on his website unitedvillages.com
amir says that providing asynchronous
internet access to remote regions is
over 100 times cheaper than providing
full time wireless connectivity.
this rings true for me, with the cost
decreasing with the inverse of the
latency.
so it seems clear that the majority of
the next 2 billion people to come online
will use an asynchronous internet connection
to begin with.
this sentiment is the basis for amir's
company - unitedvillages.com - which is
an outgrowth of technology developed at
MIT - daknet
and the Technology & Infrastructure for
Emerging Regions (TIER) group at berkeley.
http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/docs/projects/dtn.html
which is also where i found a link to the
Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group
http://www.dtnrg.org/
i wrote melissa ho
http://www.melissaho.com/research/digitaldivide.php
asking her about using soap over smtp as a framework
to develop applications to be used in this environment.
she says "SMTP fails to address issues in routing and
failure, and poses other problems. DTNRG has developed
an alternative".
my sense is still that applications need to be
written with the understanding that they may be
opperating in an asynchronous environment - for
usability reasons as much as anything else.
i guess this doesn't necessitate the use of soap
tho the high latency tends towards including much
more data in each request. so it makes sense to
structure the data in xml for readability and a
variety of other reasons, and we're rewriting the
apps anyway.
my high level point here
is that there's alot of work
porting applications to operate in this environment,
and porting applications to soap.
part of my excersize here in india, is looking
for problems which require a large amount of manpower.
here's some links i found on the web
postman net - i like it :)
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rywang/postmanet_paper/
pop - you'll like the picture if nothing else
http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/rover/
firstmilesolutions.com
http://www.melissaho.com/research/digitaldivide.php
http://in3.org/articles/IIT.htm
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/fg7/conclusions.html
http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/
http://www.n-logue.com
http://www.bytesforall.org/
http://www.nethope.org/
http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/egov/gyandootcs.htm
not related, but clean water efforts
deserve all the attention they can get
http://www.blueplanetrun.org/
