Slashdot Mirror
Bandwidth Caps May Be Critical Error For Broadband Companies
Technical Writing Geek writes "An Ars Technica article argues that after many years of stagnation, the US broadband landscape is finally 'primed for change'. Companies like Time Warner that decide to cap bandwidth risk being relegated to a 'broadband ghetto. Alternatives to the standard cable modem vs. DSL conundrum will come from technologies like WiMax and (eventually) the 'white space' broadband that might be offered by whoever wins the 700mhz auction. 'All of that is to say that cable and DSL won't always be the only games in town. If wireless solutions are able to deliver on their promises of high speeds with no usage limits, capped cable broadband service like Time Warner has planned is likely to be unattractive, to say the least. Instead of developing plans designed to discourage consumers from feeding at the bandwidth trough, cable companies would be better served in the long run by making investments in new technologies like DOCSIS 3.0 and the kind of infrastructure improvements necessary to meet bandwidth demands.'"
Ooh. I just thought of a solution to this problem. They're not talking about capping uploads, right? I'll just use that bandwidth. We'll use my newly invented HLPoIP, or High-Low-Protocol-over-IP. Here is how it works.
There we go. I used very little download bandwidth (assuming my computer can guess right a tiny fraction of a time, which it can't), I got my file, I swamped your server, and I used up the upstream bandwidth of everyone else on my cable link.
Imagine how much fun BitTorrent will be!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
You know, you could have just put "Fr1$t P0st!!1" in the body of your message, instead of bothering to come up with something that looked vaguely like actual content.
Hey, let's improve on that a little! We can throw out the randomness and just do deterministic binary search. The advantage of this is, you never have to send your 64k to the server! Since the server already knows what 64k number you were going to send (since it's deterministic), it can just base its answers on that, sending a stream of highs and lows, each taking one bit.
:-)
Hmm, some more specifics. The first guess is, of course, halfway through the range, and a "high" answer means "your guess was equal to or greater than the number I was thinking of". A "low" answer means "your guess was less than the number I was thinking of".
Looking good! Let's try it with a sample four bit number... say, 0110. So the server knows that your first guess will be 1000, so it sends a "low". Your next guess will be half that, 0100, which is too high, so it sends a "high". So your next guess will be 0110 (halfway between 1000 and 0100); the server responds "high" because that's equal to or greater than. Finally, your guess will be 0111, and the server sends a "low", thereby reducing the range to the only possible number, 0110. So it sends four bits: low, high, high, low. Encoding a low as 0 and a high as 1, we get... 0110
Whoopsy.
Your introduction to Information Theory has begun.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
My blog
...if they stopped sending me 12 fracking pieces of junk mail every month. Each.
I changed from Qwest to Cox for broadband, and ditched my Qwest landline. Since then I get not only the regular mail pieces begging me to take Qwest VOIP, or just POTS, or ANYTHING, PLEASE!
And I get Cox mail, both asking me to buy what I ALREADY HAVE, and of course to buy what I gave up from Qwest.
Seriously, they could cut their costs list a little with smarter mailing lists.
As if.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You misspelled "Enron"...