Back to the main page

Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: pentaj2@********.edu (pentaj2@********.edu)
Subject: Radio Spectrum (Was: Re: Hacking a Smartlink in SR4)
Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 17:17:22 -0400
----- Original Message -----
From: Ice Heart <korishinzo@*****.com>
Date: Monday, October 3, 2005 2:22 pm
Subject: Re: Hacking a Smartlink in SR4

> Someone missed the class on bandwidth and how it is NOT unlimited.
> Especially radio signal bandwidth. Remember the little scandal that
> quietly rocked a few car companies a short time back because their
> keyless entry systems functioned a very narrow set of frequencies?
> So people were opening each other's cars. How about garage door
> openers, and the problems with too few freqencies.

Never mind bandwidth. What about frequency allocation?

There's just not enough spectrum, period, for all of the devices
posited to be wireless.

First, I'll provide a real-world overview of the spectrum, then pick
out where SR4's wireless matrix MIGHT be able to live on the spectrum.

An overview of the spectrum (taken from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/radio_spectrum#radio_frequency_spectrum):

Lowest on the spectrum (ITU Band 1) is Extremely Low Frequency (ELF).
This is 3-30 Hz frequencies. This is used strictly by nuclear
submarines at depth, and as only a few characters can be transmitted
per minute, it's useless for our purposes.

Next up, at ITU Band 2, is Super Low Frequency (SLF). 30-300 Hz,
including 50hz and 60hz, the frequencies of AC power transmission.
Obviously, since this is where AC power lives, it's a bit full and not
really usable for anything we're thinking of.

At ITU Band 3 is Ultra-Low Frequency (ULF). 300-3000 Hz. Mostly used
for comms in mines, but the trnasmitters required are a bit big.

After that, ITU Band 4, also known as VLF or Very Low Frequency, 3-30
kHz. There's not much bandwidth on this part of the spectrum, and what
there *is* has been filled for the past century+ by radionavigation
beacons, time signals, and the like. Such creatures as PC monitors
also emit noise on the VLF band. Thus we move along.

ITU Band 5 is LF, Low Frequency, 30-300 kHz. Primarily used for
radionavigation signals (especially for trans-oceanic air traffic),
but bits of Europe also do longwave AM broadcasting here.

ITU Band 6 is Medium Frequency, 300-3000 kHz, otherwise known as AM
radio. All taken up, and SR4 indicates that AM radio lives on,
apparently.

ITU Band 7 is 3-30 MHz, also known as shortwave radio. The ranges
don't work at all for wireless PANs and the like, as shortwave can
cross the globe.

ITU Band 8 is 30-300 MHz, VHF (Very High Frequency). Used for FM radio
and TV broadcasts. However, it is a very, very crowded part of the
spectrum, used by everyone and everything.

ITU Band 9 is 300-3000 MHz, Ultra-High Frequency (UHF). used by many
TV broadcasters, Wireless LANs, and what few digital audio
broadcasting exists. UHF attenuates quite a bit through the
atmosphere, something I can only see getting worse with SR's pollution.

Keep in mind that your microwave oven also lives in UHF, at around
2450 MHz.

ITU Band 10 is microwave range.

There's more beyond that, but not much.

Now, where I figure it'd live:

First possibility is VHF. There's potential here, though I personally
don't see it.

Next up, UHF. This is the most likely part of the spectrum for SR4-ish
wireless devices. However, everybody is already using it. I wonder how
much of the spectrum is *left*.

Other than that, I'm clueless. Any radio engineers willing to throw in
their 2 cents as to where SR4's wireless stuff would live?
Message no. 2
From: scott@**********.com (Scott Harrison)
Subject: Radio Spectrum (Was: Re: Hacking a Smartlink in SR4)
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2005 17:56:46 -0400
On Oct 3, 2005, at 17:17, pentaj2@********.edu wrote:
> ITU Band 7 is 3-30 MHz, also known as shortwave radio. The ranges
> don't work at all for wireless PANs and the like, as shortwave can
> cross the globe.
>
> ITU Band 8 is 30-300 MHz, VHF (Very High Frequency). Used for FM radio
> and TV broadcasts. However, it is a very, very crowded part of the
> spectrum, used by everyone and everything.
>
> ITU Band 9 is 300-3000 MHz, Ultra-High Frequency (UHF). used by many
> TV broadcasters, Wireless LANs, and what few digital audio
> broadcasting exists. UHF attenuates quite a bit through the
> atmosphere, something I can only see getting worse with SR's pollution.
>
> Keep in mind that your microwave oven also lives in UHF, at around
> 2450 MHz.
>
> ITU Band 10 is microwave range.
>
> There's more beyond that, but not much.
>
> Now, where I figure it'd live:
>
> First possibility is VHF. There's potential here, though I personally
> don't see it.
>
> Next up, UHF. This is the most likely part of the spectrum for SR4-ish
> wireless devices. However, everybody is already using it. I wonder how
> much of the spectrum is *left*.
>
> Other than that, I'm clueless. Any radio engineers willing to throw in
> their 2 cents as to where SR4's wireless stuff would live?

