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Does Faster Broadband Matter?
tsa writes "There is an interesting piece on Ars Technica discussing the implications of faster broadband services for the users, and for the internet as a whole. From the article: 'Most online activities, like standard websurfing, are not significantly sped up by high-bandwidth connections, and the few that are, such as downloading, are not typically time-sensitive anyway. Many service providers are starting to prioritize their own content at the expense of those from rivals. Many countries have started or are considering blocking Voice-over-IP (VOIP) traffic in order to protect the phone companies from competition.'" How does faster broadband actually impact your Net usage?
Can your eyes tell the difference between a web-page loading in one second or 0.27 seconds.
I guess if you only consider standard web browsing when considering if faster broadband matters, the answer is likely that it doesn't make much of a positive impact. At least two things that this fails to take into consideration though are:
1. There are far more applications today that can utilize the faster broadband, both upstream and downstream. For a few examples, consider P2P, VoIP, video streaming, etc.
2. Increasing broadband speeds and their adoption rate enables new applications tomorrow.
Give many people more bandwidth; they'll find a use for it. Feel free to replace "bandwidth" with just about anything and it likely would be true as well.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Um first post?
. . .don't download tv shows, run a web server from their closet, and download large ISOs of operating systems.
Huh, maybe you shouldn't ask this question on Slashdot.
Porn.
A monster ate my homework!
Well, compared to using Dialup, I know I use the web a WHOLE lot more. Of course, it may be that there are a lot more interesting things on the 'net since I used a modem, but most were there before.
However, when comparing cable modem vs. an even faster connection, no, it does not induce me to "surf" any more. I like having my torrents download faster, but I usually do that while I'm asleep so it wouldn't matter much.
OTOH, if I was inclined to use VoIP, I would certainly want the fastest connection I could get.
as someone who has 100mbit fiber to the home in Tokyo: Absofuckinglutely.
How? Pr0n at the speed of light. And excessive light makes you go blind...
You lost me at the phrase "Internet blogger".
-William Brendel
Everytime new technology comes out, someone always says "Nobody needs that much memory", "What would ordinary people want to do with a computer?", etc...etc...but as we start to experince this new broadband boom, we'll see dozens of services that were just waiting to come out, Video On Demand rentals of HD Content, Full Stereo Phones, Video Phones (Instead of crappy webcam chats), and more I'm sure someone with more time will think of.
my isp (Verizon, which is the huge phone company here) is planning on converting all of the DSL lines to FIOS (fiber optic) to allow like 24mb speeds. they are doing this to offer cable TV as well as internet and phone service all through one handy dandy line. This will be great since there are no cable companies in the area so I have no cable TV but do have broadband internet. I say bring on faster speeds, they will bring me TV channels and allow my web/mail server to run alot faster.
As a gamer, you should be more concerned about latency than speed-- at least, if you play "twitch" games (read: FPS games), as opposed to MMORPGs.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Either by bandwidth-hog bloatware-infested websites or by actually useful applications. I'm not sure which one I'd bet on.
<rant>Also, one thing that's VERY worth mentioning is that the Dial-Up accelerators do much of their acceleration at a proxy server level. They take graphics and compress them through a super-lossy algorithm to 1/5 or more the size of the graphic on the originating server. This causes many online graphics to look like crap.</rant>
Start a happiness pandemic
Today's websites are so most more beefy then past, why?
Because of faster download times. Otherwise we'd be stuck in the html table 60x60 animated gif backround 256 colour dark ages.
> Many countries have started or are considering blocking Voice-over-IP (VOIP) traffic in order to protect the phone companies from competition
I live in the U.S. and can't insightfully comment on laws everywhere, but don't most 1st-world countries have laws making things like that illegal? Doing things that are in the interests of companies at the cost of consumer choice sounds downright wrong. If the phone companies are so worried about VoIP, why don't they just get into the VoIP business? How about changing with the times instead of trying to hold back technology just because you don't feel like joining the 21st century?
...well at least at a reasonable price anyway.
My 5/512 (Ha! as if Charter Cable ever actually has it going that fast), is typically maxed out all the time.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Especially when the bandwidth is good both directions, fairly complex AJAX-type apps (say, OWA) that involve lots of little GETs and POSTs with the server can feel much more snappy and desktop-ish when the latency is reduced by even a few milliseconds here and there. Presuming you've got a fairly responsive server on the other end, and a decent browser running on a quick client box, the difference between running such an app over, say DSL vs. the fatter high-end cable pipes is readily noticeable.
As more businesses turn to hosted accounting and productivity apps, that's really going to start to count.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Many countries have started or are considering blocking Voice-over-IP (VOIP) traffic in order to protect the phone companies from competition.
Wait... woah... let me say that again...
Many countries have started or are considering blocking Voice-over-IP (VOIP) traffic in order to protect the b>phone companies from competition. (Emphasis mine.)
Okay. In other situations, this wouldn't even be considered... protecting any sort of company from COMPETITION? Hello?
If they can't compete, then good riddance to them. They don't deserve their government issued monopolies if they cannot offer good services and value in light of technological advances. Dinosaurs. Time to burn their fossil fuels instead.
Excuse me? Downloading... not time-sensitive? If downloading isn't time sensitive, I don't know what is. Even for leisurely things like movie trailers, I don't want to wait more than is necessary. For people who transfer large files as part of their job, download and upload time is even more important.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Every time I see an article like this it occurs to me that the author doesn't really understand the benefits of true High-Speed internet. True, on-demand, multimedia content (TV shows, Movies, News reports) are on the verge of becoming available and (possibly) widespread; suddenly everyone has access to whatever they want to watch (and at 100+ MB/s its all in HDTV with Surround Sound). Could you imagine rather than spending $50-$100 per month on Cable, spending $0.25 per TV show and $1.00 per movie? You no longer are dependant on When a broadcaster wants to show the show, nor are you dependent on comercials to pay for your entertainment.
I get 6 Mbit down from Comcast, and if they rolled it back to 3 Mbit, I could care less. What I want is more UPLOAD speed. I want faster speeds to VPN in to work, to upload photos to shutterfly, and do other things what would make my Internet more enjoyable. I have been debating a switch to Verizon DSL for cost savings, but I just can't deal with 128K uploads. The 120+ pictures I took at Christmas would take all night to upload to shutterfly at that speed.
Not everyone who wants faster uploads speeds is running as Quake 3 server...
But what's this thing about protecting phone companies by blocking new technology that competes with their monopolies? Seriously? Shouldn't they be punished for this kind of thing?
Clever signature text goes here.
I guess that faster download speeds would be nice - it's the upstream speeds that I crave - I guess most home broadban users have a similar situation in that download speeds are great and upstream are more like 128k. I would be happy just to see that symmetrical, really.
The definition of broadband is specific: Broadband in general refers to data transmission where multiple pieces of data are sent simultaneously to increase the effective rate of transmission. In network engineering this term is used for methods where two or more signals share a medium.
Marketing are to blame for the confusing usage, where broadband means "really fast". This means we can look forward to terms like "ultrabroadband", "superbroadband", "megabroadband" and "bukkakebroadband" in the future (where "bukkake", meaning "to splash" in Japanese, will refer to a newer form of "spread spectrum"). For proof that marketing is to blame, see this link above and look for "confusing".
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
isochonous applications are here to stay, including real-time video, lots of VoIP, and others whose time-domain is sensitive to latencies. The expertise of the writer involved is suspect, quoting Son-- who ran Softbank and isn't an engineer. Routing protocols, QoS, route saturations, re-authentication cycles, all of these cause objectionable latencies-- not to mention the end-2-end capacity of the network involved. Yes Martha, we need bandwidth. Ignore the idiot.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
'Most online activities, like standard websurfing, are not significantly sped up by high-bandwidth connections
Reducing page load times have a cumulative effect; 5 seconds here instead of 60 seconds starts to add up and allows users to accomplish a lot more in a session of web surfing. Flash animations, intro pages, and graphics are popular and slow down page loads on dialup connections which cannot keep up.
Instant streaming music and video of a reasonable quality are out of the question on a dialup connection.
and the few that are, such as downloading, are not typically time-sensitive anyway
Convenience is everything, and downloading is time-sensitive: You don't want to wait weeks to download that 3000MB Linux distribution, if you had to do so it might be more efficient to have a friend burn your to DVD and borrow the discs from them.
I think this race of trying to pump insane download speeds to the end user isn't where the priorities should be. We need a decent pipe with extemely low latency. This is important for technologies like (buzzward alert) AJAX, but also for web applications and network enabled programs in general.
Also, give me a damn decent upload pipe. I know why they don't want to do it. It's a business thing. Home users shouldn't be sending large amounts of data blah blah blah but we need more than 256 kilobits up. My home one is freakin 6 megabit connection down, and 256 kilobits up! At least give me 2 megabits up. I'll host online games and it really helps when you've got 32 people in a room. Or if I'm sending friends illegal music (haha jk). But really, there are lot's of times I need a decent upload and just don't have it.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Bottom line is, there are many times where speed is "for nerds, and that stuff matters". Because I don't want to start a download and have to wait until the day after to access the file (whatever it is).
While /.'ers would benefit more from this than the general population, more regular Joe's are sending/uploaded photo's (and even video) ... and the asymetry of the 768UP-8000DOWN of my Comcast service is quite noticeable.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
there was a statement made long ago that computers would never need more than 256k of RAM. Now many games require 1G as a minimum requirement.
With changing technologies comes the ability for people to expand what they are capable of. With the advent of accelerated graphics, it wasn't "needed" at the time, however there soon became a point where almost every game sold required it. There was never a need for 256M Ram at the time it was available, but as the hardware became more capable, development followed suit to utilize the available resources.
The best answer I can give to ever needing higher bandwidth is, "build it, and they will come". As more resources become available, developers will be able to provide content which will utilize that resource and overall the experience of programs and applications will improve. After all, what's better, rdp over dialup, or rdp over LAN?
Evil Walrus >83=
NO.
Bandwidth speed does not matter -- latency is the key to a happy user. These two do NOT have to go hand in hand, though.
I started (back in the BBS days about 21 years ago) at the age of 30 with a 300 baud modem, and quickly jumped to a 1200 baud modem. I took in information quickly (of course, a young mind is a sponge). My phone bills were $300+ per month -- requiring me to work.
I transitioned to modem's fastest and then transitioned to ISDN. The ISDN's latency was intense -- everything was amazing, comparable to the few T1's I had worked with up to that point.
I was the first of a very select group of DSL (IDSL) testers in Illinois before it really hit. I believe Michigan had it first but I had a consistent 144kbps up/dn connection and it was QUICK. Not as snappy as the ISDN, but download speeds were over double. Web sites, though, were not as snappy.
I switched over to ADSL and the snappiness went down but the downloads went up. Then SDSL, then cable modem, to where I am today -- cell phone dial up.
I just switched to T-Mobile's EDGE network. I get a consistent 150kbps down and 40kbps up from my PDA/laptop bluetooth tethered to my t809 phone. The latency sucks. The bandwidth is just about perfect, though.
