The cost of transmitting Information and World Government.

I have been using the Internet for 5 or 6 years.
I know extremely little about how it is supposed to work.
I don't want to know. I don't need to know.
All I know is that it is in a state of chaos.
Extreme UNRELIABILITY is the general description.
In the medium term all service providers are in the same hopeless sort of
mess.
And I get bills which I make no attempt to understand.

What is the commodity we are dealing with?

It is merely INFORMATION with a capital I, which is quantifiable as Bits of
Information. (Binary digits if you like.) (Any sort of information, speech,
music, numerical data, TV signals, noise, etc., can be coded electronically
into bits.)

According to Shannon, the capacity of an information channel, its ability to
transmit information, is proportional to its Bandwidth in Hertz. (Or cycles
per second.)

The maximum possible amount of information transmitted is proportional to
the Time T, in seconds, for which the channel is available or used.

Therefore, I = B*T bits.

The cost of installing the channel is proportional to the amount of
equipment and transmission lines (optical fibres) involved which is again
proportional to the distance D in kilometres between the ends of a circuit A
and B.

And therefore the cost in P Pence to a subscriber of hiring a circuit
between A and B is logically proportional to -

P = B*T*D pence.

Or Cost = Bandwidth * Time hired * Distance, in pence.

It will be up to subscibers to do the best they can with the time hired and
the method of coding.

And the sooner there is only ONE reliable international service provider the
better. Then everybody will be able to understand the phone bill.

The ultimate solution is political and lies in World Government.

Mathematicians and others wishing to investigate further can do a Google on
the classical paper by Claude E.Shannon, "Communication in the Presence of
Noise", Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol.86, No 2, February 1998. Which is a
reprint from Proceedings of the IRE, Vol.37, No 1, pp. 10-21, Jan. 1949.

This paper is distinguished by Shannon's method of solving the long
outstanding problem of signal-to-noise ratios geometrically, by calculating
the number of spheres which can be contained in a much larger
multi-dimensional sphere.

Is it not curious that Shannon solved the problem about the same time that
the means came about of putting his communications theories into full use -
the transistor had recently been invented?

It is known as The Ball-packing Problem, which I have tenuously linked to
the antics of George, Tony and now Ms Rice.
----
Reg.

On Tuesday 08 February 2005 21:31 Reg Edwards wrote:

>
> And the sooner there is only ONE reliable international service
> provider the better.**Then*everybody*will*be*able*to*understand*the
> phone*bill.

Perhaps - or perhaps not - but few will be able to pay it!

We used to have (in the UK) pretty much the situation that you
propose. In those Good Old Days, calls to the U.S. were about £1 per
minute (say £3 per minute at todays prices), you could have any
colour of telephone you wanted, provided that it was black and rented
from the single provider, and you could connect any modem you liked
to their network (telephone line) PROVIDED that it had passed their
approval test. The only problem was, they hadn't written the test!

Later (or more recently, if you like) the cost of a dial-up Internet
account was between £11.75 and £15 per month, PLUS the cost of calls,
which ran to almost £1 per hour in the evenings and at weekends, and
about £3 per hour in office hours.
ISDN installation (renting two lines, at rather more per line than
analogue) could be had at £400.

Hmm... monopolies are all very nice - for the guy who has the
monopoly. Does your theory extend to car manufacturers, btw?

You seem to use a Microsoft OS and BT as your ISP..........

Bill

Reg Edwards <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> I have been using the Internet for 5 or 6 years.
> I know extremely little about how it is supposed to work.
<snip>
> According to Shannon, the capacity of an information channel, its ability to
> transmit information, is proportional to its Bandwidth in Hertz. (Or cycles
> per second.)

Shannon is irrelevant.
The cost of transmitting information is what BT/... say it is.