2MB per day or 2MB per second

General Othernet Discussions FAQ
#1

Am I the only one who is stunned by the math? At 2MB per day it would take days just to get one map, photo, or song. You could get a book or two from Gutenberg but then you would hit your max. The anticipated Core Archive of about 1TB would take 500,000 days to download. That is 1369 years! Some people are referring to Megabits (Mb) rather than Megabytes (MB) without being corrected (or are they correct)? This would be almost 10 times longer! Cell phone plans often come with 2GB per month of data for the lower tier plans. That is 1000 times what Lantern will offer and often not enough for normal use.

Again how is this not mind-boggling!

The average webpage is half a megabyte or larger unless you strip out everything but the text. This means that someone could only load, at most, 4 pages PER DAY!

How is that useful for anyone?

Surely, SURELY you mean 2MB/second rather than a ridiculous data cap of only 2MB!
Otherwise people will be furious that their device will only be useful for about 30 second per day!

Please, PLEASE! correct this or help me understand how 2MB per day or even 10MB per day is of any value. At 10 MB per day it would still take 6 lifetimes to download the Core Archive!

jeeves

#2

Please see this post:

https://discuss.outernet.is/t/who-decides-what-2mb-of-content-i-get/852/17

#3

Hi, the content is really irrelevant. FreeBSD 10.1 is well into several GB of data. By the time you successfully downloaded it––the next one would be available!

So I am correct in a daily cap of just 2 MB or potentially 10 MB with Lantern?

Isn’t that unfathomably small?
Doesn’t anyone want to address how crippling it would be to only be able to use it for a mere seconds per day before you hit your cap!

You might as well be on a 300 Baud modem.

#4

You have to step out of the Internet-user mind set when considering Outernet. Outernet is not a replacement for Internet, it doesn’t work the same way, and doesn’t have the same goals.

That’s better than no modem, that’s the point.

#5

I see.
The problem is that it is marketed to be able to download or receive:
Webpages, Videos, Books, News, Audio, Images, Software, Any File Type.

At 2MB per day it is unrealistic that anything other than simple ASCII text could be received. I almost jumped at this but the math illuminated the disingenuous marketing.

I hope you are more candid and forthright that this device really isn’t capable of much more than text transmission.

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#6

Outernet is not just one channel. If you read the post I linked to, you would have seen that. Currently, we’re broadcasting 200MB/day via DVB-S and Lantern will have DVB-S capability with an external dish and LNB. 2MB/day is if you’re not using the dish but a built-in or external SW antenna.

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#7

Lantern has multiple tuners that span from HF to L-band, or 3 MHz to about 1700 MHz. Additionally, we are able to demodulate several waveforms. This allows us to be very opportunistic with frequency and bandwidth. The 2MB could come from HF, or from L-band through Inmarsat. We have a lot of flexibility.

#8 
At 2MB per day it is unrealistic that anything other than simple ASCII text could be received. I almost jumped at this but the math illuminated the disingenuous marketing

I agree. I’m excited at the prospect of a 2Mb data / text service, but I think it’s unhelpful/ disingenuous to conflate the satellite dish/ lantern service. They are two quite different services IMHO

The lantern should be a great device in it’s own right, but should be sold on it’s own merits…

#9

The similarity lies in the intention of the project. True, you can recieve 100x more data per day on one platform over another. What the service intends to do (provide news, information, media over time) is plausible on both platforms. This plausibility is further enhanced by the upgradeable nature of the broadcast to Lantern as the Lantern is capable of recieving on several bands and probably in a larger capacity. That’s not my area of expertise, so i wouldn’t know. But the projects are for certain related, different only in terms of scale and specific frequency made use of.