Shortly after my last post on this topic, I spent some time reading the
notices on the bulletin board outside the market in our little mountain
town.
One of them asked if people in remote mountain areas are tired of slow
dial-up Internet speeds. The county has set up a Line Extension Fund to
defray Comcast's costs in providing high speed Internet to mountain
neighborhoods. After describing what people needed to do to request high
speed access, the notice went on to say that Comcast was under no
obligation to inform the public about this fund. After the June 2014
deadline, Comcast can just pocket the remains of the fund without an
obligation to spend it on remote access.
This morning, I read an article on DARPA's (that's the US Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency) work in developing drones to provide
on-demand wireless access to remote areas of the world. DARPA is the US
government body that invented the Internet in the first place, and they
continue to do cutting edge research on computing, networking, security,
and other Internet-related areas.
I am not sure whether DARPA's site is available outside the US, but this
page lists a variety of the research projects that DARPA is working on:
http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases.aspx
Among the current DARPA research topics that might find their way into
commercial Internet are:
* Hollow-core fiber optic cable optimization for speed and reliability.
* Domain-specific search.
* Quantum computing.
* International interoperational mobile networking.
* Photonic delay in optical waveguides.
* Terahertz vacuum amplifier for solid state electronics.
* MEM sensor optimization.
* Jam-resistant radio technologies.
* More stable ytterbium atomic clocks.
* Secure, private Internet and cloud computing.
Many of DARPA's technologies are released directly into the public domain.
--hmm
