[LINK] How far the fibre?

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

Eric Scheid wrote:
> On 2/7/07 11:16 AM, "Craig Sanders" <cas at taz.net.au> wrote:
>
>   
>> if you asked the people living out there, they'd say they'd rather have
>> a hospital or a doctor. even a nurse would be an improvement over the
>> nothing they have now.
>>     
>
> and not tele-medicine provided via fat broadband?
>   
Ok, I'll try to catch the ball and toss it back.

One thing we can do is separate the components, so to speak. I'm going 
to put two statements which I think can be accepted by most people.
1) Satellite is a mature and stable point-to-point technology; but
2) Satellite is not great for interactive Internet applications.

Well: satellite is already in use for telemedicine and tele-education. 
So by saying "some places won't see fibre anytime soon" I am *not* 
saying "no advanced applications". They exist and are used (and are 
funded but not as well as they could be).

See:
http://www.assoa.nt.edu.au/
for a School of the Air example. Telemedicine seems very decentralised, 
so I can't quickly find a directory of live apps.

My point is that while Internet delivery may improve these applications, 
it is not indivisible from them. In the case of telemedicine, I would 
argue that at least in diagnostic applications, the "best case" is a 
high-capacity clear channel link, not an Internet service ... but that's 
a digression.

What I'm getting at is that you get a better result if you define 
requirements before you build the system. Boring and pragmatic and 
visionless it may be, but saying "what are the requirements?" might 
actually get somewhere for the far-distant outstations and aboriginal 
communities in a reasonable timeframe.

RC
> ;-)
>
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