BROADCASTING USER NETWORKS
Something facinates me with the idea of accessing network-type
information without using the internet, mainly the idea of not
needing to pay an ISP for access I suppose, as well as a fall-back
for when my mobile broadband connection drops out. I've never got
interested enough to really do much about it mind you. Certainly
not enough to put the time and money into getting an amateur radio
licence, and I'm too far away from any of the WiFi-based local
networks which are/were set up in many larger Australian cities.
The reason for these limitations on both unlicensed (WiFi) and
licensed (packet radio and derivatives, at least in Australia) data
communications is that the existing systems all rely on
bi-directional communication. The user needs to transmit a request
for the data they want to receive. That means they need a dedicated
channel of communication, within the limited radio bandwidth
available for that use, so you need to restrict usage (with
licencing, or range/power limits) to stop everyone clogging up the
airwaves.
The alternative is something like broadcast radio/TV programmes,
where users/listeners just have to wait for the time when the
information they desire will be broadcast. What if you did that
with a large set of text content like all Gopher 0 and 1 document
types? Well if the data speed was the same as packet radio then it
would take WAY too long for the cycle to repeat, so you'd be
waiting forever between browsing pages within a dataset as large as
the entire Gopherspace (unless the receiver cached everything any
you left it on all the time, which might be practical). This is
basically the same idea as Teletext, which I unfortunately am too
young to have experienced in Australia (it was around into the
early 2000s, but nobody I knew ever had a TV/device that displayed
it - in fact I still don't think I've ever seen one).
Still I wonder what could be done with advanced data compression
and receiver technology? Whether it would be practical to have eg.
a licensed high power HF transmitter* broadcasting Gopherspace to a
whole country? To this end I started thinking about rather
unconventional text compression and data transmission techniques
which I'll document in my next "ideas" entry.
- The Free Thinker.
* Or "pirate radio Gopherspace", these guys seemed to be having fun:
http://www.crossbandradio.com/unsorted/Pirate%20radiouranus%20melbourne.mp3
