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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.
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.
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.
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!