Slashdot Mirror
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.
Porn.
A monster ate my homework!
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
I'd also like to have someone with a brain on the other side of the support conversation when there is a problem with the connection.
You messed up a litte there. You don't pay the cable company money every month so that the "programs" are there. You pay the cable company so that they can "deliver" the programs to you. Having Video on Demand will not change the number of commercials put into content only the cost of delivering the content to you. You could NEVER afford to actually pay for the content to be created w/o commercials subsodizing them.
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.
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!
the faster the broadband the faster the malware propogates.
Address the problem of malware, don't stifle bandwidth.
If the typical OS did not have swiss cheese like security this would not be an issue. Also for those of us that actually know how to maintain and use a secure system this is not an issue, and faster bandwidth is always welcome.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.