4 ms·

If you look at future applications , there isn't a big benefit from higher bandwidth. For video , 720p takes 2mbit(youtube's 720p) , and the difference between

by ippisl 16y ago

If you look at future applications , there isn't a big benefit from higher bandwidth. For video , 720p takes 2mbit(youtube's 720p) , and the difference between 720p to 1080p isn't very big.if we go to 3D , it might be doubled , but with smart compression , might be less. For video conferencing , the compression is much more effective because of the small frame to frame changes, so i think you can get 1080p at 2mbit up + 2mbit down.if i recall right , in the right setting , 1080p is needed to give you the illusion of being in the same room. For bit-torrent,to make streaming possible(i think streaming is the most natural way of video consumption), probably what is needed is higher uploads ,and configuration such that uploading doesn't slow the download side , not a higher download bandwidth. For video game streaming(onlive.com) , what's important is the latency . i believe the speed is good enough. The other future application of fast bandwidth is using cloud storage as your HDD. not a very attractive application if you ask me. dropbox is good enough. So i don't see anything in the horizon requiring very high bandwidth internet for the home. 10-15 down / 4 up would be more than enough for any average family.

10ren 16y ago
"640K is enough for anyone" (misquote). When there's an excess of computing power of some kind, it may make possible that was previously inconceivable. And if you're the one to conceive and act on it... An easy one is 3D video (1080p x 2); but I like the idea of omni-video, on a spherical screen with you at the center (or like omniMax, like iMax, but hemispherical so it also covers your peripheral vision - I've experienced it, and the effect is amazing). Thought expt: what data is inconceivably massive to transmit?
- ippisl 16y ago
  Data that's today inconceivable to transmit usually comes from science. this data is usually being sent via HDD. i don't think it fits the home. The data from/to the home would be cameras and video streams. i don't know any other sensor technology that generates massive amounts of data and being used in the home. Maybe some sort of GPU cloud , if the bandwidth is good enough. but usually bandwidth costs more than computing so it would make more sense to gather the GPU units closely. Omni-video sounds interesting , could you please tell more about the experience ?
  - 10ren 16y ago
    I went to the OmniMax theatre at a sort of Technology park in Singapore (about 20 years ago!). I actually haven't seen one anywhere else; the closest is iMax. Anyway, it was a huge hemisphere, enough to cover a large cinema's worth of people. The seats were tilted back by about 45 degrees. Because my peripheral vision was covered, when the camera tilted, it actually felt like everything was tilting. The movie I saw was taken from a plane, and so this happened whenever it banked. The bandwidth needed was massive - IIRC, they used seven 35mm cameras, and superposed them with seven projectors. The sound was via speakers placed at various locations behind the hemisphere. I've seen a couple of iMax movies (with an extremely large, though flat screen), and the effect doesn't occur. It's a lot more expensive to make a hemispherical cinema, I think. However, I recall a youtube video of a guy doing it within a simple tent (compensating for the corners not being spherical by distorting the image projected). BTW: you make a nice point about considering sensors in the home, but also consider what sensors it would be great to have, perhaps using yet-to-be invented technology. eg. a sensor that could register the exact 3D contents of a room; or brain activity; or all your sensory input nerves (brain in a tank anyone?); downloadable objects (auto-milling machines - but probably don't require massive bandwidth, unless it was ridiculously high-resolution, say approaching molecular levels - effectively, matter transmission). An interesting constraint is that lag will probably prevent interesting real-time applications. There maybe hybrid applications, eg to progressively download massive hires textures in a MMORPG or sandbox game or games like the videodisk-based Dragon's Lair (I think the limit here is that they are so expensive for artists to produce in the first place - perhaps the breakthrough needed is a way for amateurs to generate excellent/interesting textures? Perhaps consumer HD cameras will do this). Maybe motion capture, as in project natal (but I think the bandwidth needed is pretty low... again the problem is latency).
