Slashdot Mirror
Microwave Comms Betwen Population Centers Could Be Key To Easing Internet Bottlenecks
itwbennett writes: Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Duke University recently looked at the main causes of Internet latency and what it would take to achieve speed-of-light performance. The first part of the paper, titled Towards a Speed of Light Internet, is devoted to finding out where the slowdowns are coming from. They found that the bulk of the delay comes from the latency of the underlying infrastructure, which works in a multiplicative way by affecting each step in the request. The second part of the paper proposes what turns out to be a relatively cheap and potentially doable solution to bring Internet speeds close to the speed of light for the vast majority of us. The authors propose creating a network that would connect major population centers using microwave networks.
ATT had the same idea. In about 1945.
I can make a Hot Pocket WITH the internet! Genius.
So....they're bringing back MCI?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
They propose shifting more latency sensitive bits to microwave links. Specifically DNS and TCP Handshakes ya know those top 2 DDOS vectors. We already have protocols to tunnel through DNS. I'm sure that will go so well.
No sir I dont like it.
.. why we would want to use microwaves for this. Fiber is shielded, and capable of higher throughput. While I can understand using microwaves to communicate with satellites, I don't see why we would use them for communications between two population centers.
This might just be my dislike of wireless in general, but I don't see how this could solve latency issues...
Microwave networks are extremely susceptible to rain fade, and as such are not a good choice for important data links like these would be. We already have a technology which allows signals to travel at the speed of light and is immune to weather, solar radiation, and nearly anything else short of a major earthquake. It's called single mode fiber optic cable.
... that were slowly dismantled in the 90s because fibre optic was supposedly better would it?
You have to laugh. Another generation comes along and re-invents the wheel. Again.
Some microwave frequencies are sensitive to the weather.
I'm not sure if there are any that are weather-insensitive to be useful in a thunderstorm, snowstorm, or in heavy low-lying clouds/foggy conditions.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Fiber is amply fast.
The bottleneck is the cavalier attitude of web designers to network resources. You do not need to load 25 different URLs (DNS lookups, plus autoplay video and all the usual clickbait junk) to show me a weather forecast. Or a Slashdot article, for that matter...
...laura
Mesh networks, peer-to-peer between nodes (homes/businesses,etc), would be useful for offloading non-time critical applications such as file transfers and open up opportunities for local delivery of online services that eliminate the need to send traffic through major choke points.
I know exactly where. From the 80% of traffic that is useless ads/malware. Oh, and cats. Too many fluffy cat pictures
Hasn't the cell phone network already gobbled up all the best microwave bandwidth around cities?
Bandwidth is not infinite, and due to that, it won't scale up.
This is one of those pie in the sky solutions that simply doesn't scale, and even if it could, would manage to only work by stealing other spectrum, and in the end runs up against the physical fact that there isn't any more spectrum being made: Here's the spectrum chart reality check:
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/...
Pick who you are going to kick off.
The future of the net, and wireless is going to be in the opposite direction, of getting as much as possible in fiber, where spectrum actually can get close to infinite, because if you need more bandwidth, you add seperate fibers. Then that last few feet is wireless. maybe even @ infrared.
All else is just tricks and research funding bait.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Most people have no need to worry about latency. Bandwidth is the issue, and that's more political than technical.
Their proposed nationwide network seems to omit several states. I get better coverage with Verizon.
Lasers would offer the same line-of-sight links, but with much more bandwidth. It could be used with existing cable as a backup for bad weather, just like the microwave proposal.
In Lousiville, CO, I lived in one of the few neighborhoods that was skipped over for broadband in 1999. Sprint setup a microwave service that filled in the gap. Bandwidth was awesome - I was getting 10-30 MBs regularly. The downside was the latency - 100 ms ping times were the norm. I remember trying to play Duke Nuke 'Em with friends and having the unfair "advantage" of disappearing regularly when my client didn't ping back in time. Being line-of-site, there were also issues with trees occasionally swaying in front of the dish (a pizza box attached to my roof) and snow blocking the signal.
