5 ms·

Huh? Only! I live in London and have 5 people on the end of a 12Mbit down and 1Mbit up and it's fine. The company I work for has 100 people on a 40Mbit fiber.

by meaty 14y ago

Huh? Only! I live in London and have 5 people on the end of a 12Mbit down and 1Mbit up and it's fine. The company I work for has 100 people on a 40Mbit fiber. This is all fine. People are just greedy bandwidth whores these days.

vacri 14y ago
I think it's particularly funny when you see people complaining about pipe sizes that have wider throughput than can be generated by the servers from which they get their content. I have three people on the end of a 12Mb down and sure (torrentors and streaming video-watchers), sometimes we saturate it, but not often. Far more often I'm sitting there going "No-one else is home, and my pipe is barely being used - why is this download so slow?". A server giving you content at 300KB/sec isn't going to go faster because you upgrade from 12Mb to 100Mb. More speed is always nice, but seriously, the change from 2Mb to 12Mb was far less noticable than the change from dial-up to 2Mb. I guess an increased bandwidth would give more opportunity to stream hi-def video, but that's icing-on-the-cake territory, not basic-civil-right stuff.
- nitrogen 14y ago
  I would argue that the ability to upload HD video is in the same basic civil right territory as telephony, what with the ubiquity of video calling to maintain family connections across long distances. Modern cultural participation, when not located in a major urban center, requires high upload bandwidth.
  - meaty 14y ago
    Most non major urban areas give less of a crap about such things. It's only the cities that care. The internet doesn't have as much penetration as you think.
  - vacri 14y ago
    I think we're going to have to agree to disagree that only being able to upload vga video is a violation of basic human rights. Internet access is a basic human right not because of long-distance communication with family (that's a luxury), but because, like telephones, you need it to access basic services. An increasing number only have online offerings now, or require you to jump through online hoops.
ZoFreX 14y ago
> People are just greedy bandwidth whores these days. Not really. Having really fast broadband completely changes what is possible, and if we want to secure future economic growth for the internet, it's a great area to invest in. I have 120 megabits and easily saturate that on a regular basis. This in turn makes it possible to watch movies in the highest of defs on-demand, or purchase and download them to keep forever in less time than it takes to walk to the shops. We can download increasingly huge video games in less time than it would take to install from discs. We have so many online businesses making huge amounts of money off entertainment while traditional platforms are dying, but if internet speed stagnates, or the fraction of the population that has very fast internet stops growing, that will limit the potential market for online media. Another consideration is that 1mbit up. People are finding more and more awesome uses for larger upstreams. Yes, you wouldn't need a huge increase in your upstream to have great Skype video quality, but if you want to upload videos you make to YouTube in HD, or stream your gaming session in HD, you are going to feel the pain on the vast majority of broadband plans available today. We need to move away from the old online distribution model of "people consume, servers create".
- meaty 14y ago
  So basically it's an opportunity as always to monetize everything rather than lead to real social improvements?
  - ZoFreX 14y ago
    Personally I think shifting creation from centralised gatekeepers to smaller organisations and individuals is a social improvement, and a lot of what is driving the need for upstream is things like video chatting which again is a social need.

by meaty 14y ago

vacri 14y ago

I think it's particularly funny when you see people complaining about pipe sizes that have wider throughput than can be generated by the servers from which they get their content. I have three people on the end of a 12Mb down and sure (torrentors and streaming video-watchers), sometimes we saturate it, but not often. Far more often I'm sitting there going "No-one else is home, and my pipe is barely being used - why is this download so slow?". A server giving you content at 300KB/sec isn't going to go faster because you upgrade from 12Mb to 100Mb. More speed is always nice, but seriously, the change from 2Mb to 12Mb was far less noticable than the change from dial-up to 2Mb. I guess an increased bandwidth would give more opportunity to stream hi-def video, but that's icing-on-the-cake territory, not basic-civil-right stuff.

nitrogen 14y ago
I would argue that the ability to upload HD video is in the same basic civil right territory as telephony, what with the ubiquity of video calling to maintain family connections across long distances. Modern cultural participation, when not located in a major urban center, requires high upload bandwidth.
- meaty 14y ago
  Most non major urban areas give less of a crap about such things. It's only the cities that care. The internet doesn't have as much penetration as you think.
- vacri 14y ago
  I think we're going to have to agree to disagree that only being able to upload vga video is a violation of basic human rights. Internet access is a basic human right not because of long-distance communication with family (that's a luxury), but because, like telephones, you need it to access basic services. An increasing number only have online offerings now, or require you to jump through online hoops.

ZoFreX 14y ago

> People are just greedy bandwidth whores these days. Not really. Having really fast broadband completely changes what is possible, and if we want to secure future economic growth for the internet, it's a great area to invest in. I have 120 megabits and easily saturate that on a regular basis. This in turn makes it possible to watch movies in the highest of defs on-demand, or purchase and download them to keep forever in less time than it takes to walk to the shops. We can download increasingly huge video games in less time than it would take to install from discs. We have so many online businesses making huge amounts of money off entertainment while traditional platforms are dying, but if internet speed stagnates, or the fraction of the population that has very fast internet stops growing, that will limit the potential market for online media. Another consideration is that 1mbit up. People are finding more and more awesome uses for larger upstreams. Yes, you wouldn't need a huge increase in your upstream to have great Skype video quality, but if you want to upload videos you make to YouTube in HD, or stream your gaming session in HD, you are going to feel the pain on the vast majority of broadband plans available today. We need to move away from the old online distribution model of "people consume, servers create".

meaty 14y ago
So basically it's an opportunity as always to monetize everything rather than lead to real social improvements?
- ZoFreX 14y ago
  Personally I think shifting creation from centralised gatekeepers to smaller organisations and individuals is a social improvement, and a lot of what is driving the need for upstream is things like video chatting which again is a social need.