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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 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
  • 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
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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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 30 August 2004
Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 34, Issue 4

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Author Tags

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

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  • (2019)Mobility as an Alternative Communication Channel: A SurveyIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2018.284119221:1(289-314)Online publication date: Sep-2020
  • (2017)Centrally Controlled Mass Data Offloading Using Vehicular TrafficIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2017.267287814:2(401-415)Online publication date: Jun-2017
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