Telemedicine is more about things like diabetic monitoring devices that upload to a database

SMS would suffice for that, surely ?

I cant understand why people would be against upgradeing to a fibre network. Yeah we may not be able to use its potential just yet, but look at the situation 5-10 years ago. I used to think 512k was the greatest thing ever and could never need more, untill more services became avaliable.

Fibre would ensure high speeds regardless of distance, and im sure that when its established some companies will find ways in which to thrive off of it.

Also this is nothing official but wouldnt the power consumption of fibre be less overall by sending light through cables rather than an actuall current? May be wrong though

I cant understand why people would be against upgradeing to a fibre network.

People are against public funding of it I think. Most on here would jump at the chance to have it and probably pay over the odds for it too, but that is a choice of what to use their personal after-tax income for, rather than effectively N billions more tax being used to provide it before they get to see the money in their pay.

Might use less power for sending the pulses of heat down the fibre, fibre networks are cheaper to own than copper providing you aren't paying the interest and repayments on building it !

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

If electric cars get any traction ....

Not a lot of use if they don't .

LOL. They appear to be entirely reliant on tax evasion too.

They are doing keyhole surgery remotely in some cases, where the "world specialist" does it from their own base with others watching to learn.

so the surgeon is remote from the patient ? presumably we're talking links between hospitals in this case.

SCADA uses very slow comm's speeds, the industry standard is v23, yes that's 1200 baud... So no real need for high speed networks and massive amounts of backhaul. There isn't a vast amount of data, realtime analogue's and single or double bit digital data is about it.
Newer protocols like DNP3 are poll by exception so the kit is dormant for the bulk of the time bar a health check.
X21 is used for teleprotection but that's point to point.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/04/tivo_vod/

I hope that was just biased or warped test. If not it doesn't bode well. Take VoD out of the equation and at the moment there's nothing anyone needs FTTP for. We've got all the broadcast capacity we need. More in fact.

I hear there's a market for maybe five computers at most!

This is a pretty myopic view. Of course there's nothing anybody needs it for (other than doing multiple things at once). The applications haven't been developed yet! Why would they build them when nobody has the service?

You could apply the same logic to any technology. "Why do we need faster processors? These work just fine! Nothing really needs anything faster. More RAM? 8MB is more than enough! Nobody could possibly fill a 1GB drive!" You get the idea.

Edited by deleted (Sun 06-Feb-11 13:27:11)

In reply to a post by yarwell:

so the surgeon is remote from the patient ? presumably we're talking links between hospitals in this case.

Yes. IIRC there was a TV documentary about it a while ago and also coverage in The Times. I don't have any references for it I'm afraid.

Whether the links were public internet or leased line I don't know. I seem to remember it was public internet as a leased line system could never be multi-location viable, but probably duplicate communications.

Still sounds very dodgy - it would all have to be tiny incremental movement commands and suchlike, with on-site override, but definitely being developed.