I still download, upload, blog, e-mail, browse, etc. I have access to a T1 (at a customer's office) and an OC3 (also at a customer's office). Even though my PDA and my laptop both support WiFi, I stay on my bluetooth 150kbps connection -- just to keep things simple and keep battery life UP.
I've spoken with users of all sorts -- laymen and power users -- and they all tend to agree. Faster response is better than faster downloads. This is untrue for the younger users with time on their hands: they NEED fast downloads for BitTorrent and porn. Once you become part of the grind, you want quality web views with quick response times. I've switched some clients from high bandwidth DSL to low bandwidth DSL that offered lower latencies. They're MUCH happier.
FWIW, the order of need in my life:
1. Be available everywhere (EDGE/GPRS is close)
2. Have a low latency (EDGE/GPRS does not have this)
3. Have a decent download speed (EDGE/GPRS has this)
4. Be priced in an unlimited transfer package (EDGE/GPRS has this)
The only thing my current connection needs is a better latency. This will come with time, I hope. As for VoIP and the like, who cares? My cell phone bill is around US$100 per month -- offering unlimited everything. This price will only go DOWN over time, so I believe the phone companies are too little, too late.
Faster broadband is extremely important. The Chinese already have faster networks than we do, and their old people read more email than our old people. It's time to turn this thing around!
As one of those cheap folks mired in the Comcast ghetto-of-the-AOL-refugee-proletariat, I find my downloads capped a few days into the month, generally to less than 8kb/sec, making my connection nearly useless for downloading.
I keep thinking I should go for naked DSL. I live in Bellevue, WA, near Seattle. Anyone got a better options for fast + no Comcast caps + ideally affordable? I don't have a landline and don't want to subscribe to one for phone service.
Becuase of this, I am always looking for faster speeds. I look forward to having one single data line (or wireless access) into my house for phone, TV, music, & net.
I am also awaiting the time when all digital transfers are heavily encrypted so there is no more big brother unless the Gov really suspects you are a criminal in which case they will spend the 5 months to break your encyption. Why aren't we encrypting more?
Back in the old days when I was on Comcast I could actually download at 500kb. Then they clampped us down to no more than 50kb. If I was downloading from multiple sources, the overall download was 50kb.
Now I'm on charter's 3megabit plan, and I'm still locked at no more than 50kb for downloads.
And I'm not talking about P2P or bittorrent. I'm talking about downloading from HTTP or FTP servers. The fact that when I combine downloads, and they are still capped, lets me know its Charter doing the throttling, not the host sites.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
When I tell the ladies about my fat pipe, they want to come over to my place and stay up all night long.
Downloading movies.
Current speeds might be good enough for many of today's applications because today's applications have to be built around today's bandwidth limitations. Streaming HD video isn't possible today, but make the pipe big enough and it could be. You could have a whole new set of cable TV providers that offer service exclusively over the internet. Just connect a set top box to your router, and you're ready to go. What if it took only minutes to download full length full resolution movies off of iTunes? How long would Netflix and Blockbuster last? Don't think it's going to happen? Take a look at GPON. 2.5 gig down and 1.25 gig up could open up a host of new services that were never possible before.
Currently, I get 6 Mb/sec (minimum, consistent speed) through Comcast. Frankly, I don't need any more for my home. Any major downloading that I want/need to do can be done overnight.
I am more frustrated by the stranglehold that most ISPs utilize regarding uplink speeds. It's absolutely ridiculous that I have a 6 Mb/sec down speed but 128 Kb/sec up speed. If I'm uploading a major web site upgrade or getting on-line with some Battlefield 2 action, the up speeds are much more important. When my nephew is over and both of us are connecting to the BF2 network on separate systems, my network goes crazy and a lot of other Internet-related functions are brought to a crawl because the uplink it almost totally taken up by the two BF2 connections.
What I don't understand is why these companies don't allow a mixture. "For $$.$$ per month you get any combination up to { insert speed here }" to allow the customer to specify the perfect combination. Or allow the user to specifiy from a range of combinations as long as the combined speeds are not greater than X. And it's not difficult for ISPs to do.
Most modems, particularly those that are DOCSIS compliant, utilize a tiny (about 100 byte -- yes, 100 byte) configuration file that is downloaded via TFTP from the ISP when the modem is reset. I've used the configuration tools to make these files when I was involved in broadband deployment on the east coast. There are separate, numeric fields to create up and down speed caps. Modify the fields, save the configuration file, associate the broadband modem with that configuration file, reset, done. The new upload and download speeds are defined. "A la carte" broadband is simple to do. The ISPs refuse to do it, I guess because it would provide a benefit to the customer.
I certainly would not mind FttH if it ever befomes available and it provides an equal or better value; but if I was given the option right now to take 512 Kb/sec or 1 Mb/sec from the downlink and apply that to the uplink, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Faster speed means I CAN browse the internet. A large portion of the internet is becoming nearly unusable for dialup users, especially the ones that can only get 14.4kbps because the phone system hasn't been updated since Nixon was a president.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Because components in the computer define awfully lot. Like ethernet card, memory configuration, the motherboard and the OS.
I have ADSL with 8/1 speed, and three computers that all work in diffrent speeds despite they use the same router.
And I don't mean the download speed, but how fast they update the screen when the traffic comes in.
The user experience. When you browse a lot, the small things start to matter and you notice when something is slower.
And YES, you do notice the half second lag. Because you see the diffrence if one switches from a faster machine to slower. And when you have once gone fast, you don't want to go back.
My linux seems always most snappiest browsing platform so far ever. Windowses are fast, but not so snappy ever. Despite whatever configuration, router, graphic adaptor or motherboard or ethernet card I use.
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows has the trouble seen me, even I sometimes wonder why I write these line
While we keep getting faster downstream bandwidth (up to 5Mbps on RoadRunner at home now), providers are still stingy as all hell on the upstream. (got 384Kbps now, just as bad as when I had 1.5Mbps downstream ADSL)
Everyone is always advertising faster speeds, only focusing on increases in the downstream, but no one is ever trying to advertise faster upstream speeds.
Highly asymmetric internet connections (and the proliferation of NAT, to some degree) are leading to a very one-way Internet. Its all about "access to content", and never "peer-to-peer networking". I can download files from major sites very quickly, but sending files outside of my residence takes forever. Heck, video conferencing probably isn't that usable either without strict QoS controls and loads of compression.
This is especially frustrating as the prices for more and more high-speed highly-asymmetric connections keep falling, but the price for even low-speed symmetric connections are staying around the same. It gets very annoying at work, because I'm in a small office that cannot justify anything more than ADSL. So whenever anyone sends an e-mail with attachments, it takes forever and causes latency on everyone else's connections to go through the roof. (Yes, I know this can be fixed with traffic shaping like I do at home. No, I don't have the ability to do that here since I'm not the IT admin.)
Anyone seeing this going extinct in 2006?
All networks should be as fast as they possibly can, this coincides with the theory of natural selection does it not? Even if you aren't getting a faster connection necessarily, it is good to know that your connection is as fast as technology allows.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
"640K ought to be enough for anybody", and is true, no? oh, wait
...Is how faster the main web server for the web site transmits the information to your computer.
:-(
We're hitting the point that many web sites are reaching their bandwidth limits depending on the web host, and going from 1.5 mbps ADSL to 20 mbps fiber connections won't improve things much, sad to say.
The writer of the article seems to be worried most about a "two-tiered Internet" and how the networks are looking to prioritize some traffic over others. I don't see what the big deal is -- prioritization has been built into the IP protocol for decades now. Most network operators, however, have ignored the priorities.
The main reason for this is that if they started accepting priorities from their customers or peer networks, then their customers and peer networks would all set their packets to the highest priority. The end result is that traffic would be routed the same. For QoS to be of any use, there has to be a reason for people not to use it. And, money is the best way of doing this -- if you want to limit the number of high-priority packets going across your network, charge the people who put them there more than if they put low-priority packets on.
Streaming media requires a different type of service than do web pages -- if your GIF logo takes an additional 100 ms to load, you probably won't notice. If, however, a chunk of your phone call takes an extra 100 ms, you will notice it.
The problem comes in when Internet Video becomes widespread, because its need for high bandwith will overwhelm the rest of the content on the network. Prioritization won't help because almost all of the traffic will be video.
The real reason for allowing prioritization is that network operators won't increase their bandwidth without it. Think about it -- why would your cable company spend a lot of money on its Internet service so somebody else can use the Internet service to compete the cable provider's pay-per-view service? The only way the cable company will do it is if they can get a cut of the action.
I work for an ISP in the U.S. We have provided DSL at link speed since initial offering five years ago. That means, if the link negotiated at 1M by 6M, that is what the customer got. We configure all customers at link speed. We also have wireless Internet connections. They are configured at link speed as well.
Our observation is . . . that the faster the customers go, the faster they get on the Internet, the faster they get their surfing done, the faster they get off. And, the proof is in the numbers. With a sample of 500 link speed customers linked at an average of 800kbps up and 5000kbps down, we use no more than 5000kbps of upstream bandwidth on average and 9000kbps at maximum.
And, we have played with the numbers. Slowing customers down to 2000kbps was completely un-noticed by the customers. But, the average and maximum upstream bandwidth rose slightly. Slowing the customers down to 1500kbps was noticed by a few customers. But, the average and maximum upsteam bandwidth rose by 30% respectively.
So, by the numbers, the article is right. Customers use about the same amount of network no matter what. It is a matter of convenience/efficiency for the provider to give the customer a faster pipe . . . for their own benefit.
Does this mean that everyone is being manipulated . . . sure . . . but, it isn't the fault of the network guys. Blame marketing . . . They are the folks who like to manipulate people.
It depends on your definition of fast. Most people equate fast to the amount of bandwidth they have. The fact is, most online games will not saturate your typical broadband connection. When it comes to online gaming, you really need low latency. It doesn't matter if you have 10Mb down and 1.5Mb up if you have 500ms latency!
The problem is that residential broadband service providers crank up the bandwidth but do not guarantee latency. Perhaps someday they will sell a product geared towards gaming with a latency SLA.
"2400 baud ought to be enough for anybody." Wait, is that what he said? I get confused. This is dumb. Peace out.
I've looked around for faster home broadband connections, but getting much beyond 40-60 kB/sec is difficult without jumping to commercial connections that cost double what I'm currently paying just to get the same speed. I'm not a business, and don't need the better reliability of a commercial link. I just want something a little closer to symmetric with my download speed.
How about a VPN and VNC connection? Those could definately benefit from additional speed and would greatly improve a person's life. You could telecommute more effectively in the instance of a disaster, NYC transit strike, kid illness, etc. I could do 90% of my job from home if Apple Remote Desktop and Microsoft Terminal services were faster.
The argument about web-page loading is a fine one, if that's all you do and there's really no difference. In fact, the reason most pages load so slowly is not your bandwidth, but that of the site you are downloading from.
