Slashdot

Problem is, bandwidth isn't cheap. For cable internet, I'm looking at paying about $600 a year. I don't need fast access to most of the content, but occasionally there are things I want that get kind of big - like software downloads and linux distros....

So, I thought about how I could fix this. Turns out that postal system has some pretty good bandwidth, very good reliability, but a rather large latency. Put like this: Suppose I started a software distribution list for free software. I burn all my favorite software onto CD's, and send them to the next person on the list. A few days later, they've got a few gigs worth of software, at which time, they copy these to their HD, and send off the CD's to the next person on the list.

Considering that I can mail about 10 CD's for about $2.50 (guessing) or so, my bandwith costs about 0.038 cents per MB - that's 26 MB per penny. That's pretty cheap.

But now consider this: To improve speed for those far down on the list, every time a list gets more than 5 people on it, it splits into a sublist - new people are added as a sublist. The first person on the list becomes the NodeMaster - he has responsibility of forwarding the CD's to the rest of the list, and if anyone breaks the chain, he patches it by mailing another copy of the CD's to the next person. In exchange for this responsibility, he gets the CD set first.

Shipping costs are paid by reciprocal payment. When anyone receives a CD set, they drop a reimbursement in the mail to the person who sent them. This way, a person only pays for shipping once.

Well, you can do the math. A distro list with 5 members per sublist could reach 390,000 people in 8 mailings, or about 16 - 21 days. At 21 days, the average throughput would be 3.58 kB/s, for an average of about $4/month.