That "drive-by wifi" shows one way to get internet service to rural parts of Africa and Asia, without other internet access. One proposal I heard had a guy in a motorcycle going from place to place with a wifi connection to do uucp transfers once in range of each destination. The other related technology you should consider is "delay-tolerant networking."
We can get wired electricity to just about all homes in the US, and it looks like there's telephone service available to 98%. Adding wired internet isn't that much harder than those other two, and there is a Federal program to promote rural internet service. Who's going to build a network for 5 customers? Us, through our taxes.
Iridium and other systems offers global service, it's just very expensive. I find numbers like $5/MB.
So you're talking about at most a small number of American homes which won't be able to have basic internet access if desired.
Of those, how many are interested in New York Time's data delivery service over newspaper delivery? I can't come up with any number which makes it interesting to the NYT - nor any other newspaper - to provide this service. Your point about caps doesn't affect things because the NYT iPad app takes between 1 and 20 MB per paper, depending on the number of sections read. Even daily reading of the entire paper is only about 0.5 GB and an order of magnitude or two less than the caps I've heard about. Print media just doesn't take much bandwidth.
Even worse, your numbers only possibly might make sense for newspapers with a reach into large amount of rural areas. That might work for parts of Alaska, but it won't help, say, the Burlington Free Press in Vermont. 95% of Vermont people have broadband access at home, leaving very few left who 1) want it, 2) can't get the print version, and 3) can't get the broadband version.
You say "where there are enough people, there isn't enough bandwidth to give everyone a good experience." In my experience this is rare, even in apartments where I've seen a dozen or more access points. ef4 confirms that observation. The link you gave also states that there is overlap but "This artifact has relatively little impact on the majority of 802.11 functions." Can you point to real-world cases where people are having problems because of too many access points? Can you estimate how often that occurs?
Overall, I think you're having fun with ideas. That's great. But you're letting your vision of what you want - you want people enjoying the slow web, perhaps - take precedence over what people really do want, and trying to back-fit justifications without a back-of-the-envelope estimation to see if those justifications are approximately right.
Suppose I live in rural Wyoming with no internet access, but wanted it. The first question is why? If I'm a farmer who wants to get better market information, then a slow internet won't help - the information might come too late. Okay, you can fix that - have someone come by every day. Is that the postal service? Will postal service holidays and interruptions cause problems to a farmer?
Perhaps I'm a writer, who needs occasional literature lookups. Perhaps then I could use the service well (assuming interlibrary loan and similar services aren't enough). But who's going to set up that sort of service, with the research staff on the end to find a literature reference?
But as described, your proposals are wildly off the mark, because people don't work that way.
If you want Internet access for news, research, and other "real time" information in rual Wyoming, of course you don't want the Slow Web experience, so this idea doesn't even apply. If the Slow Web is brought to you via postal service, you don't expect it everyday and its not a hardship if service holidays and interruptions occur. Do you complain for 29 days a month that your favorite magazine didn't arrive in your mailbox? No, you just wait for it, and enjoy it when it arrives that month. This is where most of the conflict I'm seeing with proposals for different kinds of radio-management are coming from. I know people don't "work" this way, but this was never an idea for the Fast Web to begin with.
The reason why I'm suggesting this is useful for newspapers isn't because this is how people would receive the newspaper, and only the newspaper, they would be sending and receiving any other content from the network (as in not-original-content by the newspaper) but instead from everyone else connected to the network via the newspaper. Newspapers are already suffering from the Fast Web/Slow Web problem, a newspaper on paper is slow-web and the newspaper online is Fast Web, and with so much freely available Fast Web content, they have a hard time convincing people to pay. News goes stale faster than the speed of rumor, so let the Fast Web have it, and make long-lived content that people want instead, enjoying it on their own time.
If access points no longer have the issues I observed 4–5 years ago, that's great, but they don't solve the problem of network coverage over larger geographical areas and I'm pretty sure that few or no access point systems can handle the load if someone fires up a popular torrent or watches a streaming movie on the shared network, but then, no one wants them to do that, that's a violation of the Fast Web Etiquette—but receiving an hour television show you subscribe to on a 4GB SD card is going to be a much better experience in terms of video quality and the lack of buffering should there be any hiccups with the Fast Web. In that respect, newspapers can become the "store" for other desired content and save their collective asses.
My point was to ask you describe the sorts of information which are best sent via the slow web. I gave some examples where it wouldn't work, because of the need for timely responses.
Your example of receiving an hour television show on a 4GB card does not work, because we already have that. It's called Netflix. I mean, it's a perfect example of what you're wanting, but it's already a solved problem built on top of the postal system, and not based on uucp nor your proposed slow web. There's nothing stopping you right now for implementing this via the postal service - so my question to you is, which types of people would want this sort of system, why would they want it, why will there be a long-term demand for this sort of service, and why doesn't it already exist atop the postal system?
It looks like you propose that the newspapers could leverage their delivery system in order to deliver the data. But surely the postal system is the better fit, given that newspapers don't deliver to place with "only five people" and instead charge more so they can mail the newspaper.
