Healthy signal infrastructure
Healthy signal infrastructure is for all Green purposes not just buying. The more we can do to promote hardware standards that decrease the hardware requirements we must ourselves deploy to support Consumerium Services, and modular hardware to cut e-waste, the easier it will be to cooperate with other essential projects.
Ensuring that Publish Wiki, Research Wiki and Develop Wiki set important standards and apply very tough institutional buying criteria is the third most important responsibility of the Consumerium Governance Organization.
Non-buying purposes the HSI can be used for: voting, dating, rendezvous like a flash mob, orienteering games, betting and investing (only healthy to a limited degree, and there is no way to tell betting from investing, period), and almost any kind of mobile work like sales or transport or sustainable forestry. Of course, any kind of forestry or fishing or investing or sales or transport that is not sustainable is not healthy, so, a truly healthy infrastructure just doesn't help anyone do these things, or, better yet, it charges more to use it if you are using more or damaging more styles of capital than sustainable users would require.
In the ideal case, the Consumerium Services and even the hardware requirements would be delivered for free to all users anywhere in the world, and this would be paid for by charging other users of the same infrastructure for their other uses - charging more for those doing more damage to Earth. This is one option for how to set up the Consumerium License.
Probable features of the HSI:
- supports audio connections primarily
- uses available radio spectrum in the standard bands (1880-1900 MHz, 1900-1920 MHz, or 1910-1930 MHz)
- up to 100,000 users in any km?
- various applications can share the spectrum, e.g. voice and data, or public and private applications.
- DECT-based, moving to IMT 2000 standards and UMTS
- "2 billion users worldwide by the year 2010. This market will be worth over 1 trillion US dollars to mobile operators over the next ten years" [1]
- cooperating DECT/GSM
- cooperating DECT/802.11
- 802.11 only, especially 802.11g (much higher data rate, probably only existing POTS quality telephone service)
- ISO 14000 compliant (see also FCA/19011 below)
- self-funding
- no relying on volunteer effort (big burnout risk, see worst cases)
- no relying on donations (big corruption risk, see worst cases)
- incremental
- relies on existing pager and phone and radio wherever possible
- modular hardware based on relevant hardware standard
- sustainable
- low or no e-waste, no toxic waste at all
- product take-back by manufacturers
- accountable
- full cost accounting for whole product lifecycle using ISO 19011
- leads to Transparent Consumerium
- maintainable
- upgraded fairly uniformly in "turns" on regular basis (like every four years) etc.
- leads to Distributed Consumerium that can be run by developing nations
references
- a social ecology of wireless communication including a great worn device, a super-cheap ecologically sane cell phone. We don't know if it runs Python yet, but we can ask.