It all depends on the technology used. However, if you were to
attempt to do this realistically you would have a big problem. For
example, ever try to use a wireless network device and a typical
cordless telephone in the same area. One of the signals if not both
will probably suffer. This is because the 2.4 GHz signal is used for
both devices. Now imagine that you have a PAN which has a bunch of
devices all broadcasting at the same frequency. This can get rather
bothersome. So assume you shift the frequency of each device a little
bit. This will help, but you have to remember that each device will
want to use some bandwidth. This is an amount of frequency that cannot
be used by another device, so the next device needs to be shifted by
the amount the last device uses. For example, classic voice as used in
a telephone uses about 4KHz of bandwidth while an NTSC television
broadcast uses about 6MHz of bandwidth. If you look at a normal
television cable coming from some company like Comcast or Adelphia you
see a 900MHz signal which basically can allow about 150 normal
channels. If you were to take those NTSC signals and make them digital
you can save some bandwidth and provide more channels or other features
like interactive television. As a side note there was a big uproar
when people started going digital and the companies decided not to give
high definition signals because they took up all the old bandwidth, and
instead gave normal television in digital form taking up less bandwidth
so they could use the other bandwidth to make more money.

If you assume that SR4 core is correct and that virtually any amount
of data can be uploaded instantly you are talking about a lot of
bandwidth. From a radio perspective this means a wide signal which
means there are not too many places you can put the signal to start
with. For example if you need to broadcast a 1GHz signal you cannot
start in the ELF ranges since the width of your signal will blast
everything up to 1GHz in frequency. Of course a very low power signal
will not interfere with things far away, but that is yet another
problem. So you need to move this signal into a much higher frequency.
This is problematic as well since you run out of radio frequency and
start getting into things like light. Also, with the higher frequency
being transmitted you start getting into some radical things that
happen to your body as it makes connection with the transmission.
Putting a cell phone to your head is bad enough now, but with newer
frequencies who knows what havoc we can wreak.

Basically, SR4 has not got a grasp on reality as we know it in this
regard. You can get all sorts of fancy with spread spectrum, frequency
hopping, etc. but it still will not help with what they are suggesting.
In our real world would you attempt to download a 9GB movie file over
your cell phone, or would you go to your cable modem? I want FIOS but
unfortunately cannot get it yet. Fiber yields much faster rates than
copper. Don't try it through the atmosphere though.

If you want to be able to do more with limited bandwidth look at
something like World of Warcraft. The bandwidth they use is not that
much compared to the experience you have. However, they do this by
having a specific set of protocols that are transmitted over the net
and have a lot of intelligence at the client side. You can do this
with your PAN in a limited way, but it requires a limited set of
protocols and smart clients. This is a decker's nightmare since there
are no ways in assuming the protocols are set up well.

By the way, SR has never gotten this anywhere near right, so you
should just take it with a mountain of salt. My personal favorite was
the one-way SAN. How would a decker be able to send a persona through
one when the signal could not come back to the decker? Just play it
and do not worry about reality too much.

--
·𐑕𐑒𐑪𐑑
·𐑣𐑺𐑦𐑕𐑩𐑯 Scott
Harrison
Message no. 3
From: tzeentch666@*********.net (Tzeentch)
Subject: Radio Spectrum (Was: Re: Hacking a Smartlink in SR4)
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2005 19:53:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Scott Harrison" <scott@**********.com>
>By the way, SR has never gotten this anywhere near right, so you
>should just take it with a mountain of salt. My personal favorite was
>the one-way SAN. How would a decker be able to send a persona through
>one when the signal could not come back to the decker? Just play it
>and do not worry about reality too much.

