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Turning the postal system into a generic digital communication mechanism

Published: 30 August 2004 Publication History

Abstract

The phenomenon that rural residents and people with low incomes lag behind in Internet access is known as the "digital divide." This problem is particularly acute in developing countries, where most of the world's population lives. Bridging this digital divide, especially by attempting to increase the accessibility of broadband connectivity, can be challenging. The improvement of wide-area connectivity is constrained by factors such as how quickly we can dig ditches to bury fibers in the ground; and the cost of furnishing "last-mile" wiring can be prohibitively high.In this paper, we explore the use of digital storage media transported by the postal system as a general digital communication mechanism. While some companies have used the postal system to deliver software and movies, none of them has turned the postal system into a truly generic digital communication medium supporting a wide variety of applications. We call such a generic system a Postmanet. Compared to traditional wide-area connectivity options, the Postmanet has several important advantages, including wide global reach, great bandwidth potential and low cost.Manually preparing mobile storage devices for shipment may appear deceptively simple, but with many applications, communicating parties and messages, manual management becomes infeasible, and systems support at several levels becomes necessary. We explore the simultaneous exploitation of the Internet and the Postmanet, so we can combine their latency and bandwidth advantages to enable sophisticated bandwidth-intensive applications.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCOMM '04: Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
August 2004
402 pages
ISBN:1581138628
DOI:10.1145/1015467
  • cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
    ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 34, Issue 4
    October 2004
    385 pages
    ISSN:0146-4833
    DOI:10.1145/1030194
    Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 30 August 2004

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Author Tags

  1. network architecture
  2. postal network
  3. storage devices

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SIGCOMM04
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SIGCOMM04: ACM SIGCOMM 2004 Conference
August 30 - September 3, 2004
Oregon, Portland, USA

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  • (2012)Motivation and design of a content distribution architecture for rural areasProceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development10.1145/2160601.2160610(1-10)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2012
  • (2012)DATEMProceedings of the 2012 IEEE 13th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (mdm 2012)10.1109/MDM.2012.22(43-51)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2012
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  • (2010)New Algorithms for Planning Bulk Transfer via Internet and Shipping NetworksProceedings of the 2010 IEEE 30th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems10.1109/ICDCS.2010.59(305-314)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2010
  • (2009)Delay tolerant bulk data transfers on the internetACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/2492101.155537637:1(229-238)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2009
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