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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?
. . .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.
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.
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.
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...
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_
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.
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I've seen your posts before raving about this 100 mbit connection (I think it was you. Or someone else in Tokyo). How much of this 100 mbits do you actually see? Is a good deal of the city on fiber? Tell us more...
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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.
Whoa, fundamental networking concepts... having a faster pipe doesn't equate to lower latency.
Latency for your net connection with a given provider is pretty much fixed. Whether you have their budget 256/128 service or their "Pro" 5/768 service, your packets are making all the same hops. Upgrading your service level means that they raise or lower your throughput, but latency remains unchanged.
Theoretically, a service provider could actively retard the latency on their "budget" service or have a separate set of routers just for "pro" customers for improved latency, but I've never heard of a company doing that.
For one thing, separate routers for premium customers would destroy one of the main allures (from the ISP's perspective) of premium service: it doesn't cost them any more to operate than the budget service. When you upgrade from their $20/mo service to their $60/mo service that extra $40 is pure profit for them. They're not going to cut into that, especially since most people don't even understand the basic concepts of latency and throughput... as you yourself have demonstrated, and you seem to be a pretty computer-literate type otherwise, since you obviously understand how AJAX works.
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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.
There are three killer applications for me, in having high speed DSL.
Not in any particular order.
1. Home Office - VPN
2. Downloading my favorite linux distro in a reasonable amount of time
3. Video and Voice chat with family, especially my parents, who live out of state, so they can see the grandkids more than they normally would
In addition to this, having the "always on" connection, means it has mostly replaced the newspaper, telephone directory and a variety of other analog sources of information.
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.
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Well i sitt here in sweden with a 100/10 Mb connection. Normal speed from linux distrobution sites in sweden is 1-6 MB/s so i really like it =)
I often get above 1 megabyte when downloading programs and stuff.
And all this is for ~35 usd/month
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I live in Holland, and I get the same speeds for approx. the same price. AND I can call every 'normal' phone in Holland for free!
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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.
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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.
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...
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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/
I have a similar situation, except without the ability to ride over to the office and drop of a disk full of images.
The last job I had involved uploading a lot of high resolution images. It was faily painful to wait 15 minutes to upload a single image, and then get back "X needs to be just a tad more blue", spend 1 minute tweaking the image, and then send it back. Repeat about 100 times a week and that's about 25 hours a week wasted waiting on files to be uploaded.
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