10 ms·

Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives. Even a low speed connection in a rural zone can

by 101008 5y ago

Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives. Even a low speed connection in a rural zone can achieve wonderful things. But I really wonder what was your prototype that needed that speed connection and that wouldn't work with something slower. Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work?

OJFord 5y ago
Anything working with (downloading) massive datasets would 'work' slower, but as fast as possible (provided the supplier can keep up too) is better? Add in a requirement/desire for it being real-time (or equivalently (you'd get further and further behind) continual) and it could be necessary if large (per second) enough.
throwaway2037 5y ago
This. In a developing country, zero internet/mobile to email/mobile SMS has a huge economic impact for farmers who want to check prices in local market. Scale up to 1Mbit via 3/4G, the economic impact is equally enormous for a variety of reasons.
zhdc1 5y ago
> Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work? We work with gis/satellite data. Nothing groundbreaking technically, but we aggregate it into products that are useful for social science researchers who aren’t comfortable with or don’t have the computing resources to use this data by themselves.
- antihero 5y ago
  What exactly about gis/satellite data required such an insane uplink?
  - arcade79 5y ago
    What exactly is insane about it? I was surprised when my parents had 1Gbit in 2009. I was delighted when I could get 500Mbit in 2013. I'm slightly miffed that I don't even get 1Gbit in 2022. I literally laugh at providers attempting to convince me to get whatever with 10 or 20Mbit uplink speeds, in 2022l Yes, they exist. Anyhow. What's insane about a 10Gbit uplink? I wired up my apartment for 1Gbit in 2001. I've been frustrated about home network speeds for 21 years. I do not understand why you consider 10Gbit insane.
    - nine_k 5y ago
      At home you are free to make everything 10G-capable, have a NAS that can saturate such a link, etc. On the wider internet, few resources are happy to dedicate such bandwidth to you, even if you can consume it. Not even every popular torrent can muster so much incoming bandwidth. I can see how it may make sense if you run a popular public server from your home; maybe more convenient than colocation, but still is not a typical use case.
      - lmz 5y ago
        Also, even at colocation providers, 10 Gigabits committed rate is going to be a bit pricy.
      - throwaway2037 5y ago
        I feel the same. I am an übergeek, but I see no reason to pay for more than 100Mbit/sec, but 1Gbit and (soon'ish) 10Gbit will be available. Where I live, 100Mbit/sec is laughably cheap. I get a sales call once per month: "100Mit/sec is so slow! Would you like a upgrade?" I have no use for it. That said, I view myself as the exception to the rule. Please don't read this post as "1Gbit+ is useless" -- only that I don't have a use. Real question: If you are an Internet gamer, I assume that latency per packet is lower for 1Gbit+ connections, so it is useful for many customers. More: I feel the same about monitor resolutions above 4K. Anything above 4K on a 27inch monitor makes no sense for my body size / sitting height. I cannot use a vertical monitor taller than 27inch, and above 4K is too small for my aging eyesight! Again: I am sure there are many interesting applications for 4K+ and 27inch+. I hereby wish good luck to all the whippersnappers who will prove me wrong with interesting applications of 4K+ and 27inch+!
  - merlyn 5y ago
    25Gbps is not insane if you are using commodity hardware. If you are buying any sort of datacenter switch, most likely it will be 25G/100G already. 10G/40G is dead tech. Now, 400G uplinks are still pretty reserved, but 100G (and its' breakout, 4 x 25G) is common as dirt now.
    - namibj 5y ago
      Are there any small (affordable, energy-efficient) switches with those speeds? Say, around 8-24 of the 25G lanes? You can buy a dual-port SFP28 card for 250 EUR by using the QNAP "accessory"[0] which is just a ConnectX-6 Lx EN with a fan to work in the NAS systems they market it for. This is quite efficient due to the PCIe4 support not hogging many lanes (half of the 8 lanes can be enough depending on usage), but to use the speed one needs a 25G switch. Is the cheapest way just an Ryzen with 5 of these directly attached to the CPU, and running routing on the CPU via DPDK? [0]: https://geizhals.eu/qnap-lan-adapter-qxg-25g2sf-cx6-a2609459.html https://geizhals.eu/qnap-lan-adapter-qxg-25g2sf-cx6-a2609459...
      - throwaway2037 5y ago
        MikroTik is a market leader in barebones 10Gbit/sec routers. However, multi-port 25Gbit/sec is very expensive! This model is 2800 USD and has 12x 25Gbit/sec and 2x 100Gbit/sec ports: https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq
    - antihero 5y ago
      I struggle to find a 10Gbps USB NIC for my laptop.
      - zhdc1 5y ago
        Go with surplus commercial hardware and be judicious about when you turn your equipment on.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    I'm sure there's >10Gbits of 'gis/satellite data' available every second if you want it? Or what if you want a bunch of historical data for some sort of analysis, and you'd like to start that now, not next week when it finishes downloading? If it's historical (i.e. sitting there available to download) then faster is always better right? If your connection is the bottleneck then all else equal why wouldn't you want it? (I imagine 10Gbps is about the point currently where it's not necessarily going to help going faster on your end, unless you you have multiple (concurrent) sources, or know that even at that you're still still the bottleneck.)
