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Using Sound To Test Internet Connections
sifi writes "An article in the New Scientist claims that by converting the frequencies of a 'ping' to sound it is possible to hear the reliability and strength of an internet connection.
They then go on to claim that all this is going to make telesurgery safe.
I quite frankly think that this is a case of the media printing something becuase it sounds (pun intended) cool. I'm convinced that there's nothing here that couldn't be done with a suitably clever piece of software - unless I'm missing something."
That's always a good way to hear how good your connection is.
Anything over TCP/IP is Digital... there is no frequency beside on and off.
The article says "Chafe wondered if variations in jitter [they defined as the deviations in the ping] could be converted into a musical form."
Fine convert the jitter to music... but how is that going to help you beyond what a numeric display would tell you?
I have a feeling none of these people have a clue about what they are babbling about.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
Rather than a novel approach, isn't that just 'interface' thingy ?
The most important point is the connection itself. The surgeon should know when it goes down, or when latency changes, whatever the means used (light, sound, hell, why not electric shock !).
I see that as a maybe fun way to see the trouble, but it won't solve it.
I'll of course assume the surgeon buys special bandwidth with certified low- or fixed- latency before doing the surgical act...
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
The article mentions that you could use this technique to monitor if the line is OK just before a critical operation. But will testing the quality of the line now give enough assurance that this quality will still be met in the middle of the operation, when there is no turning back?
I think that for these critical applications any simple test like this will never suffice, and you will need some way of guaranteeing that a minimal level of signal quality will be there, regardless of changing circumstances.
But with an audible ping, they could make sure they have a good connection for the delicate procedures.
Sure, there could be a doctor holding two fingers on the jugular of a patient, but that requires another person, and sure they could have a machine that did it for them without sound, but that would require people to be watching it.
Having an audible signal for when something goes wrong makes multitasking easier, and therefore, this could be beneficial.
I don't think the poster quite got the article. Regardless of whether this can be implemented in software or would require new hardware (don't know myself) this is a novel idea.
When you ping a machine from the command line, you get a list of ping times, which scroll by at a rate of about 2 per second or so. This doesn't show you the truly short-term behaviour of the connection. If I have understood correctly (and with the science writer "guitar string" crap removed), the idea here is to ping continually whilst playing a sound whose period (1/frequency) is the same as the ping time.
This has two advantages I can think of. The first and most important is that the ear is much better at picking up on a change in frequency than the eye is at picking out a couple of unusually high or low numbers in a scrolling list. This means that you can carry out a much larger number of "useful" pings (ie. ones whose results can be understood and used by an operator) per second. The second is that most networking applications (including telesurgery) don't make any use of sound, so the output of the pings is made continuously available to the user in a way that doesn't interfere with the task he/she is carrying out.
I don't know a thing about telesurgery, but if the very short term behaviour of the connection is important, this sounds like an ingenious way of keeping the user continuously updated.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
You can that! I had to debug some modem problems a while back, and it got to the point that I could not only tell whether it was going to connnect or not, but at what speed, just by listening to the entrain sequences. Bearing in mind that V.90 only has a limited set of frequencies it can connect at, I was either getting the right value or one of the adjacent ones *every time*.
Yeah, I know: Sad! ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I can remember it that clearly for two reasons:
That's right, whatever wise man said "Never whistle while you're pissing" (I remember it first in connection with Robert Anton Wilson, but I could be wrong) had no idea this day was coming. (And if you ever hear the Star Spangled Banner playing in the washroom, try not to salute!)
Numbers on a terminal window don't have much meaning unless put in perspective, or the perspective is known very well to begin with. Music is a "given" perspective that most people know already. They may not be able to play a note, but they know what sounds right and what doesn't. This method is a good way to convert numeric data into something more immediately recognizeable.
Now, the bad news: The connection between doctor and patient in a telesurgery operation must be both low latency and low jitter. When either one isn't there, the participants have good reason to panic. And all that auditory monitoring of ping times and jitter will do is enable that panic to set in that much more quickly. Can you say "liability," boys and girls?
I just don't consider the modern Internet to be sufficiently reliable for any application, and I expect its quality will continue to degrade as time goes by, more people get on, ISPs save money by not upgrading their equipment to handle the new press of people, and certain forces work to pollute the net with carnality, banality, and commercialism.
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