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Microwave Comms Betwen Population Centers Could Be Key To Easing Internet Bottlenecks

Posted by timothy on from the you'll-get-cancer-and-be-well-done dept.

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.

9 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Prior art by Brett+Buck · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ATT had the same idea. In about 1945.

    1. Re: Prior art by Etcetera · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ATT had the same idea. In about 1945.

      Was gonna say the same thing.... or MCI, this being their entire business model, really.

      Kids today! ;) Everything old is new again...

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  2. Selective prioitization by silas_moeckel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Selective prioitization by Rich0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There are so many ways that could be abused though - both by the ISPs and the end users.

      Game server too laggy? Switch it to port 443 UDP - ISPs will think it's Skype voice and give it top priority.

      There is a really simple solution to this. Allow users to set their own QoS rules, and the ISPs respect them, and can charge a different rate for different levels of service.

      So, if you just want your SYNs prioritized it isn't a problem, and it probably won't cost you much. If you want your bittorrent traffic prioritized, that also isn't a problem, and it will cost you a fortune.

      If everybody tried to ship all their mail/etc FedEx priority overnight FedEx would grind to a halt for months until they scaled up. It isn't a problem, and there are no limitations on what can be sent priority overnight, but people regulate themselves because most will not pay $70 to ship something when the $7 service that takes 2 days longer is good enough.

  3. I don't understand.. by iamwhoiamtoday · · Score: 3, Insightful

    .. 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...

  4. Fiber is fast! by spaceyhackerlady · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Fiber is fast! by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And a dozen javascript libraries for stupid shit like mouse-overs that should be done in CSS anyway, or high resolution background images that are 2MB JPEG downloads that use over 6MB of RAM each once decompressed. Backgrounds aren't meant to be high-resolution, crisp and detailed. Learn to use background-size: cover, it works well even with lower resolution images because stretching will blur them a bit, making the compression artifacts even less noticable.

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    2. Re:Fiber is fast! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

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

      Let's solve this problem by first understanding the actual problem and not naively engineering a solution to what is not the underlying problem.

      Must you always approach discussions with knee-jerk attacks on strawmen?

  5. Idiots by Spazmania · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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