I guess the Egyptian outage has me wondering if it will ever be possible for the internet to flow freely through the ozone via Satellite, towers or some other method, or will it always be susceptible to cable disruptions somewhere along the line?
Wired bandwidth is a lot cheaper and efficient than wireless methods. Also, Satellite transmissions incur a hefty latency and so will never be the sole source of internet communication. Consider, too, that towers can be disrupted just the same as a cable being cut, and I don’t see it as that much better an option reliability-wise either. In my experience, wireless (microwave) internet can be spotty and has limited range. I guess what I’m saying is that, in light of current technologies, I don’t see it happening. Towers might become a more common method to deliver internet to end-users, but on-campus high speed lines and major interlinks will most likely remain wired for the foreseeable future.
If my electric and cable internet were out and I really needed to be on the Internet I’d hop on my iPhone and be ready to go. I don`t actually know what happened in Egypt but a run of the mill outage in the U.S. wouldn’t impact the local cell network.
The long delayed WiMax allegedy has even more promise as a full time last mile solution than cellular 3G, which I find much too slow for use all the time.
They all use wires (or fiber) for backhaul though. So the question is are you talking about everything being wireless or just major components reaching the end user being wireless? The former I don’t think will ever happen, the latter already has.
I’m asking about being wireless to the point that entire countries aren’t shut down by a cut cable.
That’s a totally different question.
A system can have single points of failure, or it can be designed to be redundant. That’s equally true whether the technology is wired or wireless.
The usual reason large (country-scale) systems have single points of failure is because somebody designed it that way deliberately so they (ie the govt) would have an on/off switch. Or at least a single place to put their filters & snoopers.
The internet arose out of a DARPA project to make a fault tolerant network. The ability to survive even when cables are cut is part of the core of its design.
As LSLGuy said, usually the only reason a single point failure takes out an entire country is because that country intentionally limits the number of connections going in and out of it. If there had been another connection to the outside world anywhere within the affected area, the network would have just switched the traffic to the other connection and the single cable cut wouldn’t have mattered much (except for things slowing down due to more limited bandwidth).
I read a Popular Science article recently (paper magazine, no cite) that said Japan’s space agency just launched a super Internet satellite which is going to give each Japanese citizen 1.2gb of connection speed, “500 times faster than the average American Internet connection” I think the article said.
While, if true, and if at a practical cost, the speed sounds marvelous, the latency of a satellite connection is more than point-to-point. Not important for some tasks, very important for others, like gamers or anything real-time critical.
Although a swarm of close-in sats would have less latency than a geosync sat. I don’t know which kind that Japanese plan uses, but if it’s only one, it would have to be the latter.
From SeanArenas’s link:
It would only make sense for them to launch Geostationary sats, as lower orbits cause precession and thus the satellites would be only be over Japan a very small portion of the time. It would be far too impractical to launch enough satellites to have full-time coverage of a single country, especially one as small as Japan.
Tesla hoped to transmit energy through the Earth’s crust. But whether that effect could be utilized to send and receive data packets, I don’t know. I’d guess that it’s possible (seeing as we can send stuff through air, which is probably a worse medium), but still likely inefficient compared to a cable.
Sounds almost like Ultra Low Frequency. The problem with this technology is that such low frequencies can necessitate a low rate of data transmission.