I would like to throw in my 20 ounces of salt ... and support Pam McLean. Stories from my life:
When changing the German National Research Center for Computing in 1985 for the Engineering University of Nicaragua I felt like I was transported to the moon - dark side. Whereas in Germany I had already access to uunet and email, a simple letter exchange from Nicaragua back to Germany required 3-6 weeks. Therefore I was extremely happy when I succeded in 1988 to connect by long distance phone calls (Nicaragua--Vermont) 3 times a day Nicaragua as Blue Internet Node (.ni) to UUNET...Suddenly affordable turn around time was 48 hours -instead of 3 weeks- and more over the usenet Newsgroups provided an excellent mechanism for getting help from technical communities and their volunteers. (all by phone-calls and compressed email transfer). In 1994 we went online as a country (!!) sharing with Costa Rica a 64K link (!) to the IX in Miami. Again a substantial change as from there on we had not to pay for connection time -as in the phone-times- but rather the limit of "what is transferable" was defined by "mean time between failure" ie. it was possible to send everything (or to get everything) if only the transmision-time did not exceed a couple of hours. We even had software to schedule up/down-loads to low-traffic hours during the night. (In that respect: there are hundreds of proven solutions still around from those times where Usenet was a Dial-Up connected Network, yet covering the whole globe with already hundreds of thousands of users and hundreds of nodes. Many of those are still shipped as unknown parts of FreeBSD or Linux with BSD compatible solutions, such that there is no need to re-invent the wheel. These include Batched Mail-transfer not the extremely resource intensive SMTP peer-to-peer email. Scheduled transfers, the whole usenet-news mechanism with decentralized multi-origin feeds yet locally made consistent etc. etc. etc.) Obviously today with a Cablemodem at my homeoffice -still in Nicaragua- and effective 8-9 KB/s it's nice to chat with my son using WEB-cam (He is on a 7 month visit to Germany). Likewise downloading 20 MB in minutes facilitates ... but it's only a gradual change compared with the jumps before. Concluding Remarks: If WiFi and other Broadband Technologies cut connection costs substantially, they may be extremely useful. However I suspect -except true Broadband online comunication- that in 99% of the cases a mix between distributing bulk information using DVD/RW as media and combining it with a low-bandwidth connection will solve the problem. (As an example: communication of medical information from remote places can be split into burning lots of Info onto an DVD/RW and have it shipped by what ever means are available combined with text-chat with the counseling central hospital once the DVD arrived there. Assume you get 3.6 GB of information this way in 12 hours to the hospital, it would need almost 9 hours to send the same content through a 1 Megabit/second direct connection). Likewise 99% of eLearning-materials can be shipped as DVD/RW -as it does not change day by day- and then locally combined with either character-email or character-chat. Hence: if the alternative is to connect many (and through-out the country) by low-bandwidth or a few with megabyte links, go for the first. The latter will come -almost by itself- as technology costs fall and demand increases. Yours Cornelio ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
