Last Mile - Economical Information Transfer

Economical Information Transfer

Before considering the characteristics of existing last-mile information delivery mechanisms, it is important to further examine what makes information conduits effective. As the Shannon-Hartley theorem shows, it is a combination of bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio which determines the maximum information rate of a channel. The product of the average information rate and time yields total information transfer. In the presence of noise, this corresponds to some amount of transferred information-carrying energy. Therefore the economics of information transfer may be viewed in terms of the economics of the transfer of ICE.

Effective last-mile conduits must:

1. Deliver signal power, S — (must have adequate signal power capacity).
2. Low loss (low occurrence of conversion to unusable energy forms).
3. Support wide transmission bandwidth.
4. Deliver high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) — low unwanted-signal (Noise) power, N.
5. Provide nomadic connectivity.

In addition to these factors, a good solution to the last-mile problem must provide each user:

1. High availability and reliability.
2. Low latency, latency must be small compared with required interaction times.
3. High per-user capacity.
   1. A conduit which is shared among multiple end-users must provide a correspondingly higher capacity in order to properly support each individual user. This must be true for information transfer in each direction.
   2. Affordability, suitable capacity must be financially viable.