[gurps] Re: Internet on blue planet and like worlds

[Tom Sparks]

are you think of a mesh network or a point-to-point (infrastructure) network?



----- Original Message ----
From: Onno Meyer <Onno.Meyer at gmx.de>
To: The GURPSnet mailing list <gurpsnet-l at sjgames.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 31 December, 2008 11:28:16 PM
Subject: Re: [gurps] Re: Internet on blue planet and like worlds

Jeff wrote:
> The scaling is not that simple. Your typical high-volume user here is 
> moving gulping a gigabyte a day and serving somewhat less in the form a 
> webcam, file sharing, untrimmed replies, and some pet thing like DJ-ing.

GURPS Robots talks about transmission bandwidth in the context of robot 
brain backups. According to RO56, a sat uplink is 10 gigabytes per minute, 
which would be sufficient for 2,400 power users if they can 'play' during 
eight hours of the day. Optical fibers or lasercoms are even better.

A TL8+ radio is supposed to do 0.1 GB/minute. This is the same order of 
magnitude as WLAN, but GURPS radios have a considerably higher range. 

Assume that there are ten distinct radio frequencies for the 'net. That 
gives a total of 480 gigabytes during the evening 'play' hours. If one 
in 11 users is a power-user and the others do 100 megabytes per day
(just to keep the numbers neat ...), the radio 'net can serve 120 power 
users and 1,200 regular users in each location. 

Of course it should be simple to lay fiberoptic cable along with power, 
water and sewage, so that means each town or city can afford a 
couple of hundred 'off the grid' homesteads before they run out of 
frequencies. 

At TL8, a dumb laptop with 10-mile radio is $100. At TL9, $50 buys a 
dumb laptop with 100-mile radio. A server with ten radios and a sat 
uplink is $19,500 at TL8 and less than half that at TL9. The cost of a 
'slice' of the commo sat network is highly variable ...

Summarized, when you're talking about startup colonies, the small 
number of people makes 'wireless wide area networks' or 'wireless 
metropolitan area networks' with a single 'cell' (in the cellular phone
sense) possible. 

> For each expensive colonist, you'll have zillions lots of cheap, 
> IP-connected sensors and effectors that need to be monitored and driven 
> remotely, because there's only so many places the colonist can go in a 
> day, and some non-cheap, high-volume ip connected nodes buffering this 
> for the colonists, like meteorology and logistical systems. 

If you assume that, you're in a Transhuman-Space-like scenario. I 
found them interesting reading, but I haven't played yet ... how do 
you get decent adventures if big brother is watching all the time?

> Then, on top 
> of that, they are going to want a stream of as much of Earth's daily 
> content as they can get, for entertainment as well as reference purposes.

Good point, but heavily dependent on your assumptions for FTL 
comms.
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