Ken Harvey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Peter Machell wrote: > > > >> Ken, how do you get an reply out of a politician the next day? > > You zap them every time their public utterances are stupid and ill > informed (which takes a lot of E-mails) and sometimes you get a > response!
Given that at least one journo who writes health IT articles for a national newspaper monitors this list, I would have thought that there is an opportunity here to list the reasons why ADSL is not sufficient to support modern health care now and certainly not in a few years from now. DIagnostic imaging and telemedicine involving video cams and remote consultation spring to mind, but fleshing out some scenarious would be good. Also, there is the more basic issue of reliability - Internet services which are down for several hours on a random basis every few weeks just don't cut the mustard. My fibre-optic (domestic grade) cable connection at home has had unscheduled outage of just a few hours on a single occasion over the last 3 years - that's the sort of reliability medical practices need, surely? > For example, while the iiNet ADSL II plus has a theoretical (advertised) > speed of (24,000 KBits down / 1000 KBits up) in practice I get a > download speed of around 3000 KBits/sec and an upload speed of about 650 > KBits/sec) speed test from http://www.tcpiq.com/ The other important parameters are latency i.e. how long it takes to set up a TCP/IP connection to a remote server and get a response, which has a dramatic impact on teh usability of interactive browser-based applications, and the packet loss rate which is experienced dropped connections with Web applications making them appear to "hang" or freeze, and other forms of unreliability. High bandwidth links with long latencies are often worse than medium bandwidth links with short latency. However, in general, the higher the bandwidth, teh shorter the latency, but that is not a hard and fast rule and there are many exceptions. Can the network gurus on this list confirm that? Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
