HOW TO CONNECT A RADIO NETWORK TO THE INTERNET

Each affiliate station that wants to paricipate, could offer the service of a dedicated connection to an ISP in a specific, strategic geographic location outside of their effective broadcast range to receive the station's signal in the form of a data stream. That ISP then offers connections to client listeners outside of the effective broadcast range of the signal. The account is managed under the governance of Pacifica.

This dedicated connection could be funded by advertisers who link their ads to the uninterupted signal, and or groups of listener sponsors who consume the signal outside the effective range of the broadcast signal. These outlying groups can even link their community interests to the signal easily. I would call the interested groups "outreach hub committees". These groups can be globaly dispersed, or geographically related yet help sponsor a hub and link their special interest to the hub. As long as the group pays for its own load. The cost of its load is the cost of the dedicated connection, plus the cost of the outreach hub ISP account.

The ISP (a commercial enterprise) benefits from the traffic if they are allowed to advertise, or sell ads. They measure the exposure of ads based on requests for services linked to ads.

They can also provide the service of bussing the stream to the next most strategic geographicaly located destination ISP who hosts one of these services.

As the network grows, signals from various affiliates can be multiplexed together to enhance efficiency.

International dedicated connections could also be offered.

Listeners within the effective broadcast range of the original signal can volunteer not to connect to these services. They can also be controled other ways. Primarily they can be redirected with a message on their web browser with directions pertaining to where the user is and a link to click on.

Listeners within the effective broadcast range of the original signal who need service could request service from a localy funded connection to the data stream. They just follow the directions on the web site.

Please understand that a similar situation exists already in the form of internet services that provide signals from lists of radio stations, including listener sponsered community radio stations, and signals from these stations' studios which are streamed on the internet.

I would not be surprised to learn that the most requested signals originate at listener sponsored community radio stations. These stations certainly have the potential to be the most popular.

By deploying such a service, Pacifica can benefit with evidence of how popular their programing is by logging requests for service.

A dedicated connection to commercial enterprises that list many radio stations could be offered as a seperate or conglomerated set of data streams by Pacifica for a fee that would offset the costs. It is to their advantage(the commercial enterprise) to list these data streams.

This type of service easily incorporates methods of counting the number of mechanical copies of copyrighted material that are reproduced as a result of requests for service.

I know this isn't the easy answer to the problem.

I think this is a solution that is fair to all parties involved, feasable, practical, and adapts to the inevitable future.

Web servers and such in general are designed to distribute data to different clients who all request different data. This proposed network intends to provide identical data to all clients, further compressed if neccessary to fit in the clients bandwidth envelope. The network benefits from having the signal pre-distributed between strategic locations because its maximum efficiency is limited to its real time speed. Clients who need further compression are a bigger load than a client who takes the stream as is. Dedicated connections are of a predictable maximum bandwidth.

The first stategicaly located outreach hub account will effectively reroute all of the requests for service from outside the effective broadcast range to that server. Excess load can be shifted back to the localy funded connection. When the load gets heavy it automaticaly inspires new hub committees to organize and sponsor new hubs.

By separating them strategicaly and geographicaly you take advantage of the physical structure of the internet, Pacifica's current infrastructure, and other communication services.

The dedicated connection to the outreach hub account ISP can take many strategic forms.

This proposed network also would easily incorporate a way for Pacifica to control how their signal is used and how many times it is reproduced.

To allow the unmanaged redistribution of these signals is to ignore many ethical, technical, and legal questions pertaining to this activity.

In my opinion It would be in the best interest of recording artists, as well as Pacifica radio, and their affiliate radio stations to deploy this network and phase out unmanaged volunteer web sites that redistribute their signal.

When the recording artist associations get through with the Napster clones, they will have to address other issues as well. By managing their signal in this way, Pacifica doesn't take money out of their pockets and still serves the community well. Even though Pacifica radio affiliates like KPFT don't specialize in mainstream music, major recording artists like Lyle Lovett were heard on community radio before they were widely known. In the event that accounting is required, this network would incorporate that easily.

Another effect of this network would be to biuld support for the load the way it was intended, by listener support, and managed under the governance of Pacifica, and in the interest of the mission.

by Albert Kada
Independent Terrorist Journalist
Special Agent CIA-A-1
World's only publisher of computer viruses besides Microsoft.
Stolen from the unpublished newspaper "The American Blasphemer" please copy