    - nitrogen 16y ago
      The California Adventure park in Anaheim, CA has a hemispherical screen theater that incorporates moving seats and scents sprayed into the air.
- artsrc 16y ago
  Humans have physically limited sensory bandwidth. Your ears, eyes, nose, etc. can't process more than a limited amount. So higher bandwidth can help move some processing about and make different architectures possible, but they can't make the experience much richer.
  - 10ren 16y ago
    Interesting point, but the thing about eyes is that they can look in unpredicted directions, so you need much more data available than just what the eye can process. This wouldn't be true if we didn't have lag (then we could just stream the right images for where the eye was looking). But our eyes are extremely sensitive to lag - even done 100% locally, it's difficult to be fast enough (or used to be). To compensate, we can download a whole environment, and track the eyes locally.
nitrogen 16y ago
1080p is actually significantly better than 720p on large screen sizes at standard computing distances (or if you have 20/20 eyesight and sit at standard TV distances from a ~50" or larger screen). I'd also expect at least 4mbit for streaming 720p feature movies in H.264. Very high bandwidth links are also useful for lowering the delay involved in bulk transfers like uploading videos, and a higher link speed (even if the total bandwidth is throttled) results in shorter individual packet transmission times, and thus lower interactive latency.
- ippisl 16y ago
  Interesting. what sizes of computer monitors are you talking about ? Doesn't latency sensitive applications use short packets , so the difference in latency from the connection is small relative to the total path ?
  - nitrogen 16y ago
    I use a 28" monitor with a resolution of 1920x1200. I've watched the same video in 1080p and 720p, and the 1080p is appreciably sharper and more detailed, even accounting for the fact that the 720 version is being scaled to the display's native resolution. It is 2.25 times as many pixels, so there's over twice as much detail possible. It's kind of fun to read the signs and computer monitors in the background of scenes (for example, on a 1080p version of The Island, you can see a character's hilariously disturbing criminal record on a monitor in the background). As for latency sensitive applications, going from a 2mbit link to a 20mbit link reduces the round trip transmit time (excluding interpacket delays required by common physical links) of a 256-byte packet from ~2ms to ~0.2ms. If both endpoints migrate from 2mbit to 20mbit, then ~3.6ms of latency can be eliminated. The benefits are larger for larger packet sizes, so larger packets can be used (and therefore increased throughput) while maintaining low latency.
andrewtj 16y ago
I think you missed a current application that needs a stack of bandwidth — network boot or install of operating systems. MacBook Air's already do a wireless network install from another machine and ChromeOS will be delivered solely via the internet. You can dismiss the prospect in the same way you've dismissed cloud storage but given trends in physical media for music and video, I don't think a decade will pass before doing an OS upgrade or install that requires physical media will be considered a curiosity.
- ippisl 16y ago
  I dismissed cloud storage , because i don't think a large percentage of people would pay higher bandwidth bills for this feature when they have something like dropbox . And i'm not sure people would pay higher bandwidth bills for internet installs.
  - andrewtj 16y ago
    I agree, but then in general I don't think that consumers pay more for internet connections for specific features — nor do I think they ever have. I think they pay more because what they have has become a limitation for what they're already doing.

