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PA2AGA > TCPDIG 03.04.97 13:51l 173 Lines 7953 Bytes #-10670 (0) @ EU
BID : TCP_97_28M
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Subj: TCP-Group Digest 97/28M
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Message-Id: <tcp_97_28M>
From: pa2aga
To: tcp_broadcast@pa2aga-1
Subject: TCP-Group Digest 97/28M
X-BBS-Msg-Type: B
spectrum allocations through commercial pressure. The personal/portable
communications era is nigh upon us. The explosion of the mobile
telephony
market and the Internet and the direction of investment dollars from
people of the ilk of William Gates III leave little doubt as to where
the
next growth will occur.
Already there are groups beginning to seriously investigate non-amateur
allocations for development of personal radio based data networks.
Alan Cox referred to a UK based group, I've certainly already
investigated
some other license classes in VK and I'm sure the Part 15 stuff in the
U.S. will have its proponents as well. My motivations for doing so were
what I consider to be overly restrictive regulation of the form and
nature of the traffic I can carry. I'm not the slightest bit interested
in commercial exploitation of the technology, but I would love to see
a reasonably priced radio based method of accessing the internet
available
to all, not just a bunch of amateurs returning suboptimal compensation
for
the investment of spectrum allocated to them.
For me it is all about incentive. I can save some money and just go and
buy
a 2Mbps point to point link and get a good high speed reliable radio
based
link to the Internet or whatever but I'd rather not, I'd rather see how
cheaply such a thing can be built. Without the incentive of desiring the
facility and the interest in the radio/development side of things I
wouldn't
bother.
Historical precedent clearly demonstrates that when the
government/society
begins to appreciate the true worth of the spectrum that amateur radio
occupies it can and will move it quickly away and redeploy it. We may
well
end up being thrust back to H.F, or skedaddled even higher.
I recall hearing a politician being recently quoted as saying something
to the effect of "Amateur Radio is like National Parks". A cynic would
suggest this means "it only exists because we'd be voted out if we
abandoned it completely, so we protect the minimum required to keep
the people happy". We exist at the whim of society.
> As I have pointed out before, the higher freqs which are prime territory
> for the stated aims of most amateur TCP/IP devotees is relatively "open
> country". There's absolutely nothing or nobody keeping any experimentor
> from utilizing those bands. As an "RF purist", my first wish is that you
> folks WOULD utilize those freqs, instead of endlessly talking about it.
> Somebody needs to! Let's see some action, instead of endlessly argueing how
> many contradictory theories can be balanced on the head of a surface-mount
> chip. Prove your ideas!
I don't know why you're singling out tcp/ip in this way.
As someone interested in the application of computing techniques to
radio communications I wish someone who were interested in the
application
of r.f. design techniques would mass produce a transceiver that met
my requirements. Sadly the only people doing that are cell-phone
companies
and wireless-lan card companies.
I still believe you are grossly in error in believing that gateways have
had an overall negative impact, and I can't help but feel that you are
generalising a local issue into an international trend. Certainly even
I can cite examples of where gateways have effectively replaced existing
r.f. links, but lack of any particular concern here suggests the
benefits
outweighed the downside.
It's not bad, it's just different.
regards
Terry
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 21:15:34 -0500
From: "Fred R. Goldstein" <fgoldstein@bbn.com>
Subject: Benefits of AMPR IP encapsulation gateways.
While reading this latest round of what I only wish were trolls, it dawned
on me that Mr. Brabham's way of thinking is quite consistent with something
else in the news. Two related stories come to mind.
One is the defection of a high-ranking official of the North Korean party,
an ideologist who helped define the "self-sufficiency" theories by which the
"Great Leader" and "Dear Leader" have run their country, the worlds' most
isolated. North Korea has very little contact with the outside world,
trying to do everything for itself.
The second is the famine in North Korea, a country whose economy, nearly
back to the stone age, has been unable to handle recent floods, and whose
people now eat perhaps worse than Russians did in the seige of Leningrad.
Brabham's complaint seems to be that by using the Internet as a wormhole
between amateur TCP/IP radio nodes, it is robbing the self-sufficiency from
the radio network. I view this as being like North Korea's argument, that
by trading with the outside world, it's robbing their country of its
self-sufficiency. And until recently, the populace largely believed the
lies their leaders told them, that they were among the worlds' richest people.
Brabham seems to have a problem with the fact that a local radio-based
message forwarding radio BBS network stopped using hard-built radio links
for its wide-area coverage in favor of easier wirelines. The network is now
contaminated with "landline lids", his version of yellow-dog revisionists.
What he does not acknowledge is that the message network in question is
itself a stone age relic, something North Koreans might be proud of in the
same way they preseve their ancient blast furnaces.
What he calls "mainstream" packet radio is in large part a recasting of the
1920-era National Traffic System, with the morse code replaced by CP/M-era
software and protocols. It is based on sending short messages around over
the course of hours to days, with no particular reliability or end-to-end
checking. It's astonishingly "retro" or even "paleo" from a computer-network
perspective. Thus it is of little interest to those of us who actually
appreciate computer networks of the modern variety. It is of interest to
old-time hams who see it as an incremental advance in their increasingly
irrelevant (to the rest of the world, at least) hobby.
What wormholes do is allow us to build local/metropolitan TCP/IP radio
networks and link them over long distances. There is no way to do this via
radio. The HF bands are too slow. The VHF/UHF bands would require too many
hops and too great a population density -- many dozens of hops to cross the
country, many across almost-unpopulated territory. And there's not enough
bandwidth there to make it competitive. From Texas to New Mexico, maybe.
>From Massachusetts to California, no way. A few hills stand in the way too.
And the OSCARs aren't going to fix it either; we can't afford nearly enough
to provide full-time coverage (a la Iridium or Teledesic, let alone
geosynchronous). That's the reality we all understand.
North Korea can't feed itself as a closed society. Amateur radio can't
survive that way either.
CB>It's difficult to credit claims of benefit to our RF hobby when the primary
>effect of gateways has been to reduce our long-haul RFcapabilty across the
>board.
>Don't forget that a four-state high-speed packet network is currently
>slated to be routed around by internet links. It's not just the HF
>forwarders and slow speed stuff which is suffering.
>
>Why?
>
>Once you "normalize'" the use of the telephone instead of radios to carry
>amateur radio traffic, there is no logical end to it. Eventually, it will
To be continued in digest: tcp_97_28N
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