[OLPC-devel] wireless networking, in the "real" world.

[Jim Gettys]

On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 00:51 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:

> On the other hand, maybe it takes less energy to transfer a compressed
> image and decompress it on the laptop into storage. I don't know how
> much energy a network connection vs lzma/bzip2 plays out. Are there any
> stats for that?
> 
> --

There is another aspect I think people are missing: you are all
presuming 802.11g running at tens of megabits.

We will often/usually be trading bandwidth for distance.  You can go
much further with 802.11 at lower bandwidth.  And the wireless chip
we're planning to use (made by Marvell, btw), can go very slow.  And the
bandwidth will also be shared, at this low bandwidth.  So, say, your
link is a 2 megabits, and its shared; you might only be seeing hundreds
of kilobits.

So running the processor for the length of time to copy uncompressed
data is not only time consuming, but therefore eats lots of power,
certainly way more than gzip compression/uncompression.

Hmmm...  Remind me that we should configure the school http proxy
servers to compress all content; http also supports compressed
transmission.
-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child