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VoIP As a Solution To Rural Broadband
boyko.at.netqos recommends his article up at Network Performance Daily, which notes the recent reports that up to 30% of households do not have a landline telephone, preferring a VoIP or cell-phone based solution. What to do with the miles of last-mile phone line infrastructure already in place in almost all the homes across the country? Maybe there's a solution to rural broadband by using the high-reliability frequencies reserved for voice purely for data — and using VoIP to make phone calls. From the article: "Repurposing the broadband of 0-25kHz would result in... speeds of around 14.4 kBytes/s (or 115.9 kbits/s) upload and 28.8 kBytes/s (231.3 kbits/s) download. That's not much of a speed boost. Still, if you've been plodding along on a '56.6k' modem, at speeds of 7.2kBytes/s, this would be like an oasis in the desert. And what about those phone calls? Well, if you make the same phone calls with VoIP that you were with the standard 0-4kHz landline, it would only take about 20.8kbits/s using the G.723.1 codec — that still leaves you with 80% of your broadband capacity when on the phone — and 100% of your broadband when you're off it." Only the US FCC calls 231K "broadband," but as noted it does beat dialup.
Not only that, but my brother is a dial-up user and while he does comment on my connection being faster than his when he's over, the most common "OMG teh coolness!" thing he likes about my connection: it doesn't tie up the phone line.
Seriously, most rural people are not technophiles. I'd suspect that 256kb/s download would be just fine if they also got to free up their telephone line.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Couldn't you just make a special model voip phone that could force the line to switch back to some kind of basic phone service?
It might be a little hard to set up but it would a pretty good back up.
Why were they allowed take a well-defined technical term and re-purpose it as meaningless marketing drivel?
;-) It permits anyone to misuse any term they like for any reason.
;-)
The main reason is called the First Amendment.
In this case, they're just Doing What Marketing Does. They use whatever words are effective in selling what they're selling. They figured out that to the public that has no clue about such technical terms, "broadband" just means "faster". So they adopted it as a marketing term.
It's nothing at all unique to Internet marketing. The same approach is used everywhere that it works. People have been complaining about marketers' misuse of words since marketing came into existence back in prehistory. There's no way we're going to change this, short of educating the public about the actual definition of the terms. And considering the general public contempt for geeky stuff that requires education, that's not going to happen any time soon.
(This misuse isn't nearly as agregious as the use of "quantum" to mean "large", when the technical definition is more like "the smallest difference possible". I'm sure others here have their favorite misuses of technical terms.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Then your definition of "rural" is a bit looser than mine. When I spoke about my broker earlier: his closest neighbor is 6 miles away ;). There is no "town" to speak of.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The same can be said for other terms as well.
Take 'bandwidth' for example. It traditionally means the width of a channel, as in the difference between an upper and lower cutoff frequencies. So say you have a bandpass filter that blocks all frequencies below 1 MHz and above 5 Mhz. It's bandwidth is said to be 4 MHz.
In the digital era though, it has evolved to also mean data rate. This has come about because channel width on an analog medium directly impacts channel capacity; the wider the channel, the greater the capacity and the faster the data rates. This somehow got manipulated into using bandwidth to describe data rate in general, and now you regularly hear people using it to describe how fast their internet connections are.
Using the term bandwidth for a digital medium, (such as a differential signaling medium like USB,Firewire, PCIe, Fast Ethernet, etc) doesn't make any sense in the classical sense as there are no 'channels' to have 'widths'. In today's terminology though, it makes perfect sense and is completely acceptable.
Basically, get used to it. Technology evolves, and language must evolve with it. The fact is the people evolving the language aren't the ones evolving the technology; they're usually the ones selling the technology.