That aside, the value of broadband (pseudo-static high-speed) and increased bandwidth isn't loading web-pages, but all the other nifty things possible: hosting your own services from home, point-to-point video conference/chat with friends and family, finally being able to share video -- even publish it as channels a la Broadcast Machine or video podcasts.
Obviously, the entertainment industry and ISPs don't want you to distribute your own content (for that matter, government might not be keen on citizens publishing their own stuff on the net either), but therein lies the promise of broadband.
When I first subscribed to Comcast, the line was roughly 3Mbit. Over the last couple of years, the downstream speed was first bumped to 4.5Mbit, and then recently to 6Mbit. I live in a generally poor urban area (85% of the households receive some form of assistance, mine not among them) and I think I'm the only one on the local node - because I get every last bit of that 6Mbit, 24/7. Sounds great, eh?
Well, truth be told, I just don't need that much bandwidth for my use. What would be ideal, is having the option to use only 3Mbit, for roughly half the current monthly rate. Most of the time, I feel like half my monthly bill is being wasted on unnecessary service. Believe it or not, I'm strongly considering going *back* to DSL, just to cut the bills. And if I'm finding the rates a little high, I can easily understand why I seem to be the only user in the local hood.
Bad bad broadband bandwidth rollouts are great, and availability is a must - but in my view, breaking the affordability barrier is currenly a greater priority than breaking any new speed barriers.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
It's not quite the law of diminishing returns, but it seems to me that it is kind of like the direction computers are heading in general. As computer technology and overall speed increases, the OS and software seems to become more feature bloated. This in returns reduces the overall responsiveness of the system. The internet seems to be headed in the same direction with increasing content and web applications. Couple this with more users gaining access to the internet and it seems as the speed increases aren't as significant as they would appear. Obviously where this diverges is the fact that there are more users online and the web pages are more intensive, so there is obviously a benefit, but it may not be as obvious to the casual glance.
$sys$droids
From the article, with a few modifications (in CAPS).... ;)
Websurfing runs at only about TWO KILOBITS per second, and nearly everything else except downloading DOESN'T EXIST. Downloading turns out to have some natural limits as well; at 100 Kbps, you can download enough TEXT for 24 hours of READING in only TWO AND A HALF minutes per day. The practical result, confirmed by ME, is that the faster speeds yield only a extremely modest increase in real traffic demand.
Look at websites now, and back in the 14.4 days... we have images now! Okay, some people have gone overboard with the video, but with a really high speed connection and some taste, things like that might be useful on web pages. I'm sure somebody will think of SOME way of making useful web pages that use the extra bandwidth. That's not mentioning all the other applications either.
And 640K should be enough for anyone right?
How could anyone say that more bandwidth won't find applications? It's dumbfoundingly stupid.
On the other hand page loads are not really set by the connection speed. After about 40K per second it's the servers and the latency that sets the download speed. That's one reason why things like google's "secret" data-center-in-a-shipping-container project will be important to frontloading content closer to the destination.
We have yet to reach a point where one can replace a desktop with a thin client or dumb terminal. But Sun's sunray show this is indeed possible if you have enough bandwith for the video connection.
Outside of high performance LANs you can't do this. But with ubiquitous high speed connections of the future only a fool would actually want to own and maintain his own computer. It'll be a paradigm shift enabled by fast connections.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
One thing I've seen is more people in the house using the connection at a time. A couple of years ago my wife never used the computer and my kids were too young. Now my wife gets online a few times a week and I bought my daughter an imac for christmas. In a couple of years she'll be using the computer even more and my younger daughter will be getting online. Throw in more appliances using bandwidth (Tivo etc) and I'll need a lot more bandwidth even if I don't change my personal usage at all.
It depends upon your application.
For the majority of "standard web browsing users", there's not a great deal of difference between 512K down or 6400K down. Although occasional downloads of software or updates do matter. My father tells me that at dialup speeds, web surfing was okay, but microsoft updates were a killer.
However, so many average people are sharing music and video, and web content is including more music and video, so higher speed does matter. My father receives email from us with family photographs, and his pop3 sessions must take some time. Higher speeds are a big winner here.
The real killer application will be greater use of video downloading, whether IPTV or iPod video or something else. These have been available for "tech saavy" users for a while, but have only been hitting mainstream in the last year, if that.
One thing you forget is volume restrictions. We have a 10GB/month cap (and we use about 6-7GB of that), yet my father in Australia has a lowly 200MB cap - even though he has DSL rather than dialup speeds. 200MB is absolutely pitiful.
There are lots of different uses of the Internet and they all have different demands.
* Latency (gaming, voip, browsing)
* Upload Bandwidth (p2p, servers)
* Download Bandwidth (media downloads)
* Stability
ISPs today like to advertise a single number, the download speed. Unless you are mostly using your connection to download large files from servers, that number means very little. Add the fact that lots of ISPs oversell and have usage caps and you have a very ugly market where it is almost impossible for a consumer to make a good decision.
Never mind zero day or zero hour, how long before zero minute?
the faster the broadband the faster the malware propogates.
I wonder if anyone has ever logged the ave speed of internet connections and the speed of these darn viruses?
Yes!
...it reduces the time between duplicate stories arriving.
Tim
I am currently sharing a 256Kbps connection with my parents. Trust me, more bandwidth would be a God-send.
The rise of home networks and the like are what's driving this. Also, consider the "one pipe"-type services that companies such as Verizon are trying to accomplish. If you use one line for phone, Internet, and TV, you need bandwidth.
At the current state, though, sharing a single connection among multiple users is the only thing I can think of.
I've got DSL.....my speed averages about 1.3 mbps...I'm pretty happy with that. What I want is not more download speed....I want more upload speed. It's a damn crock that my upload is only 256 kbps.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I work as a project manager for a large French ISP. We are about to launch TV and VOD. High definition and multiple simultaneous streams (PVR !) are the near future. All that is going to soak up all the excess bandwith you can throw at it for the foreseable future. Web browsing is insignificant compared to the volume of data that video content represents.
At the moment, quality of service ties the delivery of video to the ISP. But who knows, maybe one day we will be able to buy video from somewhere else. My employer would hate that... But as a consumer I look forward to it.
This is silly...
Bandwidth consist of two things
1) Latency
2) Throughput
One without the other is slightly useless.
If your latency is low and your throughput is high then it will make no different for viewing a website since multiple connections and downloads occur between your browsers and your webserver.
We need a balance between the two. There are lots of potential with high bandwidth such as remote backups, video streaming etc...
There is no such thing as to much bandwidth, the problem is that latency doesn't allow bandwidth to show its true colors when small data transmissions occur such as sending receiving email or surfing the web.
With the possibility of the NSA watching my every move, I might just start using Proxy Servers to surf/download. It would really slow my surfing/downloading with current highspeed...speeds, but if I had a faster connectnion I could probably pull off some of the stuff we see in the movies. 8 or 9 proxies, on an, apparantly, propritary OS that is 3D and always Green.
Why, you jerk! I've only got 50 mbit fibre at home here in Nagoya. ;)
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
... how does one market different levels of broadband speed? The answer is that companies are already becoming very savvy at it and realizing that not everyone needs this screaming fast speed yet. Cable is the undisputed winner in speed to the general populace, but DSL is quickly becoming the low cost alternative.
DSL's price for 768kbps has already dropped to $15-$20 in many areas, which means that DSL will begin to replace dialup. Dialup may never completely die for a while longer, because DSL still can't reach certain areas, but it should be enough to kill off many of the national ISPs.
Higher end broadband will be of interest to those who either really need it, or are just terribly excited about having the status symbol of having a faster connection.
Comcast upgraded their systems from 3.0 Mbps to 6.0 and I barely noticed anything. Hopefully I'll be able to switch one day to another provider not because of better speed, but because of lower cost, as the only reason I have comcast is that I can't get DSL or fiber to my house yet.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
And if Verizon comes up with a decent IPTV offering, I'll drop Comcast in favor of it in no time flat.
Free MacMini
The only way to ask this question is if you have not actually done any research at all. The minimal amount. That is: turn off your broadband, see how long you can now survive on dialup.
It is arguable that all the percieved "speed difference" is due to ineffective queuing and scheduling (*and lazy screen rendering) methods. While the world might benefit from forcing everyone to use slower connections until everything has been optimized-the-hell-out, that does not seem very realistic.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I remember using the internet in the 1980s to work on servers in Norway from my office in San Diego: a couple of satellite hops contributed to a couple second delay. Tricks like using the mouse to set the position of the emacs cursor, lots of local testing, etc. helped.
Land line fiber has eliminated much of the speed of light problems with satellite hops and I look forward to faster switches, etc. to reduce latency as much as possible.
I mostly write interactive web portals for a living and adding technologiess like asynchronous Javascript HTML updates, better networking, cheaper and faster servers, etc. all make my job more fun.
That's what you get for guessing. It's been long established that ~0.1 seconds is the typical amount of time in which a user doesn't perceive an interruption, ~1+ seconds is perceived as an interruption, and ~10+ seconds is an unacceptable wait. See Robert B. Miller, 1968, or Jakob Neilsen, 1999.
Don't forget that an HTTP response isn't just about how long it takes a web page to load. These days, it's also about the amount of time an Ajax response takes to complete, so we could be talking about the difference of ~0.8 seconds for interactions like dragging and dropping.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Yes there are more usages for faster broadband then the average "web surfer" uses,
VPN connections to allow admins remotely administer their network from home, or just end users to conduct sales from home or any where they have a broadband connection.
Internet Gamming, Uh Xbox, Playstation , that Nintendo thing, Hello these are the future of social interaction among teenager's and males 7-30 years old. The more bandwidth the better. Oh yeah PC gaming too.
Video Conferencing, VoIP, many usages as quoted, "If you build it, they will come"
Between frames, animations, ad servers, and more, many web sites are horrible bandwidth hogs. You take higher speed access, like a cable modem, for granted until you go visit your parents at Christmas and have to endure their 26.3K connection speed because they live in the boonies and their area only has dial up access.
/. and provide site settings that allow the user to control the amount of chrome served.
Used to be that web monkeys were required to test page load times and coordinate with the marketing team to ensure that web page designs would perform reasonably with low speed internet connections and with multiple browsers. Not any more -- the job is done if you can render everything the marketing team wants in Dreamweaver and it loads okay using IE 5.0 in 1024x768 resolution.
You can limit some of this abuse through the browser settings themselves, but more web sites should do like
So, YES, more bandwidth would be nice. Especially on the upstream (which is typically 1/10 or less of the downstream). People may not notice when that web page loads .05s faster, but they'll sure notice when the DVD that they're downloading gets done in a couple hours vs. a couple days!
/dev/random
Well, for starters it gives me bragging rights. Mine is faster than yours, ha, ha, ha.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The divide between broadband and dialup is huge so adding some extra speed will not really make tha gap any larger, just another impetous to get fat pipe everywhere.
