3 ms·

It's a chicken/egg problem. No one is going to develop mass-market services that require users to have a gbit internet hookup if there are hardly any potential

by Aaargh20318 7y ago

It's a chicken/egg problem. No one is going to develop mass-market services that require users to have a gbit internet hookup if there are hardly any potential customers. Which leads people to think they don't need gbit internet because there is nothing that requires that kind of speed. Just like there was no need for most people to have >10Mbit internet without the likes of Netflix or Youtube existing, and no way for those sites to survive if everyone is using a 56k modem.

mabbo 7y ago
There's a limit though, is what I'm saying. My hearing and vision are getting worse, not better, as I get older and there's diminishing returns on increased bandwidth in terms of utility. Give me streaming audio at the absolute quality limits at 8Mb, 32Mb, 80Mb- I won't be able to hear a difference. My internet bandwidth is beyond my ears capabilities. I've seen 4K and 8K TVs recently- I can't tell the difference. (I'm far more interested in contrast ratios, frankly). If I can stream video at 4K, my bandwidth will have exceeded my eyes capabilities. Why would I want to pay more for 8K hardware and bandwidth if I get nothing other than smug satisfaction? At a certain point, there isn't any benefit to each human to having more bandwidth. And me? I think I've reached my limit at only 75Mb. 1Gb would be neat, but what for?
- icebraining 7y ago
  For streaming VR? I agree, I was upgraded from 30Mbps to 60Mbps and I really couldn't care less. The annoying bottleneck is on the other side, which regularly caps to 10Mbps or less. 1Gbps sounds great for an office, though; kinda sick of having shared 50Mbps connections where some stream HD videos just to listen to music.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Right, the use case for 10x bandwidth is so you can discard 90% of the download so you don't have to decide even 1second on advance which part you want to keep.
tialaramex 7y ago
Yeah No. Exponential curves always mean you've zoomed in too far on the chart. There will be a plateau, and the exponential bit of the curve tells you essentially nothing about where that plateau will be. In the case of home Internet the plateau is likely somewhere in the 100Mbps ballpark. It's probably more than 10Mbps and it's probably less than 1Gbps. - The most important change was NOT the bandwidth increase from 56kbps to low megabit speeds. The most important thing is Always On which for most people arrived at the same time. Omnipresent Network Access changes how and why people use the network. I lived in a house that had 24/7 56kbps Internet access in the mid-1990s and it was basically the _same_ as now [except video was much poorer quality] because it was _Always On_. People who had to wait maybe a minute for Dial-up had a completely different experience because dialing up is a thing you do, like watching TV, whereas being connected 24/7 is an inherent thing like being able to understand Spanish. It felt weird _not_ having the Network if I was away. That feeling finally went away when I got a smartphone years later. - All the applications already existed. Youtube is a refined version of technologies that already existed back in the 1990s. It's video on web pages. Yes it's much higher quality video, and it's better integrated and so on, but those are refinements, the basic idea wasn't created when enough people had "high speed" Internet access, the idea is decades old. If your hypothetical killer app for gigabit home Internet was going to appear it already would have done so, at least twenty years ago.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Maybe I want to watch every NFL game live, simultaneously, in 4K.
agumonkey 7y ago
Partlt true but only partly. I almost never watch anything in hd, even 720p. Most of the time I watch 480p although hd is the mainstream ... I don't find any value in it. I consider gb internet to be the same. I'm probably stay at IRC level of bandwidth. Of course i will Switch to gb speeds because some ISP gonna sell it half my dsl line to 'grow'.

mabbo 7y ago

There's a limit though, is what I'm saying. My hearing and vision are getting worse, not better, as I get older and there's diminishing returns on increased bandwidth in terms of utility. Give me streaming audio at the absolute quality limits at 8Mb, 32Mb, 80Mb- I won't be able to hear a difference. My internet bandwidth is beyond my ears capabilities. I've seen 4K and 8K TVs recently- I can't tell the difference. (I'm far more interested in contrast ratios, frankly). If I can stream video at 4K, my bandwidth will have exceeded my eyes capabilities. Why would I want to pay more for 8K hardware and bandwidth if I get nothing other than smug satisfaction? At a certain point, there isn't any benefit to each human to having more bandwidth. And me? I think I've reached my limit at only 75Mb. 1Gb would be neat, but what for?

icebraining 7y ago
For streaming VR? I agree, I was upgraded from 30Mbps to 60Mbps and I really couldn't care less. The annoying bottleneck is on the other side, which regularly caps to 10Mbps or less. 1Gbps sounds great for an office, though; kinda sick of having shared 50Mbps connections where some stream HD videos just to listen to music.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Right, the use case for 10x bandwidth is so you can discard 90% of the download so you don't have to decide even 1second on advance which part you want to keep.

tialaramex 7y ago

Yeah No. Exponential curves always mean you've zoomed in too far on the chart. There will be a plateau, and the exponential bit of the curve tells you essentially nothing about where that plateau will be. In the case of home Internet the plateau is likely somewhere in the 100Mbps ballpark. It's probably more than 10Mbps and it's probably less than 1Gbps. - The most important change was NOT the bandwidth increase from 56kbps to low megabit speeds. The most important thing is Always On which for most people arrived at the same time. Omnipresent Network Access changes how and why people use the network. I lived in a house that had 24/7 56kbps Internet access in the mid-1990s and it was basically the _same_ as now [except video was much poorer quality] because it was _Always On_. People who had to wait maybe a minute for Dial-up had a completely different experience because dialing up is a thing you do, like watching TV, whereas being connected 24/7 is an inherent thing like being able to understand Spanish. It felt weird _not_ having the Network if I was away. That feeling finally went away when I got a smartphone years later. - All the applications already existed. Youtube is a refined version of technologies that already existed back in the 1990s. It's video on web pages. Yes it's much higher quality video, and it's better integrated and so on, but those are refinements, the basic idea wasn't created when enough people had "high speed" Internet access, the idea is decades old. If your hypothetical killer app for gigabit home Internet was going to appear it already would have done so, at least twenty years ago.

lonelappde 7y ago
Maybe I want to watch every NFL game live, simultaneously, in 4K.

agumonkey 7y ago

Partlt true but only partly. I almost never watch anything in hd, even 720p. Most of the time I watch 480p although hd is the mainstream ... I don't find any value in it. I consider gb internet to be the same. I'm probably stay at IRC level of bandwidth. Of course i will Switch to gb speeds because some ISP gonna sell it half my dsl line to 'grow'.