-- What exactly an "Mp" is was never made particularly clear (although you could
make some guesses as to Mp to GB conversion). Presumably a lot of the information are tags
and commands interpreted client side by your Persona as complex forms (VR, recorded
simsense patches, etc). But really, did it matter that the game was never consistent on
its usage? It's no different then the MU of CP2020 or, in some respects, Complexity in
GURPS.
-- I'm guessing that SR4 ditched keeping track of bandwidth and storage because it was a)
pretty boring and largely irrelevent as the "Mp" was just an ill-defined packet
of information, b) slowed down gameplay if you used the jackpoint rules, and c) further
slowed down the game if the decker was just sitting there waiting for that 1000 Mp file to
download. Yes, it could add some drama with regard to "can you get the file in
time?!" but you can do the same thing in SR4 by adjusting thresholds and dice pools,
or increasing intervals.
Message no. 4
From: tjlanza@************.com (Timothy J. Lanza)
Subject: Radio Spectrum (Was: Re: Hacking a Smartlink in SR4)
Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 20:09:22 -0400
At 07:53 PM 10/3/2005, Tzeentch wrote:
>From: "Scott Harrison" <scott@**********.com>
> >By the way, SR has never gotten this anywhere near right, so you
> >should just take it with a mountain of salt. My personal favorite was
> >the one-way SAN. How would a decker be able to send a persona through
> >one when the signal could not come back to the decker? Just play it
> >and do not worry about reality too much.
>
>-- What exactly an "Mp" is was never made particularly clear (although you
>could make some guesses as to Mp to GB conversion).

It was deliberately unclear. They wanted to separate modern conventions
from the in-game conventions. Even when they included real world units such
as audio and video recording time/sizes, they left out just enough
information so you couldn't do any calculations.

For example... Sure, 1 minute of video is 1 Mp... Excellent for in-game
purposes... What's the resolution of the video?

> Presumably a lot of the information are tags and commands interpreted
> client side by your Persona as complex forms (VR, recorded simsense
> patches, etc). But really, did it matter that the game was never
> consistent on its usage? It's no different then the MU of CP2020 or, in
> some respects, Complexity in GURPS.

One problem I had with SR was the notion that your icon ran on the host's
clock cycles (this was the basis for

>-- I'm guessing that SR4 ditched keeping track of bandwidth and storage
>because it was a) pretty boring and largely irrelevent as the "Mp" was
>just an ill-defined packet of information,

Again, not ill-defined... Deliberately undefined.

> b) slowed down gameplay if you used the jackpoint rules,

Jackpoint rules had little effect on the speed gameplay. They primarily
provided a TN modifier to traces and a limit on speed.

> and c) further slowed down the game if the decker was just sitting there
> waiting for that 1000 Mp file to download. Yes, it could add some drama
> with regard to "can you get the file in time?!" but you can do the same
> thing in SR4 by adjusting thresholds and dice pools, or increasing intervals.

Right... So you can recreate it in SR4. What was the point of this little
tirade again?

--
Timothy J. Lanza
"When we can't dream any longer, we die." - Emma Goldman
Message no. 5
From: tevel@******.com (Tevel Drinkwater)
Subject: Radio Spectrum (Was: Re: Hacking a Smartlink in SR4)
Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 21:46:25 -0700
Scott Harrison <scott@**********.com> wrote:

> On Oct 3, 2005, at 17:17, pentaj2@********.edu wrote:

<snip>

>> ITU Band 9 is 300-3000 MHz, Ultra-High Frequency (UHF). used by many
>> TV broadcasters, Wireless LANs, and what few digital audio
>> broadcasting exists. UHF attenuates quite a bit through the
>> atmosphere, something I can only see getting worse with SR's pollution.
>>
<snip>