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    GIS and remote sensing has you working with gargantuan TIFF files and massive amounts of other kinds of data. It's a whole thing. If you're doing data aggregation, it's possible that without an absolute unit of a pipe just to do a download of imagery, the prototype wouldn't have been feasible. https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/product/imagery/making-landsat-on-aws-accessible/ https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/product/imagery/ma...
  - randomluck040 5y ago
    I can think of two things. Large time series data for large areas with a lot of attributes like temperature or other atmospheric data or a huge amount of point clouds or comparable 3D Data.
    - zhdc1 5y ago
      SAR and multispectral imagery. It’s not difficult to work with when you’re only dealing a small and well defined regions, but the bandwidth and storage requirement definitely increase once you start doing daily global composites. We’ve actually moved everything into a data center with a 1gb connection. The trade of being that we have several orders of magnitude more storage and computing capacity.
      - randomluck040 5y ago
        It’s crazy because among friends I’m the only one working with geodata (remote sensing, too) and the last few days I keep stumbling upon people who already do some work in the same area and are probably much more advanced than I am. Good luck with your endeavour!
baybal2 5y ago
> Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives. Being from a soon north korea 2.0 to be (russia,) I can say it was my surprise to see Internet being so bad across the developed countries when I was travelling in the previous decade. Canada - ridiculously expensive traffic, Germany - no comments, UK - sometimes good, sometimes 128kbps DSL, USA - 20mbps DocSis everywhere India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, much of Africa had FTTH as the dominant way of home Internet connection for a while.
- larusso 5y ago
  As a German I weep and cry. 25Gbit/s seems so so far off. And I live in a major city. I only get 150Mbit VDSL at the moment. I have no cable connection so one of these to get the theoretical 1Gbit/s download is out of the question.
  - kayoone 5y ago
    Gigabit internet is quite widely available through different cable providers in Germany nowadays. Also the country side seems to be moving up, the very rural place where I grew up (and where my mom still lives) had a max of 2Mbps DSL for the last 20(!) years and now the whole area is being upgraded to fibre and will enjoy 10/1Gbps by the end of the year!
    - larusso 5y ago
      I moved into a newly build house in 2014 and was shocked to learn that all the houses only had basic copper telephone lines and Sat-TV. The whole field was empty and they had to do the groundwork for the copper cables anyway. I was shocked when the Telekom person, who connected my then 16MBit/s ADSL contract I had to move with, told me that the next TAL (connection point; Teilnehmer Anschluss Leitung, I don’t know the correct English term) was 5km out and that I will only able to receive 10MBit/s max. Netflix HD was blurry and browsing while streaming impossible. I hear news that it gets better and that rural places finally get faster speeds but as long as I live where I live now I’m bound to VDSL or find enough neighbors who would be willing to ship in to get a Fibre connection.
loudthing 5y ago
I’ve never heard someone call their own country a “third world country”. Out of curiosity, which country are you referring to?
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  It’s colloquially used to mean economically underdeveloped/developing countries. However recently economists have begun using the term “emerging markets”.
- wara23arish 5y ago
  Grew up in a third world country (middle east) That is the official terminology used in school books required by the official curriculum.
- ggpsv 5y ago
  This is term is commonly misused as it originally referred to countries beyond the Cold War's NATO/USSR denominations. Today the parent likely refers to a country in the global south or a "developing" nation. I'm from what used to be a third-world country in the strict sense of term, I'd now refer to my country as a country in the global south.
  - thfuran 5y ago
    >I'd now refer to my country as a country in the global south Meaning what, in the southern hemisphere and not Australia or new Zealand?
    - ggpsv 5y ago
      It isn't a geographical denomination, but rather socioeconomic and political. Most of the countries in the global south denomination are actually in the northern hemisphere.
      - MajorBee 5y ago
        Well, most of earth’s landmass lies in the northern hemisphere.
sschueller 5y ago
Technically Switzerland is a third world country according to the original definition.
- cromulent 5y ago
  And Finland may soon be moving from third world to first world.
- nix23 5y ago
  You could also say what you meant. >>The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
  - arcade79 5y ago
    That's what he said.

