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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.
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.
For those who don't want to Google:
http://www.drgibson.com/towers...
http://www.engineeringradio.us...
Speed of light in fibre is about two-thirds that of vacuum.
Also the fact that microwave towers can be placed more directly than trying to lay a fiber directly between population centers. Most fiber runs along highways/railroads which have other constraints than must be straight between two points.
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
Yep, nothing makes you realize why modern websites are so slow like the first time you install NoScript. I never knew before then how many websites were having me download half the damn internet over and over again.
caniuse.com's background-size chart claims that Safari for iOS has defects in its handling of background-size: cover.
While this is true, the same is also true of the present incarnation of AT&T, which used to be Southwestern Bell, and later bought the remnant AT&T and changed its name/etc.
:)
Verizon is the result of the merger of Bell Atlantic (who had also bought NYNEX (another Baby Bell)) and GTE. Verizon bought MCI Worldcom in 2005, which became Verizon's business division (and is also known now as "Verizon Business").
So even through all the twists and turns, the universe manages to maintain equilibrium somehow