Hi Jim, your last post covers a lot of real estate. I'll focus on the distributed-community call processing approach. Of course, the term "call" in "call processing" conjures up an image of a voice type of operating venue, and is overly generalized, but can and does also apply to data connections and sessions, as well.
In their book titled "The First 100 Feet:Options for Internet and Broadband Access (Harvard Information Infrastructure Project)," Deborah Hurley and James H. Keller devote a chapter to this topic which is titled:
"The Rooftop Community Network: Free, High-Speed Network Access for Communities" ...
... with contributions submitted by David A. Beyer, Mark Vestich and JJ Garcia-Luna-Aceves. I commend this book for its contents, in general.
Okay, so it's not a model that fits the marketectural service platform profiles that the big players would have you swallow. But neither was the Internet itself at one point. And it certainly has its pitfalls, but where it is most desirous is where there are no alternatives at this time. I am personally aware of at least two initiatives, on a personal level (having been asked to partake in one of them, of my own time), where neighborhood forms of reception and hand-off to one another constitute the general scheme, similar to what you've called the bucket brigade approach, akin to what the VDMA scheme suggests, but not necessarily involving this particular vendor's hardware platform (although I tend to think that the VDMA vendor's wares would be appropriate there, as well).
In each of the cases I've cited, the major carriers and ISPs are nowhere to be found, for one reason or another.
In case you are interested, the book's vitals are:
Title:"The First 100 Feet: Options for Internet and Broadband Access"
Paperback - 209 pages (June 1999)
MIT Press;
ISBN: 0262581604 |
