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February 15, 2006
Accra to Ulaanbaatar
From Ghana... [Stig Nygaard/Flickr]
Fifty years ago, communication between Ghana and Mongolia would have taken months and transpired via postal mail. Ten years ago, it would have required international phone calls costing several US dollars a minute and required the intervention of international operators to connect the two telephones. Today, Ethan and Andrew are able to communicate over immense distances, across dozens of national borders, with near-zero cost, no human assistance, and mere seconds of lag-time between the transmission and receipt of the message.What happened? And how is this possible?
... to Mongolia in a split second. [tiarescott/Flickr]
Ethan Zuckerman and Andrew McLaughlin's paper Introduction to Internet Architecture and Institutions provides a foundation for understanding how the internet works and what it means for people around the world who want to communicate.
Posted by Henry Shepherd at February 15, 2006 06:05 PM
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Comments
I'd like to make a few remarks. I didn't read the whole article but it seems to explain the whole concept of transmission over IP very well. I would make the case for understanding how IP works by pointing to the ubiquitous use of the protocol in our society. Almost everything does and almost anything can sit on an IP network, communicating over a common medium with other devices. At the same time, few people seem to understand the challenges involved in making IP networks reliable and fast, especially in the developing world. Put simply, in a country without enough commercial demand, IP will be slow, unreliable, expensive, and/or subsidized - pick any two. It's worth having a passing understanding of how any technology works, especially when it's so important to your daily life.
In Chile it was slow and expensive, now it's neither one. Demand picked up and now every business uses the Internet.
Posted by: Alex at February 17, 2006 03:37 PM
