5 ms·

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 fr

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.

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.