Turning the postal system into a generic digital communication mechanism

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.

Motivation and design of a content distribution architecture for rural areas

“…On the other hand, our design is more suitable for content distribution applications. Formalizing the use of physical media such as CDs and DVDs to transport data was also proposed in systems such as PostmanNet [21]; our system is however grounded in a real application context and hence a step beyond abstract architectures. Further, we are unique in our approach of using GPRS/EDGE connectivity to serve as a control channel, which distinguishes our work from other architectures based on DTN [11,22,16].…”

Delay tolerant network simulation with VNUML

“…Tak- ing advantage of this property, the messages can be physically sent end to end using a USB key, CD or DVD, through some "postal network" like in PostmanNet Project [14].…”

Bridging the digital divide: storage media + postal network = generic high-bandwidth communication

“…These applications share the commonalities of their appetites for high bandwidth and their benefiting from simultaneously exploiting the HLHB postal system and an LLLB Internet connection (if one is available). More details of these applications can be found in a position paper Wang et al [2004aWang et al [ , 2004b.…”

“…This is especially true in the vast underdeveloped regions of the world. Instead of waiting for the uncertain takeoff of a number of existing and proposed technologies, which can be many years away, recent position articles [Postman 2004;Wang et al 2004aWang et al , 2004b have proposed turning the existing worldwide postal systems into a generic digital communication mechanism as digital storage media are transported through the postal "network." The proposed system is dubbed the Postmanet.…”