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.

Comments

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

I can make a Hot Pocket WITH the internet! Genius.

Everything old is new again

[Rhinobird]

So....they're bringing back MCI?

Re:Rain fade.

[geekmux]

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.

I didn't know a hung-over backhoe operator was considered in the same class as a major earthquake.

What exactly has caused your last three fiber outages? Chances are it was a human behind a stick or wheel, and not Mother Nature.

Re:Fiber is fast!

[SirSlud]

Sure, let's solve this problem by ... uh .. what, legislating HTML practices? Brilliant.

Re:I don't understand..

[cdrudge]

So remove the air from the fiber. Make it a vacuum. God do I have to think of everything?!?!

Re:I don't understand..

[Anonymous Coward]

And then sell the "oxygen free" fiber cables to Hi-Fi nuts who want to improve the quality of their streaming audio.... Profit!

Having worked at weather.com for 10+ yrs

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Light is still the speed limit.

[Aqualung812]

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?