[e2e] information superhighway finally realized.

[Cannara]

Good Jon!  But, Connecticut and several other states are already passing laws
that prevent lots of info from car transponders from being used by anyone but
the drivers -- thank goodness!  You may have heard of the rental agency in
Conn. that was billing customers per mile when they exceeded speed limits. 
Nasty!  :]

Alex

Jon Crowcroft wrote:
> 
> Thinking about this, what Al Gore really meant has just sunk in:
> 
> What you need is a person and vehicle tracking system - this can be
> multi-modal - if a person carries a device that has gps (or cell/tower
> or wifi, or other triangulation based) location services, then its
> easy - but its also easy if you have plenty of surveillance cameras -
> these have two benefits
> 1/ you can then implement car registration recognition, and charge for
> road usage (and congestion charge) fairly and efficiently, reducing
> pollution, accidents and delays and permitting the police to catch
> folks that break laws (bad and fast driving etc) with hi resolution
> instead of notoriously inaccurate human witnesses
> 2/ you can also use this to recognize and catch terrorists, since the
> recognition system can be plugged into a traffic anomaly detection
> system and autmatically detect people renting cars in airports and
> driving them full of gas into tall buildings
> 
> Looking further afield, one could put in automatic speed control in
> the cars, and even immobilizers so that if the camera at the roadside
> shows a person who doesn't have the visage of one of the recognized
> (safe, approved) drivers of the said car, it either goes very slowly
> or not at all  - even further afield, the vehicle could be
> autmatically routed to a county jail - this could also apply to people
> who havnt paid their tax, or are on the run.
> 
> It could prevent soldiers awol from iraq driving over the border to
> canada or way down south to mexico
> 
> 3/ M-ad hoc
> think of all the benefits - if all the cars are fitted with 802.11
> devices, we could also use them to provide a network - we could cause
> cars to route to places where there is a gap in the connectivity at
> the moment - as per the grossglauser/tse result, and using network
> coding, this would provide for arbitrary capacity almost unbounded in
> gas rich countries.
> 
> 4/ crative accountancy
> at the same time, one could have creative CRISPS (Connectivity Rich
> ISPs) that have ingenious billing schemes - your wireless ad hoc
> broadband bill could be rolled into the tax on your gas at the gas
> station - you go fill up with 10 gallons of gas and 100Gbytes of
> download  - if you run a multi-occupancy vehicle, and you also
> run peer-to-peer file sharing you would get a double discount.
> 
> 5/ border routing considerations
> Of course one would need to consider the regulatory problems - if the
> US were to build a lot of roads just south of the canadian border to
> offer "offshore network capacity"< but the canadians used Hydro to
> re-charge lots of fuel-cell and electrc/hybrid cars, then someone is
> going to think about power-line broadband - then there could be
> interference unless one deploys OFDM (Oil For Download Mobility)
> 
> 6/ denial of service, and other security problems
> of course it is easy to jam radio, and its easy to jam on the radio
> too. so we need to worry about this, but not too much - if someone
> blocks your download, you just drive to blockbuster and pick up the
> DVD there anyhow...
> 
> 7/ network management considerations
> 
> The system should be just as manageable as the internet and the road
> system. congestion will be rare (there will be no packet loss in my
> car), and resilience will be provided by fast oregon bypasses.
> overlay routing (put that bike in the pickup, put that laptop on the
> bike, put that USB memory stick in the laptop) will naturally occur
> and is a matter for further study.
> 
> Now, back to your normal service...
> 
> In missive <424D6067.9040401 at reed.com>, "David P. Reed" typed:
> 
>  >>David - exact position may not matter in most cases, but that's what
>  >>Vonage is being beaten up about (I have 911 on the Vonage line
>  >>activated, and it gets through to my local emergency services just fine
>  >>because I told the system when I set it up where that was.)
>  >>
>  >>I note that getting the Massachusetts "state police" is rarely useful
>  >>unless you are driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike (they might as well
>  >>be a call center in Bangalore).   They cannot by law assist you, and do
>  >>not have the best means to pass on calls to localities, who might help
>  >>you if you observe someone being mugged or raped on the street in (say)
>  >>downtown Brockton.
>  >>
>  >>As far as I know, every CDMA cell phone being sold today (the vast
>  >>majority in the market) have GPS in them (in the form of A-GPS, a
>  >>proprietary technology that comes from qualcomm, which used GPS receiver
>  >>in the phone, plus an assist from towers that gets the autonomous GPS
>  >>re-locked fast when it goes out of satellite coverage).   I think that
>  >>GSM phones also all have GPS onboard as well.
>  >>
>  >>You are right that tower triangulation has failed, but the E911 mandate
>  >>for cell phones still holds, and GPS is the technology that has been
>  >>universally adopted, and works pretty well, as far as getting location.
>  >>
>  >>But as I said, knowing approximate or exact location isn't very good if
>  >>the system design actually routes calls away from local responders to a
>  >>single point of failure in some remote, windowless building that has no
>  >>direct local presence.
>  >>
>  >>
> 
>  cheers
> 
>    jon