And no, there's no simple way to reallocate frequencies and have more of it used for upstream capacity. Assignment of frequencies for cable video is a matter of federal regulation.
6Mbit connection soon to be 8MBit but still using line compression for remote X since it is just faster in response. It is clearly more acceptible than the 512kbit I started with several years ago, but faster does matter. More bandwidth means less packet fragmentation which severly inhibits the online "experience". So even when you do not use all of your bandwidth, more is just better.
For just plain data use in GB/month, my bandwidth has just doubled going from 512kbit to 6Mbit, so in that way it is not really interesting. I do get more sloppy with my downloads though: Erased, just download it again, the connection fast enough to wait for 100MB.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
It would take an entire day to download some patches and service packs over a modem. So instead of waiting a year to get a Microsoft security hole plugged, I would have to wait a year and a day. That just wouldn't be acceptable!
Obviously not everyone cares about things beyond basic web surfing. However, the applications that are possible with more bandwidth are quite exciting... there will never be enough.
Many of the supposed "advances" in media are really just compromises and reduction in quality - from mp3's instead of 24/96 wav files, and low quality video codecs whose single purpose is to reduce the bandwidth used to download TV & movies.
When you can download uncompressed 1920x1080 video over your broadband connection, and download a DVD worth of data in a few seconds, then we can start to talk about whether there is enough bandwidth.
...until the day you can download anything, at anytime, regardless of size or what else your network is doing instantaneously or at least faster than 150 miliseconds (the time it takes for the human mind to recognize something) after you click the download button.
Until then... It needs to improve.
Otherwise we are wasting our lives on time that need not be wasted.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I supposed downloads beyond 100 Mbps don't matter as I have ZERO interest in moving to a gigabit-home network. That said. I would love to see ANY increase in upstream bandwidth. It would help things like my home FTP server or such.
Just imagine if you replaced your current kitchen trashcan with one that is twice as large. You might think "I'll never need this large of a trashcan!", but how much you want to bet that a week later it's just as full as the old one, and you're saving time by only having to go to the curb half as often. Granted, the new trashbags cost more, and it gets smelly, and strange things start growing in the trashcan that you can't readily identify, but how is that really any different from an always-on broadband connection?
My opinion is faster broadband will allow more robust services to be provided on the interent.
SERVICES:
VOIP most likely the primary service to be adopted with TV(Podcasts etc...) & radio (http://www.pandora.com/ etc...) services receiving more real success.
Future services might be the real adoption of video services delivered with VOIP, & much wider adoption of video casting... (getting access to your DVR from anywhere on the internet)
SURFING:
However I think faster broadband will NOT be likely to increases visits to any given website.
No doubt webpages load up instantly, there are other occassions where you might wish to have a faster, fatter pipe.
For example, when you need to download an urgent Powerpoint slide or PDF, or a LiveCD image that you need to troubleshoot another PC, or when you are updating software on your computer. Thus, having a fast connection gives you great comfort and convenience. This luxury is what money can buy.
w00t
Hey all. In my household there are usually three people and sometimes up to five people sharing my connection. If you look at it from my point of view, I really need that extra bandwidth. I currently have Comcast Cable and get 6 megabits down. When multiple people are online, this effectively can go as low as 1.5 megabits or worse depending on what they are doing. Sometimes if the are uploading stuff or using bittorrent, my connection can really lag ass. I have on several occassions disconnected my family members because they start to do something while I am playing a game or doing something important and I lose a lot of speed.
:)
I'll take as much bandwidth as I can get at a reasonable cost (around $50 per month).
SLA?!? What are you smoking for $40 broadband?
What cable/DSL providers give you a service level agreement (SLA) where they guarentee and back financially their uptime/availability, let alone the speed of your connection. They all provide no remedy for downtime, no guarentees of bandwidth as it depends on your area and usage. Why would they guarentee latency that has so many additional factors including line quality, distance, and the routing equipment used.
You won't find an SLA on anything less than a ISDN/T1+ connection. Maybe some sort of corporate broadband does, but in my experience even $75-$150/mo 'business' broadband has no guarentees either.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
I maintain 4 websites, do web surfing, and email. I have little use for broadband especially at the current prices. If it gets cheap enough, I will get it and maybe fill up more than 8 gig of this 4+ year old 40 gig disk.
I won't pay more for something I would rarely use. It would be like buying a very expensive 160 mph sports car and only using it to drive to the store a mile away.
just like my 20 meg harddrive or 16mhz 386 cpu or 1 meg of ram was enough for the time doesn't mean you wouldn't take advantage of better hardware. The tech industry has always found ways to use more power and capacity. in the 93 i didn't think i'd be able to use up 200 gig's for space and be burning dvd's. but as our systems grew so did our applications that use them. and the blogger also completely ignores the multimedia aspect of websurfing now. how many of us have seem streaming media? the quality is usually pretty poor compared to the downloaded versions. This is were bandwidth helps.
I'm still on dialup, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, why don't these people worry about getting broadband to more people before they go off trying to make it possible to download porn^H^H^H^H^H entire movies in the blink of an eye? I can't get broadband in my area because the wiring is apparently too old and crappy. And I'm only a five minute drive from the city centre!
As another poster pointed out, parts of the internet are becoming unusable to me because they're "broadband only". Even if I could get just 128K broadband, it would be a god-send.
Plus, then it wouldn't take a week to get the latest World of Warcraft patch...
We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
Poor little grad students. $10 to visit a doctor? That's an extremely low co-pay, my ignorant friend. Someday you'll enter the "real world" and things will be very different...
I don't really need broadband, but as opposed to dial-up I don't pay per minute. That way I can use IM/VoIP/WhatEver without having an eye on the time.
...and I'll never need more than 640KB of RAM.
As with most UK broadband users, I get 2mbit down and 256kbit up. (For the moment, ) 2mbit is perfectly fine. What I'd like to see is ISPs working on faster upload speeds.
Yep. Or, if you look at how debian manages its software (tip: use debian sid on a daily basis, and update it regularly for a while, checking out the new packages and updates available), then you'll easily see that the future of software is in staying right up to date. Even windows is moving towards this, albeit at a snail's pace. Debian shows how it will be though, especially in terms of bandwidth use.
Ideally, everything would local when it needs to be local.
Imagine a family of 4 all watching 4 different HD-TV-quality shows broadcast on the 'net. That's a lot of bandwidth, but satellite TV provides it today.
A different application:
I need to download 100GB worth of data to local storage so I can run some analysis on it. The sooner I get the data, the sooner I get it done. Anything short of "infinite speed" is less than ideal.
A slow application, where more than a few hundred KB of bandwidth won't help, but 0-latency is ideal:
A single phone-quality VoIP conversation.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I would gladly trade speed for reliability. Comcast is driving me MAD by dropping every 20 min...
... will drive bandwidth requirements, why do you think Google is investing in fiber...
Its a question of content and services because the war will come down to who can provide the most compelling services, and what with make up those services. The companies that can provide those services and who have the best business model (its all new) that will win.
Examples:
DVD rental / VOD (Standard Definition and High Definition) (on demand)
Broadband Television (live, real-time)
VOIP / Vid-OIP
Online Storage Lockers
Media Sharing
Education
Browsing
Smart Agents
(just to name a few of the biggies)
In any typical household there are heavy internet users and those that only use it in passing but if you measure the usage of all the services (networked and traditional) in a household the potential traffic is quite high. For instance there may only be one person browsing the web (low traffic) but 2-3 people watching TV consuming 1 or more channels (1 each) at the same time.
Then you have the overlap of television, telephone usage, traditional snail mail, reading, education, all services which could move completely to an electronic medium (the internet) with little imagination. Now imagine that on average, 2 or more people in the household are using these services at the same time.
To get to the volumes necessary to fuel this Internet 2.0 economy the service providers need to reach a higher percentage of the users of any given household and to provide a greater number of compelling services. The arguement is how many of these services need to be 'real-time' and I would argue that 'all of them' is the correct answer. For any of the traditional services to move to broadband they will have to replicate the on demand experience that users have today. If you want to read a book you simply pick it up. If you want to watch a movie you simply stick the disk in. Ignoring the psychographic optimizations of content utilization that could take place, it is this pseudo random usage of the traditional services/mediums that make up the user experience. The service providers (whomever they turn out to be) will HAVE to replicate this experience which means that the speed of access has to be very, very fast in order to duplicate the users experience that they have today or people simply won't pay for the service.
This is of course ignoring the underserved communities/opportunities which could be a prime target for services (ethnic minorities, place shifting, handicapped).
Also, speaking strictly from a service provisioner/content owner perspective (google, AOL, MS, NBC, CBS), I want those users to have the fastest possible connection if only so that I can use the connection more dynamically. Imagine google style ad placement only with video, now do this during broadband tv streaming. This will drive bandwidth requirements through the roof (approx 10 times todays avg broadband utilization).
I would say that from a content owners perspective I can even afford to subsidize your connectivity to some extent and probably will just so that I can provide these services, charging you for services/subscription(s) rather than connectivity.
Does broadband connection speed matter... you bet it does.
If nothing else, faster broadband will, as has been stated before, greatly increase online gaming performance and if lag / latency could be all but completely eliminated that'd be absolutely fantastic. Not only that but with the Xbox Live Marketplace and Bill Gates saying that eventually all content will be downloaded instead of provided on discs we can't afford not to have faster broadband access. Case in point, your standard TV show downloaded from the iTunes Music [Media] Store is about a half hour long and takes almost that long to download. And we're talking files that are pretty small in dimensions but due to being well-encoded take up a good chunk of hard drive space. Those TV shows are nothing in comparison with things like full-length movies (particularly at larger dimensions) and video games that are supposedly going to all be distributed online. It will literally take days if not weeks to download the latest video game that comes out because you're not the only person getting it from the central servers (if something like Bit Torrent isn't utilized, which will most likely be the case due to DRM issues) and that's taking up bandwidth that people will be trying to use in order to play games online in the case of Xbox Live. This new method of content distribution that Bill Gates is so confident in simply has no way of working unless our broadband speeds are significantly enhanced, that's all there is to it.
150 years ago, most people did not have running water. If you wanted to know all the benefits of running water would you ask people without or with it?
If all you want is email and browsing you can get by with a modem. All you have to do is turn off Flash and other crappy plugins and get a half decent browser that let's you block images from ad servers. I've done it and shared the line with my wife and the "normal" use worked just fine. Getting pdfs and other large files sucked life, but you could do that at night with a good download program.
GNU/Linux, with user driven development, is cutting edge and giving people exactly what they want from their computers. People want to share their pictures and dreams with family, friends and others interested. Blogging is now one of the easiest ways to do that, but it's not much harder to do your own when a Mepis CD will auto install Apache with most of the extras. It's actually much easier to make an html photo album on your spare computer than it is to carefully select and upload them to some place that will load them with adverts and go away in a few years. Getting your software off the network via ISOs or automated update tools are exactly what users want as well. Automated downloads from Debian, unlike some updating "services", are unobtrusive and can be trusted to keep your computer working well. Amazingly enough, people also want their Dick Tracy video phone.
