Reach Out and Touch Someone

[sarabande7]

"Life was so simple back in January of 1982. This was when Washington's first 100 hand-held cellphones were put into service. The size of a Philly cheese steak, each weighed almost two pounds. . . " *

This quote is from a Washington Post Article concerning the idea that pretty much everyone on Earth will soon have a cell phone (and why

Comments

[flutehues]

My phone can take a picture of the marquee sign down in Columbus saying "The Greatest Love Story Ever Told Cancelled," which I can then send to Jess. That rocks. And texting during rehearsal is very cathartic.

[_quinn]

I originally read that as "... which I can then send to Jesus," which would also rock, although in a totally different way. :)

As far as causes, at least one of them is that the developing world is using cellphones because the limited infrastructure they require can be deployed very cheaply; you don't actually have to run copper cables everywhere.

As for the rest of the article, I'm not convinced that making cliques location-indepent is such a good thing...

[sarabande7]

For my third attempt this week to reply

[_quinn]

The speed of wireless saturation may well be inversely proportional to the existing coverage/quality of landlines; anything that lowers the bar helps. Frequently, it's not so much the infrastructure proper as the company that runs it which provides most of the drag on improving infrastructure; I suspect this has a lot more to do with broadband penetration than the lack of existing infrastructure. (Obviously, if you're running wires out to someplace for the first time, they may as well be broadband [fiber optics, etc]. I imagine in sompelace like South Korea, the government said "there shall be broadband"; and there was. Because of bizarreness introduced by the long history of AT&T and some odd decisions by, among others, the FCC, that'd be much harder to do in the US

From around the same time last year. . .

[sarabande7]

This article from March 2008 concerns a test in which an 802.11n connection was stretched about 60 mi "using off-the-shelf hardware, including parabolic antennas, for its project, dubbed the rural connectivity platform (RCP)."

Yeah, I just now got round to reading it. Don't ask.

I'm pretty convinced that muni wi-fi is ultimately a no-go (didn't work in philly, right?) for purely commercial reasons, even leaving aside any debate over security issues. But how is this application for rural networks actually playing out? The article references a test in Panama, connecting a hotel's wi-fi to a tree-mounted receiver in a village several miles away. Do you think we're gonna be doing this, or sticking to cellular modems and satellite connections?

Re: From around the same time last year. . .

[_quinn]

I like the idea of municipal wifi, but I think you're right; the problem, of course, is "commercial." (I tend to think we should nationalize pretty much all of the telecoms /infrastructure/. The attempt to regulate the natural monopolies in telecoms (and cable) has obviously failed; the government should provide the pipes (generally fiber, although in rural areas, high-speed wireless would be perfectly acceptable), and companies can compete to deliver packages over them, whether that be conventional TV stations, or fast cached access to Hulu, or whatever. Wireless (cell) service is a more interesting question; it's even more obviously public property than right-of-way, or whatever it's called, but OTOH, the government had no part in paying for the cell phone towers (unlike the phone lines, where it granted AT&T a monopoly to get them built, and legislated things like the universal connectivity charges), and there's obviously more room for competition in wireless service than in landlines. If the nation is serious about broadband,