As others have pointed out, microwave Internet isn't something new and, unfortunately, in the real world isn't a perfect solution.
-Chris
Google Fiber is 20 ms to 30 ms to East and West coasts (I'm in KC metro). I get "Flash has crashed" with low latency on Slashdot much faster.
I know that a particular communication company uses microwave towers in remote / hazardous / construction challenged (i.e. Grand Canyon) / sparsely populated areas. Fiber is used everywhere else.
MCI is part of Verizon now. So even in 2015, the biggest competitor of AT&T is still (the parent of) MCI.
Does anyone besides gamers and high frequency traders care about latency? I manage a server farm on the other side of the country, and latency is not an issue at all for interactive use whether typing at the command line using ssh or using RDP to connect to a Windows server. For the general internet user, I don't see much utility in cutting round-trip latency in half from the current 60ms I'm getting now to the 30 ms a speed of light connection would give. (though there'd be additional latency from all of the microwave repeaters along the way). The current "fix" of using anycast DNS servers, CDN's to bring content closer to you, and protocols that minimize the need to make multiple round-trips for content seem like a far better solution since they provide redundancy, reduce long-distance bandwidth needs, and reduce the load on the network and servers.
Perhaps we will have less snow to shovel then.
Speed of light is not such a big deal. Packet forwarding is. If the speed of light is affecting how much money you can make, then you are not doing society a benefit by making that money.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Remove all the government spying crap. That would probably speed it up a bit.
From the summary article, "... the median fetch time was about 35 times the speed of light, while the 80th percentile was more than 100 times the speed of light."
Wow! So your average Internet search blows right past the laws of physics.
Or maybe the writer meant 1/35th and 1/100th and couldn't figure out how to say that.
Canada had a microwave network across the nation by the end of the 1950s.
https://www.historicacanada.ca...
Just use the frigging dark fiber that is already running between them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
caniuse.com's background-size chart claims that Safari for iOS has defects in its handling of background-size: cover.
You made my day! :)))
You have no idea how many wars were fought over: "WHY IS THE SITE SO SLOW?!? Google's fast! Why can't you make us fast like Google?!?"
Yeah, that was a real mystery to all of us who weren't in product or ads...
Typo in headline.
Is that like the internet of things?
people in there ivory towers, ... I mean microwave towers -- trying to be relevant.
Now no one's garage door opener will ever work again.
Buffering and switching latency is the main source of delay, not signal latency in the copper and fiber. Microwaves would do exactly nothing to improve the switching and buffering latency. If anything they'd make it worse: light in fiber travels much further than line-of-sight microwave before it has to be regenerated with another delay.
Who peer-reviewed this paper? Did they know the first thing about networking?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Why would ISP's want to upgrade to provide us with higher speeds? They've already been heard saying what we have is enough?
They will continue business as usual overcharging us for their wares and delivering nothing.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The only reason they're thinking it has less latency is because they're only considering a point-to-point case.
Once you wire that up to the various hubs and routers of the underlying DSL or cable infrastructure, or try to send traffic to somewhere other than the end-point the microwave is connected to, your latency rapidly goes to shit.
Add in the fact that fiber can transmit over longer distances, the weather-induced degradation of most microwave links, the fact that the whole link drops when a semi-tractor travels along the highway between the two links when line-of-sight is close to the ground, the need for high and unsightly towers to get over the trees and buildings, and the final fact that microwave towers were decommissioned in Canada precisely because of all these problems, and all you can say is:
Bad idea.
Very bad idea.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Isn't that what is called a wireless bridge? ... (edge router) to each is beyond me. I guess to save on money through the service provider.
What is a wireless bridge? Take a building and other one maybe across the street and connect to it with a commercial strength wireless connection for a local network. Now why do that instead of adding a
is the DPI gear used by the cops.