by 101008 5y ago

OJFord 5y ago

Anything working with (downloading) massive datasets would 'work' slower, but as fast as possible (provided the supplier can keep up too) is better? Add in a requirement/desire for it being real-time (or equivalently (you'd get further and further behind) continual) and it could be necessary if large (per second) enough.

throwaway2037 5y ago

This. In a developing country, zero internet/mobile to email/mobile SMS has a huge economic impact for farmers who want to check prices in local market. Scale up to 1Mbit via 3/4G, the economic impact is equally enormous for a variety of reasons.

zhdc1 5y ago

> Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work? We work with gis/satellite data. Nothing groundbreaking technically, but we aggregate it into products that are useful for social science researchers who aren’t comfortable with or don’t have the computing resources to use this data by themselves.

antihero 5y ago
What exactly about gis/satellite data required such an insane uplink?
- arcade79 5y ago
  What exactly is insane about it? I was surprised when my parents had 1Gbit in 2009. I was delighted when I could get 500Mbit in 2013. I'm slightly miffed that I don't even get 1Gbit in 2022. I literally laugh at providers attempting to convince me to get whatever with 10 or 20Mbit uplink speeds, in 2022l Yes, they exist. Anyhow. What's insane about a 10Gbit uplink? I wired up my apartment for 1Gbit in 2001. I've been frustrated about home network speeds for 21 years. I do not understand why you consider 10Gbit insane.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    At home you are free to make everything 10G-capable, have a NAS that can saturate such a link, etc. On the wider internet, few resources are happy to dedicate such bandwidth to you, even if you can consume it. Not even every popular torrent can muster so much incoming bandwidth. I can see how it may make sense if you run a popular public server from your home; maybe more convenient than colocation, but still is not a typical use case.
    - lmz 5y ago
      Also, even at colocation providers, 10 Gigabits committed rate is going to be a bit pricy.
    - throwaway2037 5y ago
      I feel the same. I am an übergeek, but I see no reason to pay for more than 100Mbit/sec, but 1Gbit and (soon'ish) 10Gbit will be available. Where I live, 100Mbit/sec is laughably cheap. I get a sales call once per month: "100Mit/sec is so slow! Would you like a upgrade?" I have no use for it. That said, I view myself as the exception to the rule. Please don't read this post as "1Gbit+ is useless" -- only that I don't have a use. Real question: If you are an Internet gamer, I assume that latency per packet is lower for 1Gbit+ connections, so it is useful for many customers. More: I feel the same about monitor resolutions above 4K. Anything above 4K on a 27inch monitor makes no sense for my body size / sitting height. I cannot use a vertical monitor taller than 27inch, and above 4K is too small for my aging eyesight! Again: I am sure there are many interesting applications for 4K+ and 27inch+. I hereby wish good luck to all the whippersnappers who will prove me wrong with interesting applications of 4K+ and 27inch+!
- merlyn 5y ago
  25Gbps is not insane if you are using commodity hardware. If you are buying any sort of datacenter switch, most likely it will be 25G/100G already. 10G/40G is dead tech. Now, 400G uplinks are still pretty reserved, but 100G (and its' breakout, 4 x 25G) is common as dirt now.
  - namibj 5y ago
    Are there any small (affordable, energy-efficient) switches with those speeds? Say, around 8-24 of the 25G lanes? You can buy a dual-port SFP28 card for 250 EUR by using the QNAP "accessory"[0] which is just a ConnectX-6 Lx EN with a fan to work in the NAS systems they market it for. This is quite efficient due to the PCIe4 support not hogging many lanes (half of the 8 lanes can be enough depending on usage), but to use the speed one needs a 25G switch. Is the cheapest way just an Ryzen with 5 of these directly attached to the CPU, and running routing on the CPU via DPDK? [0]: https://geizhals.eu/qnap-lan-adapter-qxg-25g2sf-cx6-a2609459.html https://geizhals.eu/qnap-lan-adapter-qxg-25g2sf-cx6-a2609459...
    - throwaway2037 5y ago
      MikroTik is a market leader in barebones 10Gbit/sec routers. However, multi-port 25Gbit/sec is very expensive! This model is 2800 USD and has 12x 25Gbit/sec and 2x 100Gbit/sec ports: https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq
  - antihero 5y ago
    I struggle to find a 10Gbps USB NIC for my laptop.
    - zhdc1 5y ago
      Go with surplus commercial hardware and be judicious about when you turn your equipment on.
- OJFord 5y ago
  I'm sure there's >10Gbits of 'gis/satellite data' available every second if you want it? Or what if you want a bunch of historical data for some sort of analysis, and you'd like to start that now, not next week when it finishes downloading? If it's historical (i.e. sitting there available to download) then faster is always better right? If your connection is the bottleneck then all else equal why wouldn't you want it? (I imagine 10Gbps is about the point currently where it's not necessarily going to help going faster on your end, unless you you have multiple (concurrent) sources, or know that even at that you're still still the bottleneck.)
- brailsafe 5y ago
  GIS and remote sensing has you working with gargantuan TIFF files and massive amounts of other kinds of data. It's a whole thing. If you're doing data aggregation, it's possible that without an absolute unit of a pipe just to do a download of imagery, the prototype wouldn't have been feasible. https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/product/imagery/making-landsat-on-aws-accessible/ https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/product/imagery/ma...
- randomluck040 5y ago
  I can think of two things. Large time series data for large areas with a lot of attributes like temperature or other atmospheric data or a huge amount of point clouds or comparable 3D Data.
  - zhdc1 5y ago
    SAR and multispectral imagery. It’s not difficult to work with when you’re only dealing a small and well defined regions, but the bandwidth and storage requirement definitely increase once you start doing daily global composites. We’ve actually moved everything into a data center with a 1gb connection. The trade of being that we have several orders of magnitude more storage and computing capacity.
    - randomluck040 5y ago
      It’s crazy because among friends I’m the only one working with geodata (remote sensing, too) and the last few days I keep stumbling upon people who already do some work in the same area and are probably much more advanced than I am. Good luck with your endeavour!