Contrary to all of the above, the FCC is happy granting monopolies to greedy morons. By some twisted logic, they think that a cable monopoly competing with a telco monopoly will provide "enough" competition for people to get what they want and the providers to profit "enough" to provide new services. The greedy morons have been proving them wrong for five years or so. I can compare At Home and my choice of DSL to today and it's not favorable at all. Services have dried up with choice and the extra money is being put into an "intigent" network that will make competition in the future even more difficult.
Five years ago, things were much better. For less money that I currently pay for cable, I had better bandwith and fewer restrictions. Today, I have a cable modem with port blocks and a 60KB/s upload crimp. At Home provided the same without restrictions at all and the service was reliable. It was also much easier to get a DSL line, that did not suck, from someone other than the local telco. Today, we have the local telco and the cable company working to penalize each other's packets and the technology, of course, will slow everything up.
Greed, in this case, has been very bad. It's eliminated the companies that provided services people want and rewarded the assholes.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Why don't we have ethernet to the home? Cost. The carriers are greedy. Japan has 50Mbit fiber for $20US/mo. For me to get 3Mbit is $50US/mo.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
I spend a lot of time every day waiting for large files to upload to labs. I can do something else while I wait, as long as it isn't browse the web because it slows to a crawl as these uploads are happening. I would REALLY love high speed, and if it never made a single web page load faster I would not give a stuff.
San Francisco Photographers
Look at the numbers.. growth of broadband coverage areas has been stagnet for the last few years. They have not spent much into looking how they can spread the coverage out further. All they care about is how they can raise the cost up for people to use... guess I am better off with my $9 a month modem connection..
SPEED - BANDWIDTH :: Get your geek dictionary out....
.... SPEED will be come more of an issue (latency) and BANDWIDTH less of one. However thier advances MUST go hand and hand if we are going to see truely apliance type computers (just running web browsers) and the the continuation of the current AJAX and comprehensive webapplications initiatives (IE GOOGLE and SUN's OFFICE suite)
Speed: how fast you can go on your favorate interstate.
Bandwidth: More like how many cars can fit through an interstate at a time.
Speed, the amount of time it takes to pass a request and get a response. Bandwidth how much response you can fit through at a time. In the short term with VOIP
This is dumb, and its almost a troll for any tech geek webpage such as this :) Of course faster bandwidth matters. Do faster CPU's and ram matter? Do faster hard drives matter? Do higher resolutions matter?
;)
Faster is always a good thing...
Except in sex, disarming IEDs and typing posts on slashdot without proof reeeeeding them
"...at Internet."
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
(first post) I'm an ex-ATM network design engineer and have some experience on engineering the oversell ratio on ADSL networks running across a combined IP/ATM Telco backbone. It boils down to this: 1. Advertise a speed of x Mb/s 2. Oversell the speed at the DSLAMs to get x/32 nominal speed / CBR 3. Oversell the speed on the ATM VC to mux 32 connections over an E1 / 2Mb/s link. 4. Oversell speed at the RAS to get x/512 CBR. 5. Divide download speed by 4-8 to get x/1024 CBR 6. Aggressively cache, even ignoring page update headers on some sites. In effect, you usually get about 10kb/s nominal on a 512kb/s advertised link. On the ATM network, the latency is very small, but the IP backbone introduces big latency that you do not have much control over. What the Telco's should be doing: 1. Advertise the peak (PIR) and nominal (CIR) rates of the DSL connection IN BOTH DIRECTIONS. 2. Build DWDM/MPLS/ATM core networks END-to-END and advertise as such
RE:[Most online activities, like standard websurfing, are not significantly sped up by high-bandwidth connections, and the few that are, such as downloading, are not typically time-sensitive anyway.]
no? when broadband means a hell of a lot of difference when downloading two to five 700 meg ISOs of the latest release of your favorite Linux Distro? try that on a 56k dialup...
i seen a lot of difference in websurfing too when i switched from a 56k dialup to a cable broadband...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
How does faster broadband actually impact your Net usage?
;-)
What I can think of right now:
- Much faster downloads.
- Broadband TV -- very good digital TV quality, good reliability, good channel selections.
- Broadband Phone (i.e. via a box to connect between the fiber connector in your wall and your regular phone -- not software-based / Skype)
- Movie-on-demand services.
And yes, fast (10 Mbps+) broadband services affect me this way right now over here.
This is not a speculative post.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I have noticed a direct correlation between the speed of my broadband and the size of my penis.
That is the dumbist question I have heard in my life I dare you to patch windows on 56k Go ahead emerge world on 56k Here is is my ftp addy go ahead help yourself to my dvd collection on 56k
downloading, are not typically time-sensitive anyway
I guess I typically download atypical things then. A few megabit per second is getting painfully slow for me.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Could you provide links for documentation on this and the programs you use? I'd be willing to give this a try. I get 1 3/4M D / 1/4M U on my ADSL, and I'd love to turn it into 1 1/2M D / 1/2M U for better response when I'm email photos and do FTP transfers
Free MacMini
In France we have 24Mb/s broadband access (ADSL) with integrated TV (up to 200 channels with up to 8 simultaneous channels), VoIP, VoD for just 30 eur/month.
That so great. There is more and more each time the bandwidth is increased.
I have Verizon's FIOS service. 15Mb/2Mb. I absolutely love having the extra b/w. Most importantly it makes it easier to multi-task your internet connection. Eg, I now rely on SunRocket.com for phone service entirely. Previously, VoIP was a little tougher becuase anytime a big download started, there was a chance an ongoing phone call would suffer.
:-/ That latest Linux ISO? Sure, let's try it out! It only takes 4 minutes to download, what the heck.
The downside? I tend to abuse it.
And faster broadband matters. There are three adults in the house, and one kid...at times, all of us are using the internet. For WoW, for downloading, for maintaining my webpage (which involves pushing around megabytes of music files). I do remote software development, which often invovles pushing applications across the net. My wife works from home and often pushes around video files.
When we had 768K cable, there were times when one or more of us would creep along at dialup speeds when we were all hitting the net. Even when we were not congested, "normal" cable speeds were slow for some of the things I did (remotely backing up the web server, pushing across applications).
With 15 megabit FIOS things are nimble again...I'm moving sometime next year, and it's made enough of a difference that moving to a FIOS enabled area is a huge consideration.
Yeah, I don't need it all the time...I don't need all of my computing power all the time either...but during peak times at the house, that fat pipe gets it's workout on a daily basis.
Where I live you couldn't get voice mail and when I had the phone company come out to do some repairs on my phone lines, he completely trashed my phone system to the point where only on jack would work and that one not very well. In order to fix my land line I would need to have my house rewired. I then signed up for vonage and dropped the land line. This has worked great and has cut my phone bill in half. Just as a side note, Vonage's tech support is outstanding. Maybe the competition will help improve the service that the old school phone companies offer.
Sorry my bullshit sensor overloaded.
Do yourself a favor:
*ubuntu + reasonable computer + broadband (like, say, 4Mbps)
It's so convenient it hurts.
And...
Enjoy!
DISCLAIMER: not necessarily my employer's view.
I think it is you that is smoking something. I said "Perhaps someday they will sell a product geared towards gaming with a latency SLA". I said nothing about adding an SLA to standard broadband offerings. I would expect that a product geared towards gamers (instead of business) with a latency SLA would be more expensive than standard broadband, but less than business broadband.
Incorrect. I work for a Tier 1 provider and we provide latency, availability, and packet loss SLA's on our DSL products. There are other providers which provide DSL SLA's as well. I know this because we are constantly tweaking our SLA's to remain competitive.
when there's more room for them all to be interacting with the net.
We have Cogent Communications at work, and therefore we have 100 mbps over fiber. Glad to avoid the ILEC, makes for a more reliable Internet. The higher bandwidth means more can be done simultaneously; so more users feel that the connection is working fast for them.
Even with higher bandwidth, you're still going to have latency issues. Effective bandwidth will always be limited by traffic, so that at 6pm when Joe Sixpack sits down to check out his fantasy football league, my ssh session will crawl to a halt. Or at least enough to make my tunneled X11 CAD sessions slower than I'd like.
Sometimes those issues will explode when some bozo kills a router or fiber line. All that bandwidth is useless if your connection fails. It's nice to have some local resources.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Many service providers are starting to prioritize their own content at the expense of those from rivals. Many countries have started or are considering blocking Voice-over-IP (VOIP) traffic in order to protect the phone companies from competition.
I know that blocking VOIP has raised some concerns about what that does to a provider's status as a "Common Carrier", but what about prioritizing their own content over outside content? Does the fact that they are making decisions (however simple) about the content passing through their network open them up to problems? I understand it's a simple matter to traffic-shape based on a rule like "from outside our subnet, limit to 'X'", but logically that's not much different than saying "from the website hosted at this address, limit to 0". Yes, this isn't technically practical, but the law isn't designed to only be applied when it's convenient...
I'm annoyed enough that my provider blocks some incoming ports (notably 80), but I can see their position. But what comes down the pipe is none of their business. They should be counting bytes, and that's it. Not bytes from where, or when, or anything else like that.
As soon as my provider starts shaping/restricting my outgoing traffic in any other way that a pure, flat rate-limit or usage-limit, I'm gonna feel morally obligated to find a new provider.
Nixon?! Lucky bastards. I once lived in a place much worse. Positivly Roosevelt administration. (The newest building wiring was old enough FDR could have used it, and the oldest smacked of Teddy). Ladder line. Green glass insulators and thick copper, reused from old electrical runs. You knew when the neighbors arrived home, the modem would cut out from crosstalk. Once it left the building, it ran inches from the power drop to the next building.
9600 on a 33.6 modem meant I was having a good day.
.sig: Now legally binding!
The first, higher speed, is "a good thing": A faster connection is always nicer though as many have pointed out the limits are often at the server-end, not the client end. Also the entire ISP model is asynchronous, assuming that we'll all be good little consumers and never be transmitting anything but the occs'l email and requests for more packets, not having our own servers or sending our own audio or video streams.
This is pretty much not what Tim Berners-Lee was thinking when he first developed his World Wide Web, and what he and others have been trying to rectify ever since. Indeed it is contrary to much of the intrinsic nature of the internet architecture where all peers are inherently considered equal and it is all superficially one big dumb network with the clever bits innovating at the edges. Unfortunately this is also pretty much contrary to what ISPs and media companies would very much like everything to be; just another variation of the centralized broadcast model where they plug in a pipe and you get to choose ABC or Disney (oh, they're the same!)