For faster Internet they clearly wants more bits to move as photons, at the speed of light through fibre. Nothing is faster (latency, throughput, bandwidth), and all the nearby alternatives including microwave as more expensive and less reliable.
The organizations that had microwave towers for communications, namely telecommunication companies and media broadcasters, have long since migrated to a) satellite or b) fibre for their primary connections. The only microwave links that I know of locally (~100km) are small short-haul for local broadcasters (not-for-profit media broadcasters) and piece-wise legacy systems as backups to fibre loops. Latency, throughput, and operational costs are all factors.
More researchers who know nothing about electrical or RF engineering (both fields with over 100 years of development) making stupid shark with laser style claims. Or at least the people who are writing about their speculations, are making such stupid claims.
I remember getting a request for a cluster that was proposed to be split between a midwest USA site and London. Conversation was something like this (not exact numbers, but I did do the math at the time):
PHB: We need less than 50ms latency.
Me: Can't be done. We're at around 120ms right now with 10ms jitter using VPN.
PHB: What about MPLS?
Me: That might get us to 115ms with 5ms jitter.
PHB: Well, we have to come up with a solution. What else can we do?
Me: Slap Einstein? This is a physics problem, not an IT problem.
PHB: This is OUR problem to solve.
Me: Ok, if we buy our own glass, lay it in a straight line between us and London, which also includes some sort of housing for it that I don't know exists that would prevent issues with freezing/melting/icebergs, we'd end up with 72 ms.
PHB: So there really isn't anything we can do...*starts walking away*
Me: Hold on! I have another idea! We can tunnel through the earth, and skip the water issue if we can come up with a new type of shielding that can withstand tectonic forces and heat. That will allow us to get to 55 ms since we're not dealing with the curvature of the earth! Will that work?
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Internet peering points are not in every large city. your traffic might get routed hundreds of miles out of the way if your server is on a different ISP than your client.
A much of the internet lattency could be reduced ISP's peered in every market.
Since we are thinking about latency, propagation delay, then microwave is almost 50% faster than fiber for a straight line path, and most fiber networks don't go straight, but microwaves (that is to say "radio") does. This is because light does not propagate down a fiber as fast as radio waves do in "free space."
Bandwidth is another thing. You can get a lot more bits per second onto a terahertz carrier than on a gigahertz carrier.
So, if latency is the issue, maybe fiber is not fast enough.
This is not really news, we've seen anecdotal evidence of high-speed traders using microwave networks to gain a slight speed advantage over their competition using fiber networks.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I'm close enough to the industry to know that the book "Flash Boys" paints a realistics picture. There's billions of dollars to be made in the highest speed point to point communication available for high frequency trading. If the private sector can secure the radio/spectrum licenses this will happen by itself (and I would not be surprised to find out that it already has).
With all that power, we'd finally be able to run some kind of spell checker. You know.... in the time "betwen" posting articles,
I don't see how this is any more "speed-of-light" than the light travelling in a buried fiber.
Of course, the speed of light in air is faster than the speed of light in fiber. Duh. It still doesn't make a lot of sense, since most of the latency on the Internet comes from buffering and processing in network equipment.
Been there, done that. Oh, did I mention it works? I worked and resided in a part of Canada that still retains a Microwave Transmission Network ... a tower every 60 miles stretching north ... as part of a strategic backup communications network. Most Microwave systems have been de-commissioned in Canada but a few were retained (Canadian teleco and media satellites were launched in the early 60's and that is the primary network to this day).
But all our telephone and data networking is via a box about 12" square that has a direct line-of-sight to a tower, T1 speeds, plus telecom and DSL to a community about 20 miles from our worksite, plus a couple of other worksites with more than 200 employees each.
Fast and reliable, we have on average 160 devices connecting at any given time. Cheap, too ... WAY cheaper than stringing poles.