Friday, June 3, 2011

We have the technology, we can save him.

No, this isn't going to be a post about the six million dollar man, or the remake with the female lead (although I do enjoy both), this is a post about the internet. Now obviously if you're reading this, you have a decent enough internet connection, which means you also most likely live in a pretty well developed country. However, there are many places in the world where there is either absolutely no internet access, or it's very expensive and very slow. I am currently in Iraq, and the internet over here is garbage. In order to get even 256 kb/s for a month it's going to cost you $60 U.S.. I can get 15 Mbps for the same price back in the states. The excuse that TigrisNet gives is as follows directly from their FAQ section:

"Bandwidth in the Middle East area is extremely expensive because multiple satellites must be used (with multiple International satellite hops) to get the bandwidth to the country of Iraq. In the US, bandwidth is nowhere near the cost it is in Iraq because America has better Internet and Wifi infrastructure, the surplus of fiber backbones, and high speed cable lines to propagate the bandwidth."

Now this is bullshit!! Lack of infrastructure or not, there should not be that big of a cost difference. If we want the internet to survive and evolve, there has to be a way to make the internet globally accessible at a reasonable rate (preferably free) with acceptable speeds. I believe this is entirely possible with the technology we have available today, but I don't think anyone is doing anything about it because of the old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and ISP corporations aren't exactly complaining that they get to charge more for less. Maybe it's just because I read too much sci-fi, but I imagined that we would have a global net system similar to what they had in "Ender's Game" by now, but I at least hope to see it in my lifetime. Virtual computing is already about to make a drastic rise in popularity, especially with Google's chromebook about to be released in a couple weeks (which I plan on buying while I'm home to use for blogging and managing my website etc). So would it be too far fetched to have virtual servers located all across the globe/web? Or maybe even start putting servers on satellites constantly orbiting and communicating with each other so no matter where you are in the world you'll always have the same access and the same speed (depending on terrain) no matter where you are in the world. Maybe I'm entirely mistaken and there's no practical way to spread the internet and improve the quality of online time globally right now, but I do hope to see drastic improvements within my lifetime, and I don't just mean faster speeds in the states (or Europe, Canada, Australia etc). Let me know what you think, am I an idiot, do I have a point, do you have any ideas on ways to improve worldwide connectivity? The only way to know is to talk it out and brainstorm. As always, comments are appreciated, let's see what we can come up with.

4 comments:

  1. I totally agree with you. Internet should be a basic human right!
    Or, well, at least, it should be affordable :P
    Great blog btw, I'm following you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. 256 kb/s for $60...
    not bad considering where i live (in texas)
    I pay $25 for a little less than 100 kb/s

    But I definitely see your point, keep up the great blog man!

    ReplyDelete
  3. whoaaw what the hell, i pay $15 for 15 mb/s here in the netherlands, didn't know internet could be that expensive..

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Alekseezy
    What do you think the chances are I would be able to move to the netherlans after I'm done with the Army? Haha.

    ReplyDelete