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Slashdot: Internet over the airwaves. What.
Viendin
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
First, I should provide a link.
Now, what?
I'm intending for this thread to be a discussion on a few different aspects of this idea. First and foremost in my mind is how in god's name it would actually work, because the article linked in the story doesn't really explain anything but the possible networking arrangements.
Second among the topics is something that the story delves into pretty well - how this sort of thing could affect companies that are already providing the majority of the available broadband service.
Then, hey, maybe something about Google's interest in this, and those old wive's tails of hundreds (thousands?) of miles of dark fibre and 20-30 portable datacentres that Google's acquired over the past 2-3 years.
So to the first: How would this work? I'm utterly confused. I can understand the concept of content delivery via airwave, as, hey, Television works pretty well. But, interactive content delivery? Television works because it's passive and we're tuning in to a constant signal - we only choose what signal we're tuning in to. With the internet, for any real functionality, we of course need to send and receive packets. So we could tune ourselves into the signal, but ... how do we send our packets back? I can imagine three scenarios:
1) Packets get sent back through phone/cable/power wiring, in an interesting and complicated parallelization of existing networks and television signals, to allow interaction between the end user and the content provider.
2) High powered transmission antennae are installed wherever this service is put into use. Neither of these two account for the complexity or difficulty of getting some sort of unique information from a server when there's only whitespace available for all required content, and possibly thousands of users in any random number of locations attempting to access the unique content simultaneously.
3) This wouldn't be very interactive, or interactive at all. This would essentially become the vehicle for internet-tv, and provide streaming content that is non-unique and chosen/controlled entirely by the companies that provide it. It would be television but .. internet'd.
So, none of those seem like great solutions, and that's why I'm confused. G&T'ers, help.
Now, what?
I'm intending for this thread to be a discussion on a few different aspects of this idea. First and foremost in my mind is how in god's name it would actually work, because the article linked in the story doesn't really explain anything but the possible networking arrangements.
Second among the topics is something that the story delves into pretty well - how this sort of thing could affect companies that are already providing the majority of the available broadband service.
Then, hey, maybe something about Google's interest in this, and those old wive's tails of hundreds (thousands?) of miles of dark fibre and 20-30 portable datacentres that Google's acquired over the past 2-3 years.
So to the first: How would this work? I'm utterly confused. I can understand the concept of content delivery via airwave, as, hey, Television works pretty well. But, interactive content delivery? Television works because it's passive and we're tuning in to a constant signal - we only choose what signal we're tuning in to. With the internet, for any real functionality, we of course need to send and receive packets. So we could tune ourselves into the signal, but ... how do we send our packets back? I can imagine three scenarios:
1) Packets get sent back through phone/cable/power wiring, in an interesting and complicated parallelization of existing networks and television signals, to allow interaction between the end user and the content provider.
2) High powered transmission antennae are installed wherever this service is put into use. Neither of these two account for the complexity or difficulty of getting some sort of unique information from a server when there's only whitespace available for all required content, and possibly thousands of users in any random number of locations attempting to access the unique content simultaneously.
3) This wouldn't be very interactive, or interactive at all. This would essentially become the vehicle for internet-tv, and provide streaming content that is non-unique and chosen/controlled entirely by the companies that provide it. It would be television but .. internet'd.
So, none of those seem like great solutions, and that's why I'm confused. G&T'ers, help.
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Viendin on
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There must be some way to make it work without wires though... I mean your cell phone sends a signal a mighty distance.