6 ms·

At this point in history, would most users even be able to benefit from gigabit connection speeds? I have 20mbps FiOS, and I feel like my connection is almost

by lukev 15y ago

At this point in history, would most users even be able to benefit from gigabit connection speeds? I have 20mbps FiOS, and I feel like my connection is almost never the limiting factor in delays online. Sites that are actually serving at full speed load in a fraction of a second. Lots of sites are slow, but it's almost always the server side or intervening networks (overseas sites, etc.) For the vast majority of content, 20 reliable mbps completely meets my needs. I can stream HD video with no buffering. I can download ISO images in much less time than it takes to boot a VM. My Dropbox syncs within a few seconds: I can't recall actually having to wait for a file to be available. Not saying that gigabit internet isn't awesome. But I don't feel like connection speed is the major bottleneck on the internet experience right now for those who can get a > 15mbps connection. I'd rather focus on expanding the availability of that, before we move on to the next tier of bandwith-heavy applications.

djtriptych 15y ago
At this point in history, would users even be able to benefit from 28.8kbps connection speeds? I have a 14.4, and I feel like the BBS's and AOL chat rooms I frequent struggle to keep up. What could I possibly need double the speed for?? Not saying 28.8k isn't great, but the internet just doesn't need speeds like that yet. Better to focus on getting everyone up to 14.4k first.
- lukev 15y ago
  Of course we can and will use more. But in any optimization scenario, you eliminate bottlenecks first. I question whether the ISP to home link is the bottleneck in the modern internet experience the way it was in 1998.
  - bryanlarsen 15y ago
    But that's a chicken and egg problem. Upgrading ISP to home link creates incentives for others in the chain to upgrade their link.
  - veidr 15y ago
    You're right about that, but I think it isn't purely an optimization scenario. Altogether new use cases emerge when your workplace and home are linked with such dramatically higher speeds. Even more new scenarios shake out when work, home, and most of your friends' and family members' homes are so linked. When connections get orders of magnitude faster, it becomes about doing new things, in addition to doing the old things faster. I surf the web the same way with 1Gbps fiber in Tokyo as I did a few years ago with 3Mbps DSL in Ithaca, NY. But surfing the web is just a small part of what I do via the Internet nowdays.
  - NegativeK 15y ago
    Netflix has argued that it is. The companies that are trying to do remote-gaming are probably having issues with bandwidth. The days it took to upload my music collection to Google Music all argue it is. Bandwidth isn't the only bottleneck, but it's holding some technology back.
- bane 15y ago
  Well, there is a difference. A 28.8 and even a 56k connection were easy to saturate with something a simple as listening to streaming radio. I don't believe I've even approached saturating 20Mbps with multiple users in the house streaming multiple video streams and downloading as much data as they could. The other end and the in-between-bits has always been a limiting factor and has been once you get over about T-1 speeds. Put another way, buffering in software for 28.8 was usually needed because your end couldn't stream something like a 3 minute song smoothly. Buffering on a 28Mbps connection is because the provider can't stream something like a 3 minute hi-def music video smoothly. In principle I'd love gigabit Internet, but I honestly wouldn't know what to do with it.
  - rogerbinns 15y ago
    I can saturate a 100mbps connection by booting a diskless computer. Why shouldn't our operating systems/environments be stored "in the cloud"? Why shouldn't I have more than one computer in my house? Just because you can't think of things doesn't mean they don't exist :-) And once they do exist they'll seem obvious to you. Remind me again why I can't have cameras all over my house and see them all at once while somewhere else. Why shouldn't I be able to speak to an SO wondering around the house doing chores while I'm in a hotel room? All that aside, think of the games and entertainment that can be enabled. TVs are large enough to be almost life size now. Why shouldn't I be able to stand in front of one with a doctor or Amazon employee on the other side being able to examine each other, products, packaging etc in high resolution detail. (Note 1080 is not even close to high resolution for life size.) Dream big.
