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?

Comments

So I guess most people

[PIPBoy3000]

. . .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.

Well this always comes up...

[iPaige]

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.

Well in my area...

[slack-fu]

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.

Re:Well in my area...

[TallMatthew]

I am relatively confident, however, that you won't ever have 24 Mbps of wide-open unrestricted IP for anything less than several thousand dollars a month (call Sprint for a fractional DS3 cost which, delivered over old copper typically, is inferior to that fancy new glass you're getting).

While the handoff is coax, DS3 transport is carried over fiber and split off an OCn mux at the customer prem. The difference between a fractional DS3 and the SBC offering isn't the medium, it's the network the packets travel on; decision-making on oversubscription differs markedly for consumer networks vs. business networks, based on the fact businesses generate more revenue overall and would be less tolerant of networks that don't run at rated speeds.

SBC's lightwave or lightspeed or lightstream or whatever they're calling it, that 24Mb HDSL circuit the original comment spoke of, is intended for delivering large media files, specifically movies-on-demand. They're partnering with a set-top box manufacturer and a large web portal to offer these services to their customers. That should roll out relatively soon. These files will be hosted on-net within SBC, or via some private peering point with a fat pipe, so SBC endusers should have no issue getting the movies at 24Mb. However, the rest of their infrastructure (specifically their peering circuits) won't change much, if at all, so the Internet will be as fast (or slow) as it is now. That's not what they're interested in, that's not why they're investing gargantuan sums of cash for buildout, they're not doing it to provide fast HTTP access to the Internet for customers, they're doing it to sell movies-on-demand.

Personally I've got no problem with that. Give me the fat pipe now, spend the $$$ to get fiber to my house, then I'll gripe until you upgrade your throughput to the rest of the Internet. I figure that they will have to do it eventually.

confusing terminology, this "broadband"

[putko]

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".

Re:Does it matter?

[porkThreeWays]

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...

Re:Is web surfing the only application?

[stoothman]

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.

You are not unique. Others want what you have.

[twitter]

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.

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.

Re:Does it matter?

[Herkules]

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

Biased article, preconceived conclusions

[ispland]

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...

Duplex speeds solved

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

http://www.newsdesk.se/view_pressrelease.php?id=72 553

http://www.northspark.se/

Re:Is web surfing the only application?

[miyako]

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.