> just a few years ago the vast majority of people received their TV through over-the-air broadcast. It's instant and scales infinitely, kind of beautiful simplicity, technically speaking
"Scales infinitely" is underspecified. Over-the-air broadcast scales well with the number of people who want to receive a particular broadcast. It scales very poorly on some other dimensions:
- Over-the-air suffers from congestion when many parties want to send a broadcast simultaneously. There's only so much spectrum. In a wired network, you can just add more wires.
- Over-the-air doesn't scale well at all when people want to receive the same broadcast from farther away. In a wired network, you can use longer wires, or relay data from one wire to another wire. (Relays will work for wireless too, but they make congestion that much worse.)
"Scales infinitely" is underspecified. Over-the-air broadcast scales well with the number of people who want to receive a particular broadcast. It scales very poorly on some other dimensions:
- Over-the-air suffers from congestion when many parties want to send a broadcast simultaneously. There's only so much spectrum. In a wired network, you can just add more wires.
- Over-the-air doesn't scale well at all when people want to receive the same broadcast from farther away. In a wired network, you can use longer wires, or relay data from one wire to another wire. (Relays will work for wireless too, but they make congestion that much worse.)
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