    - bane 15y ago
      These are mostly softballs though...1-at-a-time: "I can saturate a 100mbps connection by booting a diskless computer. Why shouldn't our operating systems/environments be stored "in the cloud"?" Clouds go down, your computer goes down. There's no compelling reason to put the OS "in the cloud". Your data? Maybe, if you can handle not having access to it every second of the day. And even today, one can RDP or VNC perfectly comfortably on a 20Mbps connection provided all the "cloudy" parts of the internet behave. More importantly, if the server and the links between you and the server aren't capable of giving you 100mbps then you can't saturate the connection. "Why shouldn't I have more than one computer in my house?" How does not having a 1Gbps internet connection prevent this? "Remind me again why I can't have cameras all over my house and see them all at once while somewhere else." Why can't you do that today? Streaming 1080p from x-number of cameras, multiplexed into a single display that's probably no better than 1080p is silly. The proper approach, regardless of bandwidth, is to downsample the displays before multiplexing at the broadcast side. Then you're just streaming a single video stream anyways, which is perfectly doable at 20Mbps. "Why shouldn't I be able to speak to an SO wondering around the house doing chores while I'm in a hotel room?" Again, why can't you do that today? There's no reason to stream video from empty parts of the house. In your use-case, you're only sending one or two video streams at a time anyway...again still healthily within the realm of 20Mpbs. "All that aside, think of the games and entertainment that can be enabled. TVs are large enough to be almost life size now. Why shouldn't I be able to stand in front of one with a doctor or Amazon employee on the other side being able to examine each other, products, packaging etc in high resolution detail. (Note 1080 is not even close to high resolution for life size.)" This is the only compelling case you've provided I think, but bandwidth is not the principle problem in this use-case. Everything from cameras to encoders to compressors to display devices are a bigger problem in this case. And yes, you'll have to compress even at 1gbps. A 1920x1080 display with 24bit color at 60fps is something like 3GigaBytes per second or around 24gbps. The next gen of TV is likely to be some variant of super hi-vision which is 7680x4320. @24bit and 60fps that's just shy of 48Gigabytes per second uncompressed or 384gbps. So yeah, bandwidth will be a bottleneck in those applications, but 1gbps is not even close to handling it and I'm guessing the hardware required to real-time encode and compress video for a stream like that is astronomical.
jrockway 15y ago
I recently moved from Chicago to New York, getting 6Mbps DSL at home in Chicago and 1Gbps (yes) Internet at work. The difference is noticeable. Regardless of need, once you have fiber to your building, 1Gbps and 20Mbps cost the same. It's getting something other than a POTS circuit that makes the difference.
veidr 15y ago
In my experience, the bulk of the awesomeness of gigabit Internet is that it turns the Internet into a LAN. I think anybody who uses the Internet in a LAN-like manner can definitely benefit from gigabit speeds (and can I get 10Gbps soon, please? I'm ready!) For instance, I (regularly) upload my 20~60GB VMWare VM files between my house and the office, because I don't want to carry a computer/disk around with me. At work, I tend to have a bunch of Remote Desktop connection to my home machines, which I leave up 24/7, as its not enough bandwidth to make a perceptible difference. And while most backup services like CrashPlan or Mozy or whatever definitely are the bottleneck, if you are backing up to your own remote servers, or to AWS via something like Arq, the speed really makes a difference, just as much as with a LAN (at least up to 100Mbps with AWS, anyway... at that point I think they become the gating factor). I agree you don't get a huge benefit when surfing normal Internet websites, and that the benefits break down when the remote end of the connection is international, but for stuff like the above, the faster the better.
alalonde 15y ago
Build it, and they will come. Expanding this kind of service to the majority of domestic internet users would be a game-changer for the types of new apps and sites it could enable.