>> Next up, UHF. This is the most likely part of the spectrum for SR4-ish
>> wireless devices. However, everybody is already using it. I wonder how
>> much of the spectrum is *left*.
>>
>> Other than that, I'm clueless. Any radio engineers willing to throw in
>> their 2 cents as to where SR4's wireless stuff would live?
>
>
> It all depends on the technology used. However, if you were to
> attempt to do this realistically you would have a big problem. For
> example, ever try to use a wireless network device and a typical
> cordless telephone in the same area. One of the signals if not both
> will probably suffer. This is because the 2.4 GHz signal is used for
> both devices. Now imagine that you have a PAN which has a bunch of
> devices all broadcasting at the same frequency. This can get rather
> bothersome. So assume you shift the frequency of each device a little
> bit. This will help, but you have to remember that each device will
> want to use some bandwidth. This is an amount of frequency that
> cannot be used by another device, so the next device needs to be
> shifted by the amount the last device uses. For example, classic
> voice as used in a telephone uses about 4KHz of bandwidth while an
> NTSC television broadcast uses about 6MHz of bandwidth. If you look
> at a normal television cable coming from some company like Comcast or
> Adelphia you see a 900MHz signal which basically can allow about 150
> normal channels. If you were to take those NTSC signals and make them
> digital you can save some bandwidth and provide more channels or other
> features like interactive television. As a side note there was a big
> uproar when people started going digital and the companies decided not
> to give high definition signals because they took up all the old
> bandwidth, and instead gave normal television in digital form taking
> up less bandwidth so they could use the other bandwidth to make more
> money.
>
<snip>

> By the way, SR has never gotten this anywhere near right, so you
> should just take it with a mountain of salt. My personal favorite was
> the one-way SAN. How would a decker be able to send a persona through
> one when the signal could not come back to the decker? Just play it
> and do not worry about reality too much.
>
Think Bluetooth guys! There is a modern communication standard that
uses a fixed range of frequencies by multiple devices all at once!
Similarly, consider the advantage of digital cell phone networks over
the older analog networks. The older analog networks hogged a lot more
frequency, whereas the later all digital cell phone companies (like Fido
here in Canada) could support several orders of magnitude more phones on
less bandwidth, because the digital cell phones share bandwidth.

Sure your wireless phone *can* interfere with your 802.11x wireless
router, but when I have 3 or 4 friends all over, all connected
wirelessly through my router, their laptops' signals don't interfere
with each other in the same way because they are using the same digital
protocol and they share the 2.4GHz bandwidth specified in the 802.11x
standards. I assume Matrix 2.0 is mostly a set of near universal set of
communications standards for different purposes, and thus you won't
usually have interference like this unintentionally.

In the case of Bluetooth, you can (in theory) have a scatternet of
effectively unlimited size. Off the top of my head I think each
Bluetooth device can act as a master to 7 slave devices, and (I can't
remember which) each slave can then be connected to another master
(which is then connected to other slaves, et cetera, et cetera) or each
master can act as a slave in relation to another master (which acts as a
slave in turn). Doesn't matter. The central point is that *now* in
2005, I can carry a Bluetooth phone, a Bluetooth Palm pilot, Bluetooth
headphones, and a Bluetooth MP3 player, and they all can communicate on
the *same frequencies* . If nothing else, the concept of PANs simply
reflects the way things are heading. The real question should be why
wasn't it like this in 2050 in the Shadowrun world? The answer was it
wasn't that way in 1989 in the real world.

Newer digital standards keep increasing the amount of information that
can be transmitted over the same bandwidth (802.11b at 11Mbps
[introduced in 1999] vs. 802.11g at 54Mbps [2002 I think], pretty close
to Moore's Law actually...). I'm sure that there is a theoretical
maximum "information density", but by 2070 I'm sure wireless is pretty fast.

The next question, why are wireless networks so insecure in Shadowrun?
The answer is that it is the same reason all Matrix systems have been
similarly insecure since 1st Edition Shadowrun. Presumably because it
is supposed to be a cyberpunk game about futuristic hackers (well,
except FASA added magic and stuff), and it would be a pretty boring game
if encryption was like strong crypto in the real world, and virtually
unbreakable. How tough to make things is a play balance issue best left
to the GM.

As an aside, Bluetooth devices have a range of 10m, I believe. A little
bit longer than most devices according to Shadowrun, but eerily close in
concept. I mean really, when I read about PANs, I did not think "No
way, that is so fake". Rather I thought "Hmm, sounds like Bluetooth".
I mean the concept is a reasonable Science Fiction extrapolation of
modern technology. As for cyberpunk antecedents, it has already been
pointed out that Cyberpunk 2020 had similar concepts 15 years ago.

The concept is sound. Is it fun to play? That is purely subjective.
I'll have to try it out for a bit before I make up my mind, but I do
think it sounds cool.

