Social and Economic Technology - 7.5. Technical Aspects
The IT infrastructure for Secotek.
A respectable broadband is being made universally available throughout all rural areas, and Secotek is quite feasible without even that. Even without broadband, everything proposed is feasible, even if in some circumstances in an imperfect way. In the rural workplace it is not necessary to present the glitzy yuppy front associated with city business, where all the latest equipment is deemed necessary plus designer decor in order to sell itself. The rural workplace is usually refreshingly more down to earth and unpretentious in appearance and equipment needs.
Apart from video on demand, most of the extra bandwidth that broadband provides is used to carry flashiness, normally very inefficiently, and there is little incentive to do anything about it. This should not fool anyone into believing that the bandwidth necessary to carry the important data forever increases. It does not. Secotek will specifically concentrated on the use of currently available video technology. It is true video tends to be a bandwidth "eater", however, the main usage of the video is to give a continuous "presence". When the bandwidth is wanted for other usages, the operator is normally concentrating on another aspect of work. Hardly any concept of "presence" is then lost if video images then become a bit "jerky", recovering back to normal seconds later. The software must be designed to allocate the available bandwidth properly and sensibly rather than just always demand more. What the system must never do because of any computing resource shortage is "crash". The services that rely upon the resource must merely be degraded in quality in the most ergonomically acceptable way, to recover properly as conditions permit. This applies particularly to older computing equipment. Here lies a fundamental difference between the software proposed here and the "normal" benchmarks upon which software is judged.