From: Eugene Leitl <Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
>> 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?
That's to put fiber to every home/business, (last mile) if you're
going to do it right....
Fiber bandwidth just plain blows away any wireless system I've
seen, and in fact if you look at the numbers it's cheaper to
install fiber than it is to try to build a wireless system at high
data rates for that many users.
Besides wireless doesn't scale very well, and no one wants to wire
low traffic (profit) areas.
> 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.
I was just very surprised to learn that Iridium is still around,
but at 2.4Kbps dialup and 10Kbps max and those expensive per
minute/packet rates just how useful is it. Besides how many users
can it support simultaneously? I think the answer is too few to
mention. And it cost how many billions?
>> 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.
It doesn't scale, and it's not upgradable, it supports a limited
number of users, and it's nowhere near 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.
For of billions of dollars invested, supporting a limited number of
users at 2.4 and 10 Kbps, and big bucks.
Still it's a very valuable addition to the worldwide network, if I
was a yachtsman, I'd want one.
Brian
Member:
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