3-12-2209
Address| 92:00.01.05.b7.12.2a:IPvsQP |
IP vs QP
(adapted from my article in ‘Salvage and Archaeology Guild Quarterly Report’ {9-02-2208, vol. 23})
Reconstruction of servers and recovery of data from prewar sites in the past several years has allowed us to piece together a clearer picture of how ‘internet protocol’ differed from the Qnet protocol we use today.
1) The most obvious difference is the fundamental architecture- all computers on an ‘internet’ were physically linked by electron-data cables or lightpaths, while all computers on the Qnet have simple ‘local’ connections to a Qnode which is connected to all Qnodes via component entanglement.
2) ‘Internet’ data files were first sent through the network en masse from the point of origin to one of several central ‘Direct Node Servers’ (DNS) which, somewhat like a postal delivery service, directed the data to its recipient. During the second leg of the journey the DNS broke the files up into packets which it would tag with routing instructions to efficiently move it through the network. In contrast, as nearly as the public is allowed to know, ‘Qnet’ data files are telecast to each and every other Qnode. The recipient nodes which are unaddressed in the file header simply ignore it.
3) Because electron data cables and lightpaths allow high-bandwidth transmission, an ‘internet’, which was composed almost exclusively of these links (at the cost of great energy expenditure), allowed many files to be transferred rapidly- sometimes at speeds over 100 kilobytes per second! By contrast the bandwidth of Qnet transmission is directly proportional to the total volume of entangled component mass in the system. Insofar as the public is aware, it is necessary to ‘bud’ new Qnodes from existing structures at a great cost and risk to the original node. Of course, the power consumption of a rank 3 Qnode is less than that of a single fileserver.
In studying the ‘internets’ it is possible to learn better data architectures than ones currently employed and evolve our Qnet into a more efficient stucture. While the ridiculous cost of implementing electron cable and lightpath networks over great distances prohibits anything so obvious as a rebuilding of IP systems, it may be possible to expand local to Qnet speeds by the inclusion of parallel Qnodes in local networks, allowing transmission at effectively twice the speed without a serious increase in the dedicated entangled mass. This is discussed in more detail in the original article.
- Riess