Overcoming the Digital Divide

Distance learning  is transforming education.  Both undergraduate and graduate courses can be taken for credit online.  Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are available for all age groups in many subjects.

The global E-Learning market is expected to exceed $275 billion by 2022.   Enrollment in the US alone is over six million students who appreciate being able to learn from home at their own pace.  But that’s not the whole story.

Worldwide nearly one-in-three children between the ages of 12 and 17 do not attend school.  Many of them are beyond the reach of the Internet and cannot access the online courses.  And university students taking distance learning courses have trouble succeeding without reliable Internet connections.

Both of these groups can benefit from a data broadcasting solution that delivers content without the Internet.  Combined with phone service so that students can chat with instructors and submit exams we can now offer distance learning to students everywhere.

Inequality in health care is hurting the 3.5 billion people who live in rural areas today.  There are relatively few doctors in rural areas and even fewer specialists.  Rural doctors have to deal with a wider variety of medical issues by themselves.  And some of them don’t even have access to the Internet!

According to the Australian Medical Association “[The Internet] enables rural doctors to learn from the most current resources, explore treatment options, watch demonstrations of procedures and attend live discussions with experts.”

Data broadcasting can accomplish this as well.  Websites, blogs, journals, video and any other digital media can be broadcast to doctors in rural areas.  Discussions with experts could be streamed live and rural doctors could pose questions by telephone.

Information networks account for 2% of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere and by 2030 they will consume 20% of all the world’s electricity.

The Internet was not designed to be a broadcast network but that’s how it’s being used today.  Half of its capacity during peak hours is used to stream Netflix and YouTube.  Content delivery networks deploy hundreds of thousands of edge servers to handle the traffic.

Our technology does not need the servers and networks.  We simply display images on TV.  It takes no additional energy to broadcast data over an existing television network.

Pixelstream Information Transfer (PXIT) is like color-by-numbers because the pattern and the color palette are known in advance.  But instead of picking the colors for artistic reasons, we choose them to reflect the contents of a file we want to send.

A video capture device connects the (yellow) video output from  television receiver to the USB port of a computer.  It converts video into a sequence of frames and delivers them one-at-a-time to software.  Once the software recognizes the computer-generated images it has all the information it needs to reconstruct the file.

Data broadcasting is an effective solution for both the long haul and for the final mile.  Satellite television can be used to broadcast data over the entire continent and television white spaces can be used (except in major urban areas) to deliver data to residences.

As files are received they are ingested into a server running on the user’s computer.  The server could be accessed by a web browser that also runs on the user’s computer or by nearby devices using WiFi.