The second topic, monkeying about with what, where, and how packets get transported, is a creeping phenomena that is indeed slowly taking hold. A good early example is the TOS for many of the 'unlimited' wireless digital data services from cellphone companies:
To borrow a line from HHGTTG:
Already many ISP's block ports, typically port 25 to either stop email spamming or prevent customers from using 3rd party email servers. Also port 139 is often blocked, so Windows users don't accidentally share the contents of their hard drives to the online world. However many go on to block (or significantly degrade traffic on) ports for unambiguously self-interested reasons, such as p2p, or increasingly vendors with whom they compete. One well known example is Telus in Canada who black-holed traffic to a union website (and several thousand other websites unfortunate enough to be co-hosted with it) during a strike. Another is Rogers, also in Canada, who are apparently currently messing about with traffic to/from Apple's iTunes websites.
VOIP is the big target these days. Already several rural US ISPs have had their hands slapped for trying to block it. The ISPs were extensions of the local rural phone companies, heavily Federally subsidized, who'd gone into the data business (also often Federally subsidized). However when their customers stopped making analog calls and started making cheaper VOIP ones they tried to put a stop to this loss of revenue / increase in traffic. Ultimately they were denied this but the issue is one larger and larger ISP's are taking up. BellSouth's chairman and others have increasingly been making their own noises along these lines, and this could indeed be the big flash-point w
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I agree with most that say the applications and content drive bandwidth and the reverse is true, because availability of disgusting quantities of bandwidth can allow people to do things they would not have otherwise even contemplated. A game today may weigh in at 4GB, whereas the games of yesterday weighed in at 64K! For the standard consumer, imagine and sound content has been somewhat static for a while because for quite a long time 1600x1200 has been the realistic cap on most images (this discounts special science and business sectors like GIS and NASA, but those things are more often printed, or at least they were when I was involved with them).
Video everywhere will get you up a bit higher on the bandwidth need, but how much more resolution do we need than 1600x1200? I like the games of today very well, but I enjoyed some of those older games more and they came on floppy disks--remember those?
I do not need more bandwidth for browsing the web or playing games or reading mail or receiving instant messages or using internet telephony. But market factors and what most people want will probably drive bigger and better as it always has. Will we have 1TB games in 10 years with screen resolutions of 3200x2400? Will we just have to have real-time video communication at that level? What about real-time high-definition multi-angle live pr0n performances streamed on-demand to my digital lair?
Oh, goody. It's more real than real! Too bad my eyes and ears cannot tell.
What are you all talking about? To download a DVD with 100 Mbps takes almost 3 minutes, and HDTV blu-ray will hit the market in January. Then there is VoIP that really need improvement with some orders of magnitude, not to mention digital television.
I would happily sacrifice half my down speed (around 640k a second) to double my upspeed (around 38k a second) to get some better bittorrent sessions going on. I wonder if bittorrent may finally provide the reason for a push for better upstream speeds.
Okay, thanks to ADSL I've got my fixed IP address, so I can host my own domain. I've got enough download speed -- 8 Mbps -- so I never have to wait that long for my data to arrive. If I wanted to play games over the net, I suppose latency wouldn't really be a problem either. However, the problem now seems to be that my upload speed is stuck at 1 Mbps.
As far as I can see, this is due to supply and demand. Most people who want an ADSL connection only want to download stuff: they choose only to consume content and not to provide it. This is unfortunate, as providing content for each other is really what the Internet is all about. As time goes by, perhaps more people will begin to see things differently, but if most ISPs continue to limit our upload speeds, they are in effect fostering this culture of consumerism.
However, perhaps there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I figure that demand for greater upload speeds will begin grow as soon as more people start to add video to their VOIP.
1) Faster upload speeds mean the Consumer can start to become the Provider.
2) If you build, they will come.
The first one is huge. Broadband as it is today is rigged so that users cannot become providers. Between the aweful upload speeds(30-40kBps) and AUPs the broadband companies have pretty much insured that the Media providers(usually the Broadband providers themselves) stay the providers and that customers only consume and never provide themselves. There is very little reason(these days) upload speeds could not be a lot faster than they are if not syncronous with your download. They providers just don't allow it.
The second....most of the services we take for granted today were considered ridiculously frivolous by accepted standards just 5-10 years ago. Some in fact were considered just plain bad. Flash converted video, hi res images, Hi bit rate audio, torrent distributed(even non torrent) games al la Steam, heck even ajax would have been a huge no no. Yet these are all the things we like now. Just because most people can get by with broadband as it is now, does not mean that we don't desperately need much faster connections! I want HD tv over IP, I don't ever want to buy another game on cd, or even DVD. I want video conferencing that looks like I am on the lan with the other person and not some compressed low framerate dialup. I want to send my familly tons of huge pictures in seconds not minutes or hours. I want to watch the New Jersey Devils shut out the Rangers in HD on my widescreen monitor! I want to send my friends clips of the game in HD! without it taking 2 hours.
dimes
I think the interesting question is not how much raw bandwidth is available to users, but whether the move to tiered service for content providers will will catch on. If it does, I think the internet as we know it is doomed.
Step 1. Major backbones provide tiered service offering lower latency and higher speeds to content providers who pay a surcharge. Everyone else is assured that their service will not be adversely affected because they have plenty of execess capacity.
Step 2. Major networks, studios, advertisers, software companies, and national magazines all sign up for prefered status with the backbone providers. Consumers sign up for broadband in droves so they can watch truly high quality streaming media from the major content providers.
Step 3. Excess capacity gets used up. Banwdith partition devoted to those paying for prefered status expands, bandwidth available for everyone else contracts.
Step 4. A consortium of SBC, MTV, Time-Warner, and Ticketmaster buys all the Internet backbones. Web 2.0 becomes Cable TV 2.0. Microsoft re-launches Blackbird. The rest of us go back to using dialup BBS systems over 56modems that are then transmitted over VOIP.
The words "You'll never need more space then you'll get with this 5 megabyte harddisk." come to mind. The words a salesman said to myself and my father when we bought one eons ago.
Do we need more speed? Not presently. But as the speed comes more applications that use it will come. Might as well ask did we really need to leave the primodial ooze.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
This was all through internal Motorola documentation, hardware, and software that involved DOCSIS-compliant cable modems, so I can't readily provide that information. (And I left the company/project several years ago.) But the same type of methodolgy is used for DSL as well. (One of the final stages of modem initialization, after locating the uplink and downlink frequencies, is the downloading of the configuration file which tells the modem which cap speeds to use.
You also need to know that any ISP that catches you messing with your connection will terminate your account almost immediately. When information about how to do this was leaked a few years ago, just about every ISP implemented a "no tolerance" policy to those who uncapped their bandwidth. BroadbandReports.com had a lot of messages posted about people who got knocked off their connection for uncapping their modem. So, I don't recommend doing it.
Needless to say I was furious when I learned that speed caps are managed through a configuration file for the modem and are so easily changed. It wasn't even coded. You start the configuration utility, load the file, change the decimal number for the amount of kb/sec for each stream, save the configuration file, and reset the modem so that it downloads the configuration file again. Done! Bastards...
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Westwood Studio's game Red Alert 2 left out an option to play direct modem to modem. The only way to play that game was through a TCP connection through the internet. Modem to Modem had the lowest latency even though it had low bandwidth. I wish today's games would leave in a way to simply dial up someone across town without having to go through a TCP/IP connection. Many laptops still have 56K modems built into them.
I would pay for 10 mbs both ways just for online gaming. With my machine speed and a fast connection lag would be non existent.
Put in local terms, if I'm an ISP with 1000 users who have 10 Mbit/s broadband, and they're all doing their thing at top speed (say they're all amateur directors doing peer-to-peer movie trading), I have to be able to handle 10 Gbit/s of real throughput across my switches to let them max out their connections to each other. Now scale up to a backbone ISP that handles traffic for ~10 million broadband users -- how much do their core routers have to pump through the network at a time to deliver 10 MBit/s at peak usage times?
The bandwidth in the interior of the network isn't there yet, so faster connections at the edges do limited (if any) good. It reminds me of people I know who were spending extra money running 100 MBit Cat5 around their house when their main link to the Internet was 384K DSL (or even dialup) and they had no internal traffic to speak of. What's the point? Spend the money when it makes sense to, it's not like this is your only chance.
I also love when I see doom-and-gloom articles about how the broadband uptake in places like South Korea is so much higher than the US. So what? What's the backbone speed going out of South Korea and how much of the South Korean Internet traffic is jamming into relatively slow overseas (presuming they don't have interconnects through North Korea) links? From where I sit it looks like a feeding frenzy for the sake of coolness more than any real benefit they're getting out of it. Am I wrong? If so, make sure you fully explain the benefit South Korea has seen from massive broadband uptake and (for bonus points) how that translates into the same or similar benefits in the US market.
-- Old Man Kensey
Music downloads pushed much of the mainstream broadband adoption we saw before 2005. People who waited an hour for a song realized it would take only minutes with broadband and gladly made the switch. We have an equivalent that is just starting to get noticed by the mainstream...video. More and more people are realizing they can get their tv shows and movies online like happened five or six years ago with music. The networks are responding to this trend much faster than the music industry did and embracing online distribution. Bandwidth demand will rise significantly as video downloads become common. ISPs will start to advertise based not on web speeds and music downloads, but on how long it takes to get an hour of HDTV content. The changes will start in the areas saturated with cable and DSL providers (yay for competition) and then filter down to the rest of us.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
This writer's conclusions make no sense.
Sure, most users don't use their broadband to full capacity. There's a huge different between a backbone internet connection and a consumer grade line. The entire consumer broadband business model is built on the concept that giving a very large number of consumers high speed access will work if only a small number of those users are generating substaintial demand at any one time.
He also misses the fact that current providers have adopted the asymmetric line speed model in an attempt to curtail peer to peer and hosted content by consumers. This artifical cap will slowly erode, as we've seen in FTTH and some cable offering already.
Also overlooked are emerging trends in smart houses, automation, video monitoring and tele-presence, all of which assume the easy availability of cheap, fast consumer bandwidth at the core of their business model. Other applications, such a remote medical diagnostics and imaging will also generate more usage and will be encouraged by employers and medical providers.
The entire premise of this article is biased from the outset. It really seems like he wrote the entire item to support a preconceived conclusion. Or perhaps it's another case of the media intentinally stirring the pot...
What would Groucho do?
I'm on dialup at home (only option I have). I'm on an OC-3 at work.
Yeah, I can tell the difference. There are a LOT of pages out there that load slowly, so even general surfing is noticeably different. Throw in podcasts, iTunes music purchases, and OS updates, and even "general" internet use these days needs more speed than dialup can deliver.
Geoff
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Dare to Dream.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
You can definitely tell the difference.
I have full cable, which I think tops off at around 5000Kbps but usually does betwen 1000-3000. My mom has 'Lite Speed' cable, which I think is 256Kbps, and it seems agonizingly slow to me. Both are considered broadband however.
For my mom the Lite Speed is fine because she doesn't download many big files and mostly uses it for web and email. For me I'd die if I had to go that slow 'cause I do games and pictures and stuff.
Lastly, I seem to remember similar questions asked in the past: 9600bps vs. 2400, 28800 vs. 14400, etc. Same question, and same answer.
