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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.
ATT had the same idea. In about 1945.
I can make a Hot Pocket WITH the internet! Genius.
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
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.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
So remove the air from the fiber. Make it a vacuum. God do I have to think of everything?!?!
And then sell the "oxygen free" fiber cables to Hi-Fi nuts who want to improve the quality of their streaming audio.... Profit!
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.
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.