believe that the evolution will
be driven initially by hackers, for fun. This is what we are seeing
in the Open Source software community. Will this be enough to
have a real effect on the cisco-Lucent-RBOC oligopoly? Only
time will tell.
Why is this relevant to extropians? well, some of us believe
that human progress is now driven by computation and connectivity.
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