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

Re:Prior art

[BenFranske]

I always smile when passing old long-lines towers on the road (or seeing them on top of central office buildings in large cities). You can get an idea of the size and scope of the network at http://long-lines.net/ which has some excellent maps such as http://i.imgur.com/HI0cMJ1.jpg showing the network.

Re:Rain rain go away

[Megane]

I remember the bad old days in the '80s when cable TV reception would go to shit on rainy days because they used microwave links to connect their various head ends in a big city. Then they upgraded the whole system to fiber, which turned out to be a good thing years later when cable modems became a thing.