Hi Peter,
You bring up two interesting points. The first being your assertion that all wireless is an extension of fiber, which I largely agree with, although satellite and some still-functioning coaxial and microwave analog systems using FDM (if this discussion is to include the digital divide on a global scale), which are still scattered around the world, are still filling the gap in many areas. But your statement about the dependence of wireless on fiber is, in a 'round-about way, what I was getting at in my earlier reply (msg#97) in this thread.
The second point that you raise, concerning the digital divide (my words, not yours), is far more perplexing, and is an area that I've been interested in for a long time, too. Division, as it turns out, is a relative quality, since now it appears that those who cannot obtain broadband will be relegated to have-not status before long, too. But let's stick with the purely digital indigent for now, those who are entirely without any immediate hope of obtaining any access, at all.
This last point, re: under-served area coverage, is often associated with arguments for extending various forms of wireless, usually satellite, to sparsely served areas. Pointing to satellite as a solution has its merits, despite satellite's not being directly regarded as wireless these days, in the popular wired/wireless vernacular, where satellite has achieved a catalog niche all its own.
Back in '94 I had a long-standing discussion (spirited debate at times) on the Compuserve Telecommunications Forum where I did traffic copping for a hobby for a while. The thread ran for about six months, on and off, with one of the chief technobots at McCaw's/Gates' Teledesic.
(As an aside, I visited that forum last night and gave them a jagged piece of my mind for AOLizing the joint, when I attempted to retrieve some of the above-referenced discussions that I had archived in their filing system, but can no longer find due to the 'improvements' that they've instituted to the site! Arrgh!)
The Teledesic technologist's point, in reinforcement of Gates' ostensibly-altruistic view of the world, was that the 840 LEOs would, among other things, close the digital divide on continents where inhabitants had never even (and still haven't) made their first telephone call.
The latter characterization of a primitive existence would invariably bring into question a plethora of other issues for inspection, as I'm sure you've been through yourself, from time to time. Such as: Where does the electricity come from to power earth stations (that don't exist yet) and the end user terminals, handsets, PCs? Illiteracy and innumeracy. The violation of cultural norms in societies that have endured since the beginning of time without outside 'help.' Competing alternatives to satellite. And so on.
These arguments are still germane today, with varying degrees of pertinence, to locations whose names start with letters from A to Z, from the outbacks of Australia (or Arizona, for that matter) to the innermost hamlets of Zambia.
During those arguments a point I'd make from time to time is the same one that I made here (that you responded to): that fiber would eventually find its way, through creep, to those same locales, where the very last mile extension would be achieved by wireless. The bot countered that this would take too long, and that Satellite would be the main approach to solving the divide in such situations for the foreseeable future.
In the interim, as it turns out, neither approach has really made too much of a difference in areas of greatest need, although it appears that fiber has been gaining some ground while satellite has stayed the course, or taken a step back in certain respects. Witness the reduction in the number of birds Teledesic now states that they will support, eventually, maybe, which now stands at something less than 250 or so. Initially, they were boasting 840 - including "spares," and this stemmed from a form of grandiose thinking, imo, that was about seven or eight years prior to the bubble-bent that pervaded the late Nineties and into 2000. I can't help but think that this was a good harbinger of things to come for anyone who was good at reading tea leaves at the time. 20/20 HS, granted.
Add to this the very dismal performance of several other brain children, namely, the once-failed Iridium and the near-failed Globalstar systems, among others.
While writing this post I received another, which was sent to me by George D on the nFCTF. George's post also deserves attention when addressing underserved areas: Free Space Optics, which is an area you recently expressed an interest, yourself:
Message 16849420 |
