The Network is not Free: The Case of the Connected Toaster
Latency is a big deal for many modern applications, particularly in the realm of machine learning applied to problems like determining if someone standing at your door is a delivery person or a … robber out to grab all your smart toasters and big screen television. The problem is networks, particularly in the last mile don’t deal with latency very well. In fact, most of the network speeds and feeds available in anything outside urban areas kindof stinks. The example given by Bagchi et al. is this—
A fixed video sensor may generate 6Mbps of video 24/7, thus producing nearly 2TB of data per month—an amount unsustainable according to business practices for consumer connections, for example, Comcast’s data cap is at 1TB/month and Verizon Wireless throttles traffic over 26GB/month. For example, with DOCSIS 3.0, a widely deployed cable Internet technology, most U.S.-based cable systems deployed today support a maximum of 81Mbps aggregated over 500 home—just 0.16Mbps per home.
Bagchi, Saurabh, Muhammad-Bilal Siddiqui, Paul Wood, and Heng Zhang. “Dependability in Edge Computing.” Communications of the ACM 63, no. 1 (December 2019): 58–66. https://doi.org/10.1145/3362068.
The authors claim a lot of the problem here is just Continue reading


