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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.

5 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...

      --
      Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
    2. Re:Prior art by BenFranske · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. 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

  3. 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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