Eight years ago I was living in sweden (I'm dutch) and there was this cool new thing called streaming video. You could watch for example the dutch news in 50kbit/s. Fast forward eight years. I now live in Finland. I have a nice broadband connection and aside from the news (now in ok-ish 500 kbit/s) there's still not that much interesting to see on the net. There's lots of crappy stuff out there but mostly you still can't (legally) watch a pay per view movie, series, etc. The bandwidth is there, the technology is there but the content providers aren't.
Sure there are lots of local cable operators and telcos that offer you a very limited choice in video channels and pay per view stuff but none has gone online and offered their services to whomever has the bandwidth. I'd probably pay for 20mbps instead of the 1mbps I currently have if that would get me high quality content at a reasonable price level. Right now it's just not there.
I can get a premium selection of IMHO shitty digital channels (discovery*, CNN, etc.) for 25 euro per month or I can put a satelite on my roof and receive hundreds of channels, including most channels from my home country for about 10 euros/month. I'd gladly pay 10 euros per month for the same content over an internet connection (provided the quality of service is good enough).
Jilles
Blocking VoIP traffic over the Internet to protect the phone company is like blocking fax traffic over the telephone lines to protect the post office.
... queueing is. What I want isn't more bandwidth, it's QoS.
I have a cable modem (~4Mbps down, ~400kbps up) and I use it pretty heavily. I run a mail server and a web server, frequently use VNC when I'm away from home, VOIP when I'm at home and often have a bittorrent download running (usually getting some recent TV show), not to mention the normal surfing and downloading activity of a half-dozen computers.
My problem is that latency can get really bad for interactive usage when something else is sucking up a lot of the bandwidth. When someone is receiving or retrieving a big e-mail, for example, surfing can get annoyingly slow, remote telnet/SSH/VNC connections get unresponsive and VOIP becomes useless.
The problem is that one network connection may receive a burst of data that the ISP helpfully queues up for me, so they can keep my incoming pipe full. I also see problems when I saturate the outbound connection for a little while. It appears that they do a lot of outbound queueing as well. The symptom is that round-trip packet times across the cable modem link increase to upwards of _3000_ milliseconds.
I can use traffic shaping to prevent queuing at the ISP, but only by severely restricting my total bandwidth. It makes my VOIP smooth, at the expense of slowing down everything to about 1.5Mbps incoming and 200kbps outbound. For those who aren't familiar with it, traffic shaping basically involves using a router to prioritize and manage the network traffic.
Let me explain how it works (as I understand it, corrections and suggestions are welcome!):
Prioritization of outbound traffic is a no-brainer -- if the router has a VOIP packet, an SSH packet, an HTTP packet and a bittorrent packet all waiting to be sent, it should send them in that order. Management of outbound data volumes is a little less obvious, but still pretty simple: The router limits the rate at which it sends packets. It has very shallow queues and rapidly starts dropping packets which can't be sent without exceeding the specified maximum data rate.
Inbound traffic shaping is less obvious, but also works fairly well. It relies on the fact that every decent IP protocol is not only tolerant of dropped packets, but actually takes dropping of packets as a hint to self-tune. TCP is marvellously good at this. So inbound traffic shaping keeps track of the data that has arrived (both volume and type) and if a connection has exceeded the limit, the router drops the packets. It may seem wasteful to drop data that you have actually received, but doing it will cause the sending TCP stack to slow down the rate at which it transmits, resulting ultimately in a smooth, continuous flow of data at very close to the target rate. To prevent a big "stall" when the data rate crosses the threshold, Random Early Detection (RED) can be used. RED will randomly drop packets even before the maximum rate is reached, with the probability of a drop increasing as the rate approaches the maximum.
Ideally, I should be able to configure my shaper to limit incoming and outgoing data rates to just a little less than what my cable modem can handle, and that should ensure that my high-priority packets (like VOIP) always get through right away.
It doesn't work.
Why? Because the ISP does too much queueing, and does it with a straight FIFO... no prioritization. So while I actually can get a sustained download rate of 4Mbps, latency goes to hell in a hurry. At anything above about 2Mbps my latency goes through the roof and to reliably avoid queuing I have to keep the inbound rate at 1.5Mbps or below.
I understand why they do it... so they don't have to buy as much total bandwidth. Queueing allows the ISP to serve more customers for a given amount of bandwidth to the backbone (yeah, I know, it's not "a" backbone any more). It makes congestion on the ISP's network connection less apparent to the end-user. Suppose I'm doing a big download, sustaining the maximum data rate my cable modem c
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
most users will not max their line even once a day as they just web surf and only occaisionally download mp3's (not very big files) or a new program or update (moderate sized). Only a small % of users are downloading iso's or similar sized data sets on a daily/hourly basis. So in that regard, no it doesn't matter. But individuals dont care about the 'big picture' of the generally small time savings they would get over a year using say 10Mbs down vs 1Mb. Most people want their download to be as fast as possible when they need it. As to browsing, the biggest delay I find now is the serving of ads not content. So many pages refuse to load, or only display partially, while waiting for these bs ad servers to send their stuff.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And I'll use it. I can never have too much.
I'd love to be able to seed multiple torrents, download files, play CS, host an FTP server, and still leave enough bandwidth for others on my network to browse the net and stream video. Right now (5mbps down, 2mpbs up) I can really only do one or, or at best, two or three of these things at once.
Yes, of course faster broadband matters.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
All I know is that if I'm ever getting sued for dlling anything remotely illegal I'm gonna make damned sure my ISP is sued right along with me.. its ridicilous to place all the blame on the consumers when you have all these ISP's pushing faster and faster lines yet theres hardly anything to use it on.. if you get a 5mbit link what do you use it on? Theres a FEW online video services available.. mostly porn and of the "legal" ones most is USA only. If you have a 5mbit link and youre gonna download music off iTunes with fast enough speeds to fill your line youre gonna have to buy an awfully lot of music and thus be stupendously rich..
No.. the fact is that WAREZ is the only thing that a high speed line is useful for.. the rest is just a bit of sprinkle that only a few people can get, either because its not available where you live or because the price for every single item (like single songs) grows to absurd proportions if you try to buy enough of them to really use all the bandwidth you're paying for..
Just being able to trim the amount of time we spend optimizing our net code would be a big help, allowing more time for bug-fixing
Or you could just wait until the God damned bug-ridden piece of shit was finished before slopping it out the door.
If your users had enough bandwidth you could scrimp on net code, you'd STILL ship a bug-ridden piece of shit because it's cheaper and garners you more revinue.
This is slashdot, buddy. Most of us have more than twio digits in our IQs.
(mrc="yelling")
Streaming Video
Video on demand over the internet will be HUGE. The time-to-DVD for hollywood films can go down to zero, if there is a world wide release in theaters and homes. Piracy would be greatly diminished if people could watch any movie without needing to store them for a small price.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
In korea, PowerCom is offering Fast Ethernet Spped Internet access(100 MB/s), and it turned out to be a great success. End of discussion.
This was what was said during the 30's about rural electrification. Guess what? People found other uses besides lighting a few 40 watt bulbs. Nothing changed the life of the rural housewife like electricity. No more wood burning stoves, hauling water, heating water over a fire, boiling clothes etc.
Wow... That has to be the worst logic I have seen in a long while. Basically your saying that because they give me lots of bandwidth I should download illegal stuff because I can't use all that bandwidth for anything else!
Again, wow.
Who said you have to use all your bandwidth? By your lovely logic you must drive your car at 120 mph or faster all the time because they made it so your car can drive that fast and what else are you going to do with all that extra speed right?
It's people like you that f*ck it up for the rest of us. Plus it's also people like you that ruined the legal system trying to sue everyone else to avoid the cold hard fact that YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING ILLEGAL and you have no one else to blame but yourself. Hey I also do my fair share of illegal stuff, but I ain't gonna sue everyone because I did. If I get caught, I get caught and I face the punishment myself. Don't try to pass that off on everyone else.
... [Insert decent Sig]
N/T
Larger bandwidth will drive the creation of new applications and content that can make use of that content. Consider the complexity and attractiveness of websites today as compared to 1999. (And don't give me the "simple websites are better - look at all this crappy flash stuff. I fundamentally agree with you, but people shop at attractive websites for the same reason they buy designer clothing. It's where the money is, so business will go there. Nerds like us can deal).
Meanwhile, have you ever used Second Life? There's as a clear demonstration I've ever seen that existing broadband throughput is not high enough.
If we want customizable virtual worlds -- and any geek who has read Snow Crash does -- we will need a couple orders of magnitude fatter pipes.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
...considering that I run a full set of private networking services for family and friends including Web, Mail, VoIP, Remote applications, Print and File serving, utilizing OpenVPN, I'd say a good deal. NFS works at 768k up, but it would work a hell of a lot better if I had say... 6M up and it was synchronous. This is the way of the future. Everyone will be running their own private services and will rely on public or ISP provided content less and less. For those reasons more bandwidth is prefereable.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Broaderband offers the potential to allow users to do more than just download. For example Cablevision is now offering a 2nd tier service that offers 30 mbps down and 2 up. Nice speed - but more important this service allows users to run their own mail and web servers. Initially the web server bandwith is capped, but I have hopes that the cap value will gradually be increased.
This is the next Internet as far as the home user is concerned - anyone who wants to can run their own servers.
When Comcast ups the bandwidth on my segment, my effective bandwidth goes down. This is because virus- and worm-infected PCs outnumber clean PCs on my segment (like the majority of Comcast segments, I suspect) so the number of attacks per minute goes way up (I used to talk about attacks per hour, in fact). Do the math... I lose bandwidth when the attackers bandwidth goes up.
I would pay ten times as much for a clean network. Log analysis at the firewall is pretty pointless when you can't even store a month's worth of data.
I'm a graduate student at U of M myself, and I can tell you this isn't the viewpoint of most U of M grad students. Graduate students from other countries tend to be fawned over at US schools, and when even the smallest little thing doesn't go their way, they raise hell like you wouldn't believe...
Also to note, health insurance for grad students changed to this policty over a year ago, so this guy can't be paying too much attention to begin with...
I have a 4mbit broadband and I'm quite happy with it (BitTorrent runs 24/7).
Per Aspera Ad Astra.
This has been solved. Swedish company Northspark has developed and are now selling a hardware product that gives each consumer in a building 1000Mbit/s duplex (for clarity: yes, its 1Gb both ways) over existing CATV/Coax networks.
2 553
http://www.newsdesk.se/view_pressrelease.php?id=7
http://www.northspark.se/
What an ignoramus! Does faster broadband matter? OF COURSE IT DOES!
1) The browsers of today are quickly becoming part of the Old World of the Internet. The descendents of websuring with rich environments could easily suck up any slack.
2) Can we say games?! HELLO! Games are one of the hottest markets around. On-line gaming is big business! In this arena faster broadband means better on-line gaming.
