On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Brian D Williams wrote:
> 250 billion is the lowball figure just to rewire the U.S. with
> fiber.
Say, that's a lot of fiber. Given that modern fiber can carry few TBps,
and hollow core fiber even more, what are you going to do with the
bandwidth? What's wrong with LoS and wireless for the last mile?
> You want worldwide Universal wireless connectivity? For how many
> people? The whole world?
Ahem, we already have that. It's just a tad too expensive for general use.
> Lets see there are about 6.2 billion people in the world, if we
> could do this for $1000 a port (we can't get even close to that)
> you're talking 6.2 trillion dollars. The real figure to build such
> a system is probably considerably more.
How much connectivity do you need? Few kbps from any point of the world
for anyone who can fork over a few $100 for the wireless receiver should
be doable right now for two figure gigabucks. If the user base would
scale, it would be even cheap.
> Of course if we're talking about a system for a few thousand rich
> techies, it would be less.
While we're talking about a few k rich techies, Iridium is selling data
transfer services.
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:39:41 MDT