"According to my calculations, the nation’s network is capable of delivering less than 1% of my iMac’s capability to communicate to my friend’s computer across town!
LESS THAN ONE %!!! Darn close to zero... That is one heck of a barrier! "
"According to my calculations, the nation’s network is capable of delivering less than 1% of my iMac’s capability to communicate to my friend’s computer across town!
LESS THAN ONE %!!! Darn close to zero... That is one heck of a barrier! "
I have been involved with technology since I was nine years old. I remember the wonder of arranging capacitors, coils, crystals, and such in certain positions relative to one another. Connecting them with wire in a specific sequence. Finally, placing the magnetic earphones on my head and moving the whisker around the crystal, exploring for that one spot that brought the sound of a wireless station cracking into my ears--magic!
Every year, in the past decades since my crystal set days, I have been amazed and delighted with each technological advance brought to light by us humans. Sometimes, I have been involved with them myself--what a rush! I am proud to be a bit of a geek.
Today, I have a bit of an embarrassing task to perform. I need to point out something so obvious the situation reminds me of the old fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In that fable a single innocent child was able to state the obvious without embarrassment. I am neither a child nor innocent in the ways of technology, hence my embarrassment. After a touch of telecommunications infrastructure history, I will reveal the obvious:
In 1854, the U.S. Supreme Court awarded Samuel F.B. Morse a patent on the Telegraph which he used to send and receive his Morse Code--a means to transmit information from one point to another via electric pulses over copper wire strung between poles. I mark this as the start of America’s telecommunications industry. A few short years later, Marconi was sending Morse’s Code wireless across the Atlantic! Alexander Graham Bell showed us how to send analog voice signals over the copper wire. In fact, Bell setup the first telephone network in New Haven, Connecticut in 1878. Long distance networking came in 1884 with wires strung from Boston to New York.
This more than century old telecommunications architecture has been steadily enhanced over the decades until traffic on the network became too great to pass freely without delay. At that point (not very long ago), each new enhancement became a “patch” to postpone the re-architecting of America’s telecommunications network. Faster traffic switching made incremental gains. Then, placing “traffic light” computers in the system, to prioritize each bit of information passing through the network, helped for awhile but, at the expense of further delaying most data.
OK... So, January, 2006. Here I sit writing away on my Apple Computer 20” iMac with all of its power (I can watch DVD movies in the background, check on how my cross country flight simulation is going, perform monitoring of my web servers while I use my two fingers to type this article and the computer is still idling along). This computer, like all computers today, comes with ways to connect to other computers over a network. The main connection is a GIGABIT ETHERNET connection.
Now, within my own office, I can connect all my computers together using the Gigabit Ethernet ports and the computers can talk to each other very fast. But, as soon as I try to connect to my friend’s computer across town (or across the nation), I must use our nation’s telecommunications networks between the two computers... They operate at a reduced rate. A greatly reduced rate! In rural Washington state, my consumer choices for “broadband” are DSL that might allow me to get through the network (on a good day) at a rate of 1.5 Megabits (by the way, a Gigabit would be 1,000 Megabits...) or cable which might be 2-3 times faster than DSL.
According to my calculations, the nation’s network is capable of delivering less than 1% of my iMac’s capability to communicate to my friend’s computer across town!
LESS THAN ONE PERCENT!!! Darn close to zero... That is one heck of a barrier!
Typically, at this point in a conversation with the public, I get someone who states, “That is all the bandwidth we need.” Of course, the audience mostly responds in agreement because they have no experience with applications or programs on their computer that would take advantage of more network bandwidth... I can envision similar arguments about bringing electricity into our rural area over a hundred years ago... Oh yes, and the rural telephone system as well...
I am certainly aware that, for a large sum of money, I can lease network facilities between specific points to satisfy my need to communicate at a higher rate with my friend. But, I cannot personally justify the expense for that one friend let alone all my friends and relations.
Interestingly, there are areas of the planet that have not been burdened by a long-standing (old) telecommunications system. They are building new networks. Fiber Optic networks of much higher capacity. Those areas may be on the other side of the world from America but they are connected to us at the speed of light via high-capacity fiber cables running over the sea bed between all the continents... That is why, when calling a help desk you may wonder about the accent of the helpful person on the other end--that person may be sitting at a desk in India.
Our old telecommunications network is leaking economic growth as though it were the nation’s life blood. Come to think about it, it is the nation’s life blood...
So, what can we do? First, do not totally blame the telecommunications companies. They are in a business trap designed over years by legislation and honed by tight competition. Their only action can be re-action with quick patches of technology to maintain the bottom line one more week or month.
In many areas of our rural country, public agencies have tried to build their own local telecommunications systems using fiber optic cables, cable, and wireless technologies. Some have been wildly successful. Some have failed, wasting public dollars.
The biggest effect that most of these public sector attempts have had is to place the telecommunications companies on the defensive. They have even gone so far as to attempt to get legislation through Congress to stop such attempts by public (local government) agencies.
The result is, we bicker and battle among ourselves while other areas of the world continue to gain and pass America on the economic front. The phrase, “Fiddling while Rome burns.” comes to mind--appropriate, if out of context.
The barrier remains. Until our national network can support each one of our computers at or near its network capability, our economy will continue to see jobs move away. We will also continue to see the digital divide increase within this country. America’s innovation is bottled up just waiting for this barrier to be eliminated.
Public agencies (towns, counties, states) must work together with telecommunications companies to pool resources and rebuild the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure based not on copper but, fiber optic cables; based on network architecture requiring fewer, simpler switching nodes. A network design that has enough capacity so NO DATA IS LEFT BEHIND . There will be no need to prioritize data types impeding the flow as they move through the network. Every data stream will be top priority.
What can we do with such a network? That is a much larger paper (actually, a book) for another time... Besides, the CAT scan of my lungs just arrived over my fiber connection from my doctor. He is on the video link, “Hi, Doc! You want me to rotate the image so I can see the inner spine area? OK, got it. What is that little white dot, Doc?...”
