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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.
. . .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!
as someone who has 100mbit fiber to the home in Tokyo: Absofuckinglutely.
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
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.
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.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
... 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.
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!
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/
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.