baybal2 5y ago

> Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives. Being from a soon north korea 2.0 to be (russia,) I can say it was my surprise to see Internet being so bad across the developed countries when I was travelling in the previous decade. Canada - ridiculously expensive traffic, Germany - no comments, UK - sometimes good, sometimes 128kbps DSL, USA - 20mbps DocSis everywhere India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, much of Africa had FTTH as the dominant way of home Internet connection for a while.

larusso 5y ago
As a German I weep and cry. 25Gbit/s seems so so far off. And I live in a major city. I only get 150Mbit VDSL at the moment. I have no cable connection so one of these to get the theoretical 1Gbit/s download is out of the question.
- kayoone 5y ago
  Gigabit internet is quite widely available through different cable providers in Germany nowadays. Also the country side seems to be moving up, the very rural place where I grew up (and where my mom still lives) had a max of 2Mbps DSL for the last 20(!) years and now the whole area is being upgraded to fibre and will enjoy 10/1Gbps by the end of the year!
  - larusso 5y ago
    I moved into a newly build house in 2014 and was shocked to learn that all the houses only had basic copper telephone lines and Sat-TV. The whole field was empty and they had to do the groundwork for the copper cables anyway. I was shocked when the Telekom person, who connected my then 16MBit/s ADSL contract I had to move with, told me that the next TAL (connection point; Teilnehmer Anschluss Leitung, I don’t know the correct English term) was 5km out and that I will only able to receive 10MBit/s max. Netflix HD was blurry and browsing while streaming impossible. I hear news that it gets better and that rural places finally get faster speeds but as long as I live where I live now I’m bound to VDSL or find enough neighbors who would be willing to ship in to get a Fibre connection.

loudthing 5y ago

I’ve never heard someone call their own country a “third world country”. Out of curiosity, which country are you referring to?

vishnugupta 5y ago
It’s colloquially used to mean economically underdeveloped/developing countries. However recently economists have begun using the term “emerging markets”.
wara23arish 5y ago
Grew up in a third world country (middle east) That is the official terminology used in school books required by the official curriculum.
ggpsv 5y ago
This is term is commonly misused as it originally referred to countries beyond the Cold War's NATO/USSR denominations. Today the parent likely refers to a country in the global south or a "developing" nation. I'm from what used to be a third-world country in the strict sense of term, I'd now refer to my country as a country in the global south.
- thfuran 5y ago
  >I'd now refer to my country as a country in the global south Meaning what, in the southern hemisphere and not Australia or new Zealand?
  - ggpsv 5y ago
    It isn't a geographical denomination, but rather socioeconomic and political. Most of the countries in the global south denomination are actually in the northern hemisphere.
    - MajorBee 5y ago
      Well, most of earth’s landmass lies in the northern hemisphere.

sschueller 5y ago

Technically Switzerland is a third world country according to the original definition.

cromulent 5y ago
And Finland may soon be moving from third world to first world.
nix23 5y ago
You could also say what you meant. >>The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
- arcade79 5y ago
  That's what he said.