The other problem I have is that you keep coming back to "radio-management." That's not important. We can wire 99+% of US homes with wired connection - we did that with power and are nearly there with phones. Why is radio important if you can get 14.4K wired to your home? Assuming a rather low value of 1KB/sec over twisted pair, that's 2GB per month. If you also want local wireless for the house, that's under $100. I set up that system 10 years ago for myself.
To emphasize, 1KB/sec is fast enough to download the entire NYT in 6 hours.
So the potential users, after removing the Netflix factor, are 1) those people who can't get any network connection, and 2) those people who are restricted to dialup but want more than 2GB/month, and don't care about 'fast web' responsive access. Both are small and decreasing in numbers.
Oh, and how does someone signal which 4GB of data they are interested in? I tried but completely failed to come up with any solution which doesn't require a large majority of the sites in the world to rearchitect their interface for this tiny minority - and that's not going to happen.
To be short: Netflix doesn't accept uploads from customers via postal mail—so it doesn't exactly match the example. Most people want content that requires more than 2GB/month. Yes, NYTimes is much less than 2GB/month, but this wouldn't be about receiving "just" the NYTimes---the newspaper delivery service would work as a "carrier" of bits. Users signal for the data they're interested in via what they upload. Publishers of bits upload indexes to the content network. It can be implemented now with the postal service, by sneakernet in communities of people, or it could be something that newspapers implement, it doesn't matter who does the physical work of bit-moving. And finally, I'm not interested in supporting the "large majority of the sites" because they're all Fast Web. If they want Slow Web, they can add it, but they don't have to, it's not mandatory and its not expected of them.
My examples were all meant to show areas where a slow web would not be effective. Who are the people and what are the use cases for a slow web, and why doesn't it exist now on top of the existing postal system?
The newspaper delivery service would not work. Period. Delivery service only covers the local service area, where there is a high enough density of subscribers to make a special delivery service worthwhile. These people can get broadband and/or cell service. Otherwise newspapers use the postal service, and charge a premium to those customers who want that service.
Now you say that "upload" is important. Yes, when my wife was deployed in Iraq, we mailed USB sticks back and forth, containing music and video files. So that service exists now for point-to-point, and scales decently well to several people. Who are the people who want one-to-many data broadcasting via the slow web? What do they want to accomplish?
And I return again to mechanics. How does one "signal for the data they're interested in via what they upload?" If I send videos of our baby to family, do I get baby videos in return? Or do I get ads for baby products? I can't think of any mechanism which would handle what you are describing, other than having a human concierge service - and that's expensive.
If there are no adapters to make the slow data resources which are available on the fast web available to the slow web, then why would people use the slow web?
We can get wired electricity to just about all homes in the US, and it looks like there's telephone service available to 98%. Adding wired internet isn't that much harder than those other two, and there is a Federal program to promote rural internet service. Who's going to build a network for 5 customers? Us, through our taxes.
Iridium and other systems offers global service, it's just very expensive. I find numbers like $5/MB.
So you're talking about at most a small number of American homes which won't be able to have basic internet access if desired.
Of those, how many are interested in New York Time's data delivery service over newspaper delivery? I can't come up with any number which makes it interesting to the NYT - nor any other newspaper - to provide this service. Your point about caps doesn't affect things because the NYT iPad app takes between 1 and 20 MB per paper, depending on the number of sections read. Even daily reading of the entire paper is only about 0.5 GB and an order of magnitude or two less than the caps I've heard about. Print media just doesn't take much bandwidth.
Even worse, your numbers only possibly might make sense for newspapers with a reach into large amount of rural areas. That might work for parts of Alaska, but it won't help, say, the Burlington Free Press in Vermont. 95% of Vermont people have broadband access at home, leaving very few left who 1) want it, 2) can't get the print version, and 3) can't get the broadband version.
You say "where there are enough people, there isn't enough bandwidth to give everyone a good experience." In my experience this is rare, even in apartments where I've seen a dozen or more access points. ef4 confirms that observation. The link you gave also states that there is overlap but "This artifact has relatively little impact on the majority of 802.11 functions." Can you point to real-world cases where people are having problems because of too many access points? Can you estimate how often that occurs?
Overall, I think you're having fun with ideas. That's great. But you're letting your vision of what you want - you want people enjoying the slow web, perhaps - take precedence over what people really do want, and trying to back-fit justifications without a back-of-the-envelope estimation to see if those justifications are approximately right.
Suppose I live in rural Wyoming with no internet access, but wanted it. The first question is why? If I'm a farmer who wants to get better market information, then a slow internet won't help - the information might come too late. Okay, you can fix that - have someone come by every day. Is that the postal service? Will postal service holidays and interruptions cause problems to a farmer?
Perhaps I'm a writer, who needs occasional literature lookups. Perhaps then I could use the service well (assuming interlibrary loan and similar services aren't enough). But who's going to set up that sort of service, with the research staff on the end to find a literature reference?
But as described, your proposals are wildly off the mark, because people don't work that way.