3) The fact that "many service providers are starting to prioritize their own content at the expense of those from rivals" is another reason to open the pipes up even wider. A low prioritization becomes relatively meaningless if all of your packets are getting transmitted at a fast enough rate.
4) VOIP blocking can be gotten around both by legal and political means, and by tunneling. VOIP is here to stay in one form or another and Quality of Service relies heavily on how much data you can push and how fast you can push it.
5) Movies and other forms of entertainment require better QoS than we currently have. This idea that online activities like "downloading, are not typically time-sensitive" is bogus. Customers want low cost on-demand TV. The Internet has the potential for this if speed and QoS issues can be worked out.
There are hundreds of other applications that are currently not practical over the Internet due to speed. Open it up and you will see another explosion in the growth of Internet business.
Some of you folkes will remember a time with 14.4 Kbps was a LOT of bandwidth, and most of these wouldn't voluntarily switch back. Our children will be laughing at us for our pathetic 1.5 Mbps links, and their children will laugh at them for technology we would kill for. It happens to be a fact. Slow news day? Technology invents its own uses. Give me your extra bandwidth, and I'll find something to do with it.
Shaw's Principle: Build a system even a fool could use, and only a fool would want to use it.
I just love how they need to protect the phone companies from competition. Evil, commie competition. God forbid someone breaks their monopoly.
Next up: electric cars are banned to protect the oil companies from competition.
Satellite dishes are banned to protect the traditional cable providers from competition.
In fact, all progress and invention should be banned to protect our current business models from any further competition.
One thing I do when forced to use dialup is load one page then open a bunch of my other sites in tabs and let them load while I'm reading the first article. Most of us can't keep up with a steady stream of 56,000 bits of information per second, audio and video not withstanding.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
This isn't going to help, though. Once WiMax firms up, ISPs could set up city-wide networks for almost nothing, relatively speaking, and relying on cable or telephone networks already laid down will be unnecessary. Non-profits, small businesses, municiple governments - anyone with arond 50K to spend on antennas - could have their own city-wide network. As they will buy directly from the tier1 providers, they will buypass the current crop of incumbent ISPs altogether. Unless the incumbents can show how their existing network can overcome the large benefits of a city-wide wireless network in some fashion, their days are numbered.
I'll tolerate anything except intolerance.
The Point of view of an Opera user, yes broadband matters. Though Opera speeds up browsing a lot (single pages), it does miracles in multiple-page browsing, I'm talking 10+ websites loading at once.
I don't know if any of you use the internet to do intensive research, but if you do, and do it without Opera, you're at a disantvantage. Since not only can you navigate so many pages fast, but take notes in a flash (CTRL+SHIFT+C)
Now, with a broadband connection, those 10 pages will load a helluva lot faster. For relaxed 'home'-browsing however, a slower connection would do just fine... But when you're loading a ton of them simultaneously and searching through windows at the same time, speed matters. And all the seconds can add up to hours in a search.
/. loads fast enough for me.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
What I want to see is some sort of national broadband penetration. You folks can have 100GB/s, but if the more rural parts of the US are stuck with AOL dialup, it don't do a lot of good to us. The highspeed advantage is pretty freaking serious, and I feel the pain when I come home from school over the holidays.
Faster ??? I'd just like to be able to get broadband !!! And not just some limp wristed light version that barely exceeds dial up speed.
I care more about latency, which affects remote access greatly.
Yes...faster broadband would be nice. I have the least expensive DSL offered around here. It is great for surfing and game playing but to download large streaming media or hdtv shows it is slow. If I want to download an hour show in HD it will take at least a couple of hours.
(I find that I am watching TV on my computer more and more and on the tv less and less. The combination of HD content, large LCD monitor, and being able to watch just the shows I want when I want to watch them makes regular tv look pretty lame.)
speed does matter... try playing second life... every extra bit is welcome
One user that is dependent on broadband is the online trader. Receiving real time market data covering a large range of technical indicators can take up quite a bit of bandwidth. The potential for corporate evil doings in this realm is huge. What if your order to buy or sell a stock doesn't get to the market on time? It could be disastrous.
http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/
Yes, faster broadband is sometimes necessary. This is when you need to use VoIP or to download movies and other large files. A typical movie on a P2P network is around 700 MB and is estimated to take 6-9 hours on my DSL. Symetrical connections do need to become cheaper, but most people do not need the higher speed for uploads. It is important to note that ISPs can be a little generous on bandwidth. My 512k/128k is 576k/160k as indicated by the modem/router.
sudo mod me up
I'm on a 1.5 mb down/256k up ADSL line now, and before that I was on dialup. I will admit that until I discovered Bit Torrent, the experience was initially actually somewhat traumatic, since being able to get virtually any file I could think of more or less instantly was overwhelming to me, especially since I was also introduced to DirectConnect within about two days of getting the connection as well. I had files coming at me from all directions...I was unable to keep up with what I was being sent, and it caused me some panic.
:)
Eventually I calmed down, got off DC++, and set up my firewall properly. Now I only use Bit Torrent for very specific files that I want, and I don't simply sit on DC++ randomly leeching everything that goes past.
The thing that can be overwhelming about broadband is that it gives you so many options of what to do, that it's very difficult out of all of said possibilities to actually make choices...at least at first. Once you realise that it doesn't mean you're going to be automatically buried by a tsunami of data that you can't control, it becomes manageable. I realised that it was simply something I could use for getting the files I wanted as I had with broadband...just much more quickly.
I'm looking forward very much to the introduction of SDSL in my area now as well...because that way I'll be able to host my own Unreal Tournament 2004 server, which will be great fun.
All your cable provider is doing when they increase your rate is increasing the cap they put on your modem itself. Thus, it's possible to get every last bit of your 6 Mbps even if there are a few other people sharing the system. That said, your system is almost surely oversubscribed somewhat, it's just that you're lucky that you aren't trying to use your full 6 Mbps at the same time everyone else is - otherwise that shared 30 Mbps would become overloaded. :)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
There is no dichotomy between a formal education and ignorance, only between a degree and a lack thereof.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
He's trolling. "Bukkake-broadband"? Please, someone google "Bukkake". Or click on his link to read an interesting article...
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I did, and it wasn't about whether or not we need faster broadband.
It was about the potential emergence of a multi-tiered internet. Back to school the lot of you!
Which internet is he talking about? Really, what is the actual data premise here? He's just plain *nuts*. This is a manufactured non issue it's so obvious. I'm stuck on dialup at home. Once a month or so I treat myself to a little browsing at the public library in "town" which has some sort of broadband, I do not know the exact connection they use but it supports roughly a dozen machines simultaneously surfing away.
It is MUCH faster surfing at the library, even on their older machines, that's why I consider it a "treat". Click a link, POOF 0 RAMA it's there and loaded and you can browse. On dialup it's mash link, hang around, slowly text part of page appears, then later on images sort of show up. No comparison. Now how about streaming media content, even just lowly flash animations on dialup? Shoutcast and etc? Videos? I'm limited to a few of the audio stations at the eXtreme lower bitrates, and even then it makes surfing at the same time almost unbearable unless images are turned off, etc. Online videocasts are play a bit then *buffer, buffer, buffer*, play, buffer, and etc. Mostly buffer. Just forget any full downloading of anything interesting if it's more than a few megs, just ain't worth it. My computer's nights are already taken up with just keeping a modestly full operating system patched and updated. Where does this "doesn't matter" part come into play?
From my POV, I can't wait until some sort of decent affordable broadband is offered in the hinterlands. Until then I really appreciate having *any* connection, but a scosh better connection speed would be *sweet*.
Without trying to sound overly informed, - as these things do change -, there are still many Telcos around the world which are fully state-owned and subsidized.
The types of companies which wouldn't stand a chance in a competitive-type (i.e.: "Free-Market") economy, where they would have to actually generate income.
One of the main things that these state-owned monopolies do is to be able to have laws altered by the government to their liking and advantage. Obviously, VOIP is an extremely disruptive technology, which although not too terribly worrisome right this minute, (as statistically there aren't that many people savvy enough to know how to use it) has already started showing up on those state-owned monopolies' radars as something that could force them to actually work and get things done for their (gasp!...) customers.
Things like offering discount pricing, many more advanced features, clarity of calls, not to mention the killer feature: 'free' calls to any location on the planet, that is free if placed to another VOIP customer as in Skype. Therefore, expect these state-owned Telcos to fight tooth-and-nail and do whatever it takes to go as far as criminalizing what in their eyes amounts to nothing less than robbing them of their state-sanctioned livelihood and cushy guaranteed income. (In all likelihood, it will ultimately be a trivial job of coming up with a protocol which can't be fingerprinted and blocked as it changes ports and goes through some sort of secure tunnel...)
So to get back on topic, yes, faster broadband is definitely a must as there will be more and more uses for those fat(ter) pipes.
Z.
Give me an example using a more mature technology. What do you do with your 4Ghz Processor that a 1Ghz processor couldn't do? 2Gb ram VS 128mb? *CONSUMER* Software applications have never scaled to fill available resources, and new applications *have not* emerged to utilize the power. (games don't count)
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I'd like to be able to surf and torrent at the same time, something I can't do with my current crap DSL. If I see something I want to download, I don't want to end my surfing session then and there or wait until I go to bed to start up the queue.
Streaming video would be cool too, but I can read and annotate a transcript before the video will play all the way through.
And all this on a 'broadband' connection.
So yes, size^H^H^H^H speed does matter.
--RIAmAses! Let my MP3ople go!
I get along just fine in my horse and buggy. It gets me from A to B just fine. What's all this hubub about cars being so great? If you ask me, we should stop using cars and even slow down the horses a little bit.
Anyone who says we should stop pushing the limits, and not go for as much bandwidth as possible, is the kind of fool who says exploring outer space is a waste of time.
I want the internet to run like a 100 baseT LAN everywhere all the time in the next 5-10 years. I'll betcha it happens too!
Is this still true?
yea sure its illogical but its also true, there is nothing out there for you to spend fast lines on.. sure for businesses a 10 or 100mbit line is nice but WHAT does a regular consumer use a 100mbit line on?
If you got a LOGICAL answer to that PLEASE make it..
At 850K/sec, I download DVD isos faster than I can watch them. Bring on the bandwidth!
Your connection is only as fast as the slowest point. I'm a heavy surfer; for the most part the problems are run in to are site with a slow connection. I have RR and regularlly get 4.5 down One of the most annoying things is send a file to my friend 3 blocks away who is also running RR I'm only transfering at 100k a sec. The fastest upload speed I've acheived is 160 down. ^Not that I send many files, but it's annoying when you know that you both have a high speed connection and cannot achieve decent speeds. Some one said above it would be nice if they evened out upload speeds some what.
1000 Yen = 8.49USD, about 7.18 Euros or 9.89CAD (Canadian $)
My argument was that just because you can't do enough legal stuff with something, you shouldn't be allowed to do illegal stuff to compensate.
Swallow that...
... [Insert decent Sig]