by ippisl 16y ago

10ren 16y ago

"640K is enough for anyone" (misquote). When there's an excess of computing power of some kind, it may make possible that was previously inconceivable. And if you're the one to conceive and act on it... An easy one is 3D video (1080p x 2); but I like the idea of omni-video, on a spherical screen with you at the center (or like omniMax, like iMax, but hemispherical so it also covers your peripheral vision - I've experienced it, and the effect is amazing). Thought expt: what data is inconceivably massive to transmit?

ippisl 16y ago
Data that's today inconceivable to transmit usually comes from science. this data is usually being sent via HDD. i don't think it fits the home. The data from/to the home would be cameras and video streams. i don't know any other sensor technology that generates massive amounts of data and being used in the home. Maybe some sort of GPU cloud , if the bandwidth is good enough. but usually bandwidth costs more than computing so it would make more sense to gather the GPU units closely. Omni-video sounds interesting , could you please tell more about the experience ?
- 10ren 16y ago
  I went to the OmniMax theatre at a sort of Technology park in Singapore (about 20 years ago!). I actually haven't seen one anywhere else; the closest is iMax. Anyway, it was a huge hemisphere, enough to cover a large cinema's worth of people. The seats were tilted back by about 45 degrees. Because my peripheral vision was covered, when the camera tilted, it actually felt like everything was tilting. The movie I saw was taken from a plane, and so this happened whenever it banked. The bandwidth needed was massive - IIRC, they used seven 35mm cameras, and superposed them with seven projectors. The sound was via speakers placed at various locations behind the hemisphere. I've seen a couple of iMax movies (with an extremely large, though flat screen), and the effect doesn't occur. It's a lot more expensive to make a hemispherical cinema, I think. However, I recall a youtube video of a guy doing it within a simple tent (compensating for the corners not being spherical by distorting the image projected). BTW: you make a nice point about considering sensors in the home, but also consider what sensors it would be great to have, perhaps using yet-to-be invented technology. eg. a sensor that could register the exact 3D contents of a room; or brain activity; or all your sensory input nerves (brain in a tank anyone?); downloadable objects (auto-milling machines - but probably don't require massive bandwidth, unless it was ridiculously high-resolution, say approaching molecular levels - effectively, matter transmission). An interesting constraint is that lag will probably prevent interesting real-time applications. There maybe hybrid applications, eg to progressively download massive hires textures in a MMORPG or sandbox game or games like the videodisk-based Dragon's Lair (I think the limit here is that they are so expensive for artists to produce in the first place - perhaps the breakthrough needed is a way for amateurs to generate excellent/interesting textures? Perhaps consumer HD cameras will do this). Maybe motion capture, as in project natal (but I think the bandwidth needed is pretty low... again the problem is latency).
  - nitrogen 16y ago
    The California Adventure park in Anaheim, CA has a hemispherical screen theater that incorporates moving seats and scents sprayed into the air.
artsrc 16y ago
Humans have physically limited sensory bandwidth. Your ears, eyes, nose, etc. can't process more than a limited amount. So higher bandwidth can help move some processing about and make different architectures possible, but they can't make the experience much richer.
- 10ren 16y ago
  Interesting point, but the thing about eyes is that they can look in unpredicted directions, so you need much more data available than just what the eye can process. This wouldn't be true if we didn't have lag (then we could just stream the right images for where the eye was looking). But our eyes are extremely sensitive to lag - even done 100% locally, it's difficult to be fast enough (or used to be). To compensate, we can download a whole environment, and track the eyes locally.

nitrogen 16y ago

1080p is actually significantly better than 720p on large screen sizes at standard computing distances (or if you have 20/20 eyesight and sit at standard TV distances from a ~50" or larger screen). I'd also expect at least 4mbit for streaming 720p feature movies in H.264. Very high bandwidth links are also useful for lowering the delay involved in bulk transfers like uploading videos, and a higher link speed (even if the total bandwidth is throttled) results in shorter individual packet transmission times, and thus lower interactive latency.

ippisl 16y ago
Interesting. what sizes of computer monitors are you talking about ? Doesn't latency sensitive applications use short packets , so the difference in latency from the connection is small relative to the total path ?
- nitrogen 16y ago
  I use a 28" monitor with a resolution of 1920x1200. I've watched the same video in 1080p and 720p, and the 1080p is appreciably sharper and more detailed, even accounting for the fact that the 720 version is being scaled to the display's native resolution. It is 2.25 times as many pixels, so there's over twice as much detail possible. It's kind of fun to read the signs and computer monitors in the background of scenes (for example, on a 1080p version of The Island, you can see a character's hilariously disturbing criminal record on a monitor in the background). As for latency sensitive applications, going from a 2mbit link to a 20mbit link reduces the round trip transmit time (excluding interpacket delays required by common physical links) of a 256-byte packet from ~2ms to ~0.2ms. If both endpoints migrate from 2mbit to 20mbit, then ~3.6ms of latency can be eliminated. The benefits are larger for larger packet sizes, so larger packets can be used (and therefore increased throughput) while maintaining low latency.

andrewtj 16y ago

I think you missed a current application that needs a stack of bandwidth — network boot or install of operating systems. MacBook Air's already do a wireless network install from another machine and ChromeOS will be delivered solely via the internet. You can dismiss the prospect in the same way you've dismissed cloud storage but given trends in physical media for music and video, I don't think a decade will pass before doing an OS upgrade or install that requires physical media will be considered a curiosity.

ippisl 16y ago
I dismissed cloud storage , because i don't think a large percentage of people would pay higher bandwidth bills for this feature when they have something like dropbox . And i'm not sure people would pay higher bandwidth bills for internet installs.
- andrewtj 16y ago
  I agree, but then in general I don't think that consumers pay more for internet connections for specific features — nor do I think they ever have. I think they pay more because what they have has become a limitation for what they're already doing.