hristov 15y ago
Current speeds are not really enough for HD video. Even if you get 1080p video online it is still highly compressed for online transmission. If I remember correctly I think blue ray is 40-60 Mbps. Higher compression means there simply isn't as much detail.
- bradfa 15y ago
  Over the air HD in 1080i format is generally about 20Mbps. It looks pretty darn good to most people. Yes, higher bitrate makes better pictures, but for TV, over the air is currently the best way to get network programming in the least compressed format.
wmf 15y ago
That's the genius of Sonic's plan. Advertise gigabit, customers use 20 Mbps, everybody's happy.
- MrMatters 15y ago
  Why does that make everybody happy? What I got from the article was that the difference in cost to the ISP for having someone connected at all and using a ton of data had grown increasingly minimal in recent times.
  - kls 15y ago
    and that the cost difference from somebody at 20mbps to 1gbps is nominal. It does not cost them that much more in true usage. I think it is pretty straight up of them to have their installers disclaim to customers that they really don't need a 1gbps connection.
techsupporter 15y ago
The point isn't that Sonic is running gigabit networking to people's houses. The point is that it CAN BE DONE and on a reasonably profitable basis (I'm assuming that Sonic's management is fine with the cost outlays). Verizon was 80% of the way there and its management got cold feet. Memo to Frontier Communications: THIS is how you do it. You can beat Verizon at their former game, get Sonic.net to show you how. (Or, even better, get Sonic.net to take over your FiOS operations in the Pacific Northwest...)
- matwood 15y ago
  Keep in mind one of the reasons it's profitable is because running above ground wires is much cheaper than in the ground or whatever has to be dealt with in big cities. The article even mentions expanding to other towns will mean going into debt.
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    When their break even point is well below 2 years going into debt is hardly a bad idea. In their situation debit is simply leverage and while it increases risk you can easily maintain profitability while borrowing significant amounts of money as long as your creating capital with that debt.
    - matwood 15y ago
      The article implies that laying cable in the ground is significantly more expensive than running it above ground. Hence the need to go into debt. The ROI timeframe will also likely change with the increased costs. The point I was making is that one of the most expensive parts of getting fiber to the home is laying the cable. In this case they were able to do a 'test' run to a neighborhood where they could just relatively cheaply run the cable above ground. I hope that their cost structure still works when moving towards more expensive rollouts, but given how we have seen other fiber rollouts get scaled back or fail I'm not so sure.
- twoodfin 15y ago
  > Verizon was 80% of the way there and its management got cold feet. I have a simple explanation for that: A regulatory and commercial environment that was clearly not going their way. Verizon spends something like $1,000 to install FiOS at your house, then a few hundred dollars a year in hardware, bandwidth, etc. To make that work for them economically, they need customers paying an average of $100+/month and preferably even more over time. But how does Verizon get your $100+ when you watch all your TV on NetFlix, Hulu or iTunes? That's pretty obviously the way things are heading, though it may take another decade. Now all you want from Verizon is an IP pipe, and good luck convincing customers that "Internet only" should cost as much as "Internet + TV + Phone". And an Obama-appointed FCC is unlikely to allow Verizon to demand a cut of NetFlix or Apple's revenue for use of "full bandwidth": That's what the Net Neutrality fight was always about. Without their own services to sell, the capital cost of laying and maintaining a "dumb pipe" didn't look so good. I think Apple is going to have a go at solving this problem for the providers: "Let us take over the user experience (i.e., the hardware and software) and in return we'll give you a new way to package your services that guarantees a healthy revenue stream regardless of how consumers are getting their content." Just think how much more money AT&T makes from the average iPhone subscriber vs. the average dumb phone subscriber and you'll have the right idea.

