BROADCASTING USER NETWORKS

Something facinates me with the idea of accessing network-type 
information without using the internet, mainly the idea of not 
needing to pay an ISP for access I suppose, as well as a fall-back 
for when my mobile broadband connection drops out. I've never got 
interested enough to really do much about it mind you. Certainly 
not enough to put the time and money into getting an amateur radio 
licence, and I'm too far away from any of the WiFi-based local 
networks which are/were set up in many larger Australian cities.

The reason for these limitations on both unlicensed (WiFi) and 
licensed (packet radio and derivatives, at least in Australia) data 
communications is that the existing systems all rely on 
bi-directional communication. The user needs to transmit a request 
for the data they want to receive. That means they need a dedicated 
channel of communication, within the limited radio bandwidth 
available for that use, so you need to restrict usage (with 
licencing, or range/power limits) to stop everyone clogging up the 
airwaves.

The alternative is something like broadcast radio/TV programmes, 
where users/listeners just have to wait for the time when the 
information they desire will be broadcast. What if you did that 
with a large set of text content like all Gopher 0 and 1 document 
types? Well if the data speed was the same as packet radio then it 
would take WAY too long for the cycle to repeat, so you'd be 
waiting forever between browsing pages within a dataset as large as 
the entire Gopherspace (unless the receiver cached everything any 
you left it on all the time, which might be practical). This is 
basically the same idea as Teletext, which I unfortunately am too 
young to have experienced in Australia (it was around into the 
early 2000s, but nobody I knew ever had a TV/device that displayed 
it - in fact I still don't think I've ever seen one).

Still I wonder what could be done with advanced data compression 
and receiver technology? Whether it would be practical to have eg. 
a licensed high power HF transmitter* broadcasting Gopherspace to a 
whole country? To this end I started thinking about rather 
unconventional text compression and data transmission techniques 
which I'll document in my next "ideas" entry.

 - The Free Thinker.

* Or "pirate radio Gopherspace", these guys seemed to be having fun:
  
http://www.crossbandradio.com/unsorted/Pirate%20radiouranus%20melbourne.mp3