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To strike a contrarian tone, how much is this going to matter a handful of years from now as the internet at large and bandwidth to the home continues to increa

To strike a contrarian tone, how much is this going to matter a handful of years from now as the internet at large and bandwidth to the home continues to increase? In a decade is it unreasonable to expect that "really fast" home internet is 1 gigbit? At that point even your pokey 50mbit connection already has 10x-20x the bandwidth Netflix sees for a "good" connection (their metric). Does this make it harder for Netflix and future video streaming companies to send us 4k video, sure, but I struggle to come up with too many other ways that this will hurt.

swang 12y ago
Do you live in America? I find it laughable that our internet will get that good unless Google gets Fiber into large enough areas forcing competition. Even then, ComcastWarnerXfinity will find ways to jack up prices.
Tossrock 12y ago
It's going to matter a lot, because consumer internet consumption is shifting inexorably toward mobile, which tends to have data caps. You could blow through the standard 2 GB monthly allotment in a single HD movie streamed to your phone. If suddenly Youtube videos no longer count toward your data allotment, you're much more likely to use Youtube, and not any other competitor which are metered.
- cdash 12y ago
  It is not just mobile that has data caps either. Sure the caps are a lot higher than mobile caps of a few gigs but even 150-300 GB caps are pretty small. At the highest bit rate, 1 hour of Netflix video is about 3.1 GB. Now add in the fact that there is only one internet connection per household so you will have multiple people watching Netflix video and doing everything else on the internet they do and it is just terrible. A digitally downloaded game, which is not just done on PC anymore but also will be huge on the new consoles can be around 30 GB or larger.
Bud 12y ago
"Continue to increase"? As has been amply documented in various HN threads, it hasn't increased at all in the last 15 years or so, really. Certainly not to the degree one would have expected. DSL speeds are basically exactly the same (slower in many cases) as they were in the late 1990s. If you are lucky and in the right urban area, you might have fiber or cable internet with faster speeds, but otherwise? It's still the late 1990s. And the prices, if anything, are higher today for the same service.
betterunix 12y ago
"To strike a contrarian tone, how much is this going to matter a handful of years from now as the internet at large and bandwidth to the home continues to increase?" Who will enjoy the benefits of the increase? If you are only getting 9.6kbaud unless you pay millions of dollars in fees to every ISP between you and your peers, then all that bandwidth is useless to you. "In a decade is it unreasonable to expect that "really fast" home internet is 1 gigbit?" One gigabit to Youtube, unless you are on a Comcast connection in which case it is 1 megabit for Youtube and a gigabit to NBC's streaming service, and 256 kilobits for anything else. "Does this make it harder for Netflix" Oh you wanted to have access to Netflix? Well that will be $300/per gigabyte for a business line that has real Internet access. For a mere $20/month, you can have unlimited access to the best of Comcast, now partnered with Microsoft!!!

swang 12y ago

Do you live in America? I find it laughable that our internet will get that good unless Google gets Fiber into large enough areas forcing competition. Even then, ComcastWarnerXfinity will find ways to jack up prices.

Tossrock 12y ago

It's going to matter a lot, because consumer internet consumption is shifting inexorably toward mobile, which tends to have data caps. You could blow through the standard 2 GB monthly allotment in a single HD movie streamed to your phone. If suddenly Youtube videos no longer count toward your data allotment, you're much more likely to use Youtube, and not any other competitor which are metered.

cdash 12y ago
It is not just mobile that has data caps either. Sure the caps are a lot higher than mobile caps of a few gigs but even 150-300 GB caps are pretty small. At the highest bit rate, 1 hour of Netflix video is about 3.1 GB. Now add in the fact that there is only one internet connection per household so you will have multiple people watching Netflix video and doing everything else on the internet they do and it is just terrible. A digitally downloaded game, which is not just done on PC anymore but also will be huge on the new consoles can be around 30 GB or larger.

Bud 12y ago

"Continue to increase"? As has been amply documented in various HN threads, it hasn't increased at all in the last 15 years or so, really. Certainly not to the degree one would have expected. DSL speeds are basically exactly the same (slower in many cases) as they were in the late 1990s. If you are lucky and in the right urban area, you might have fiber or cable internet with faster speeds, but otherwise? It's still the late 1990s. And the prices, if anything, are higher today for the same service.

betterunix 12y ago

"To strike a contrarian tone, how much is this going to matter a handful of years from now as the internet at large and bandwidth to the home continues to increase?" Who will enjoy the benefits of the increase? If you are only getting 9.6kbaud unless you pay millions of dollars in fees to every ISP between you and your peers, then all that bandwidth is useless to you. "In a decade is it unreasonable to expect that "really fast" home internet is 1 gigbit?" One gigabit to Youtube, unless you are on a Comcast connection in which case it is 1 megabit for Youtube and a gigabit to NBC's streaming service, and 256 kilobits for anything else. "Does this make it harder for Netflix" Oh you wanted to have access to Netflix? Well that will be $300/per gigabyte for a business line that has real Internet access. For a mere $20/month, you can have unlimited access to the best of Comcast, now partnered with Microsoft!!!