-Tev

P.S. Sorry for such a long post. Also apologies to Scott for tacking my
post onto the back of his. I don't think I disagreed with his original
post much at all, indeed I agree wholeheartedly with most of his
opinions. I mostly just wanted to point out to everyone who is saying
that it is patently unrealistic to go look at whats available now. It
was simply the last one in this thread that I had on hand.
Message no. 6
From: scott@**********.com (Scott Harrison)
Subject: Radio Spectrum (Was: Re: Hacking a Smartlink in SR4)
Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 11:09:07 -0400
On Oct 4, 2005, at 00:46, Tevel Drinkwater wrote:
>
>> By the way, SR has never gotten this anywhere near right, so you
>> should just take it with a mountain of salt. My personal favorite
>> was the one-way SAN. How would a decker be able to send a persona
>> through one when the signal could not come back to the decker? Just
>> play it and do not worry about reality too much.
>>
> Think Bluetooth guys! There is a modern communication standard that
> uses a fixed range of frequencies by multiple devices all at once!
> Similarly, consider the advantage of digital cell phone networks over
> the older analog networks. The older analog networks hogged a lot
> more frequency, whereas the later all digital cell phone companies
> (like Fido here in Canada) could support several orders of magnitude
> more phones on less bandwidth, because the digital cell phones share
> bandwidth.
>
<SNIP>
>
> As an aside, Bluetooth devices have a range of 10m, I believe. A
> little bit longer than most devices according to Shadowrun, but eerily
> close in concept. I mean really, when I read about PANs, I did not
> think "No way, that is so fake". Rather I thought "Hmm, sounds like
> Bluetooth". I mean the concept is a reasonable Science Fiction
> extrapolation of modern technology. As for cyberpunk antecedents, it
> has already been pointed out that Cyberpunk 2020 had similar concepts
> 15 years ago.
>
> The concept is sound. Is it fun to play? That is purely subjective.
> I'll have to try it out for a bit before I make up my mind, but I do
> think it sounds cool.
>
> -Tev
>
> P.S. Sorry for such a long post. Also apologies to Scott for tacking
> my post onto the back of his. I don't think I disagreed with his
> original post much at all, indeed I agree wholeheartedly with most of
> his opinions. I mostly just wanted to point out to everyone who is
> saying that it is patently unrealistic to go look at whats available
> now. It was simply the last one in this thread that I had on hand.

The concept of a PAN is very much like Bluetooth. The real problem
lies in the basically unlimited amount of bandwidth that SR4 espouses.
To use the Bluetooth example, you will find you do not want to transfer
a 9GB movie from one Bluetooth device to another because the time it
takes would be horrible. The SR concept of a Jackpoint was really nice
in that it put a limitation on the amount of data that could be
transferred over time. The fact that an MP was undefined was not a
problem. You at least knew that your icon or your pay data had a
certain size and it would take a certain amount of time to transfer.
This allowed you to suffer IC tracking you, your chummers being shot
around you, etc. More excitement and reality from the way we know it.

--
·𐑕𐑒𐑪𐑑
·𐑣𐑺𐑦𐑕𐑩𐑯 Scott
Harrison
Message no. 7
From: u.alberton@*****.com (Bira)
Subject: Radio Spectrum (Was: Re: Hacking a Smartlink in SR4)
Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 12:28:59 -0300
On 10/4/05, Scott Harrison <scott@**********.com> wrote:
>
> The fact that an MP was undefined was not a
> problem. You at least knew that your icon or your pay data had a
> certain size and it would take a certain amount of time to transfer.
> This allowed you to suffer IC tracking you, your chummers being shot
> around you, etc. More excitement and reality from the way we know it.

No one ever stated an official exact value for a megapulse, but it was
always said that it was "a lot". I've seen some fans guessing values
from 32MB do 1GB per Mp, so, depending on what arbitrary value you go
with, that 9GB video file could occupy from 281 to 9 Mp, which would
take at most a couple of minutes to transfer at the slowest line speed
they listed in one of the old Matrix books (20Mp/sec).

This means SR bandwidth has always been ridiculously large, whether
wired or wireless (riggers have been transmiting full simsense over
the airwaves for a long time). The only difference was that previous
editions still made you to keep track of those imaginary numbers,
which added to the amount of tedious bookkeping both deckers and
non-deckers had to go through.

Not worrying about download times and file sizes mean you can do the
entire hacking run in the time it took to wait for a large download,
and you still get to experience the joy of being tracked by IC _and_
shot at along with your friends :) !

--
Bira
http://compexplicita.blogspot.com
http://sinfoniaferida.blogspot.com

Further Reading

If you enjoyed reading about Radio Spectrum (Was: Re: Hacking a Smartlink in SR4), you may also be interested in:

Disclaimer

These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.

Thwap!