by lukev 15y ago

djtriptych 15y ago

At this point in history, would users even be able to benefit from 28.8kbps connection speeds? I have a 14.4, and I feel like the BBS's and AOL chat rooms I frequent struggle to keep up. What could I possibly need double the speed for?? Not saying 28.8k isn't great, but the internet just doesn't need speeds like that yet. Better to focus on getting everyone up to 14.4k first.

lukev 15y ago
Of course we can and will use more. But in any optimization scenario, you eliminate bottlenecks first. I question whether the ISP to home link is the bottleneck in the modern internet experience the way it was in 1998.
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  But that's a chicken and egg problem. Upgrading ISP to home link creates incentives for others in the chain to upgrade their link.
- veidr 15y ago
  You're right about that, but I think it isn't purely an optimization scenario. Altogether new use cases emerge when your workplace and home are linked with such dramatically higher speeds. Even more new scenarios shake out when work, home, and most of your friends' and family members' homes are so linked. When connections get orders of magnitude faster, it becomes about doing new things, in addition to doing the old things faster. I surf the web the same way with 1Gbps fiber in Tokyo as I did a few years ago with 3Mbps DSL in Ithaca, NY. But surfing the web is just a small part of what I do via the Internet nowdays.
- NegativeK 15y ago
  Netflix has argued that it is. The companies that are trying to do remote-gaming are probably having issues with bandwidth. The days it took to upload my music collection to Google Music all argue it is. Bandwidth isn't the only bottleneck, but it's holding some technology back.
bane 15y ago
Well, there is a difference. A 28.8 and even a 56k connection were easy to saturate with something a simple as listening to streaming radio. I don't believe I've even approached saturating 20Mbps with multiple users in the house streaming multiple video streams and downloading as much data as they could. The other end and the in-between-bits has always been a limiting factor and has been once you get over about T-1 speeds. Put another way, buffering in software for 28.8 was usually needed because your end couldn't stream something like a 3 minute song smoothly. Buffering on a 28Mbps connection is because the provider can't stream something like a 3 minute hi-def music video smoothly. In principle I'd love gigabit Internet, but I honestly wouldn't know what to do with it.
- rogerbinns 15y ago
  I can saturate a 100mbps connection by booting a diskless computer. Why shouldn't our operating systems/environments be stored "in the cloud"? Why shouldn't I have more than one computer in my house? Just because you can't think of things doesn't mean they don't exist :-) And once they do exist they'll seem obvious to you. Remind me again why I can't have cameras all over my house and see them all at once while somewhere else. Why shouldn't I be able to speak to an SO wondering around the house doing chores while I'm in a hotel room? All that aside, think of the games and entertainment that can be enabled. TVs are large enough to be almost life size now. Why shouldn't I be able to stand in front of one with a doctor or Amazon employee on the other side being able to examine each other, products, packaging etc in high resolution detail. (Note 1080 is not even close to high resolution for life size.) Dream big.
  - bane 15y ago
    These are mostly softballs though...1-at-a-time: "I can saturate a 100mbps connection by booting a diskless computer. Why shouldn't our operating systems/environments be stored "in the cloud"?" Clouds go down, your computer goes down. There's no compelling reason to put the OS "in the cloud". Your data? Maybe, if you can handle not having access to it every second of the day. And even today, one can RDP or VNC perfectly comfortably on a 20Mbps connection provided all the "cloudy" parts of the internet behave. More importantly, if the server and the links between you and the server aren't capable of giving you 100mbps then you can't saturate the connection. "Why shouldn't I have more than one computer in my house?" How does not having a 1Gbps internet connection prevent this? "Remind me again why I can't have cameras all over my house and see them all at once while somewhere else." Why can't you do that today? Streaming 1080p from x-number of cameras, multiplexed into a single display that's probably no better than 1080p is silly. The proper approach, regardless of bandwidth, is to downsample the displays before multiplexing at the broadcast side. Then you're just streaming a single video stream anyways, which is perfectly doable at 20Mbps. "Why shouldn't I be able to speak to an SO wondering around the house doing chores while I'm in a hotel room?" Again, why can't you do that today? There's no reason to stream video from empty parts of the house. In your use-case, you're only sending one or two video streams at a time anyway...again still healthily within the realm of 20Mpbs. "All that aside, think of the games and entertainment that can be enabled. TVs are large enough to be almost life size now. Why shouldn't I be able to stand in front of one with a doctor or Amazon employee on the other side being able to examine each other, products, packaging etc in high resolution detail. (Note 1080 is not even close to high resolution for life size.)" This is the only compelling case you've provided I think, but bandwidth is not the principle problem in this use-case. Everything from cameras to encoders to compressors to display devices are a bigger problem in this case. And yes, you'll have to compress even at 1gbps. A 1920x1080 display with 24bit color at 60fps is something like 3GigaBytes per second or around 24gbps. The next gen of TV is likely to be some variant of super hi-vision which is 7680x4320. @24bit and 60fps that's just shy of 48Gigabytes per second uncompressed or 384gbps. So yeah, bandwidth will be a bottleneck in those applications, but 1gbps is not even close to handling it and I'm guessing the hardware required to real-time encode and compress video for a stream like that is astronomical.

jrockway 15y ago

I recently moved from Chicago to New York, getting 6Mbps DSL at home in Chicago and 1Gbps (yes) Internet at work. The difference is noticeable. Regardless of need, once you have fiber to your building, 1Gbps and 20Mbps cost the same. It's getting something other than a POTS circuit that makes the difference.

veidr 15y ago

In my experience, the bulk of the awesomeness of gigabit Internet is that it turns the Internet into a LAN. I think anybody who uses the Internet in a LAN-like manner can definitely benefit from gigabit speeds (and can I get 10Gbps soon, please? I'm ready!) For instance, I (regularly) upload my 20~60GB VMWare VM files between my house and the office, because I don't want to carry a computer/disk around with me. At work, I tend to have a bunch of Remote Desktop connection to my home machines, which I leave up 24/7, as its not enough bandwidth to make a perceptible difference. And while most backup services like CrashPlan or Mozy or whatever definitely are the bottleneck, if you are backing up to your own remote servers, or to AWS via something like Arq, the speed really makes a difference, just as much as with a LAN (at least up to 100Mbps with AWS, anyway... at that point I think they become the gating factor). I agree you don't get a huge benefit when surfing normal Internet websites, and that the benefits break down when the remote end of the connection is international, but for stuff like the above, the faster the better.

alalonde 15y ago

Build it, and they will come. Expanding this kind of service to the majority of domestic internet users would be a game-changer for the types of new apps and sites it could enable.

hristov 15y ago

Current speeds are not really enough for HD video. Even if you get 1080p video online it is still highly compressed for online transmission. If I remember correctly I think blue ray is 40-60 Mbps. Higher compression means there simply isn't as much detail.

bradfa 15y ago
Over the air HD in 1080i format is generally about 20Mbps. It looks pretty darn good to most people. Yes, higher bitrate makes better pictures, but for TV, over the air is currently the best way to get network programming in the least compressed format.

wmf 15y ago

That's the genius of Sonic's plan. Advertise gigabit, customers use 20 Mbps, everybody's happy.

MrMatters 15y ago
Why does that make everybody happy? What I got from the article was that the difference in cost to the ISP for having someone connected at all and using a ton of data had grown increasingly minimal in recent times.
- kls 15y ago
  and that the cost difference from somebody at 20mbps to 1gbps is nominal. It does not cost them that much more in true usage. I think it is pretty straight up of them to have their installers disclaim to customers that they really don't need a 1gbps connection.

techsupporter 15y ago

The point isn't that Sonic is running gigabit networking to people's houses. The point is that it CAN BE DONE and on a reasonably profitable basis (I'm assuming that Sonic's management is fine with the cost outlays). Verizon was 80% of the way there and its management got cold feet. Memo to Frontier Communications: THIS is how you do it. You can beat Verizon at their former game, get Sonic.net to show you how. (Or, even better, get Sonic.net to take over your FiOS operations in the Pacific Northwest...)

matwood 15y ago
Keep in mind one of the reasons it's profitable is because running above ground wires is much cheaper than in the ground or whatever has to be dealt with in big cities. The article even mentions expanding to other towns will mean going into debt.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  When their break even point is well below 2 years going into debt is hardly a bad idea. In their situation debit is simply leverage and while it increases risk you can easily maintain profitability while borrowing significant amounts of money as long as your creating capital with that debt.
  - matwood 15y ago
    The article implies that laying cable in the ground is significantly more expensive than running it above ground. Hence the need to go into debt. The ROI timeframe will also likely change with the increased costs. The point I was making is that one of the most expensive parts of getting fiber to the home is laying the cable. In this case they were able to do a 'test' run to a neighborhood where they could just relatively cheaply run the cable above ground. I hope that their cost structure still works when moving towards more expensive rollouts, but given how we have seen other fiber rollouts get scaled back or fail I'm not so sure.
twoodfin 15y ago
> Verizon was 80% of the way there and its management got cold feet. I have a simple explanation for that: A regulatory and commercial environment that was clearly not going their way. Verizon spends something like $1,000 to install FiOS at your house, then a few hundred dollars a year in hardware, bandwidth, etc. To make that work for them economically, they need customers paying an average of $100+/month and preferably even more over time. But how does Verizon get your $100+ when you watch all your TV on NetFlix, Hulu or iTunes? That's pretty obviously the way things are heading, though it may take another decade. Now all you want from Verizon is an IP pipe, and good luck convincing customers that "Internet only" should cost as much as "Internet + TV + Phone". And an Obama-appointed FCC is unlikely to allow Verizon to demand a cut of NetFlix or Apple's revenue for use of "full bandwidth": That's what the Net Neutrality fight was always about. Without their own services to sell, the capital cost of laying and maintaining a "dumb pipe" didn't look so good. I think Apple is going to have a go at solving this problem for the providers: "Let us take over the user experience (i.e., the hardware and software) and in return we'll give you a new way to package your services that guarantees a healthy revenue stream regardless of how consumers are getting their content." Just think how much more money AT&T makes from the average iPhone subscriber vs. the average dumb phone subscriber and you'll have the right idea.