How much use would you get from a 1 gigabit internet connection?
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More useful if symmertical (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:3)
Maybe I want to download the 30 gigabyte game I just purchased without waiting until next Tuesday to play it.
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:3)
At 1Gb/s, you're getting around 100MB/s of data hitting the disk. Unless you've got an SSD, or are doing absolutely nothing else with the disk, your network connection won't be the bottleneck. With 100Mb/s, it probably will be, but not by much. The first time I tried downloading a DVD image via a GigE connection, I ended up watching the RAM fill up with write caching from the disk, the OS then try to swap things out, and eventually the machine grind to a halt and eventually become useable 10 minutes later.
Now, with an SSD, it is very nice being able to download things that fast, but often the bottleneck is somewhere else. Just because I have 1GB doesn't mean that everything from my ISP to the remote server has that much spare capacity - it's fairly rare to find a server that can handle 1GB/s to a single client.
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:3)
I was working out the logistics behind doing a full system remote backup. I ended up just buying a hard drive and mailing it to my brother for storage because uploading 1.5TB of stuff takes a few days on my connection, even 100Mbps would take 1.5 days and there are questions about the ISP data caps (would his ISP, with a possible data cap of 250GB/mo drop him if he did 1.5TB in a week?).
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:3)
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
You don't need 1GB for HD. OTA uses a 6Mhz channel (around 38Mbit) and can cram 1 HD and 2-3 SD channels. Cable can cram 4 HD streams in 38Mbit, altough with more compression. That's using MPEG-2. x264 is much better at compression. What about reasonable quotas? in Montreal we have about only 60GB per month on the standard package, which is ridiculous...
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Wow, this has been a light month and I'm at 50GB combined after only 24 days, last month was over 200GB, as was the month before that. I can't imagine living with 60GB on a regular basis. Oh, and I don't stream much video, add that to the mix and I can see 500GB/month easily.
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:3)
"you do need 1Gbps for 1080p uncompressed. you actually need 10Gbps for that." .5 gigabit per second roughly per video channel. audio of course takes more bandwidth which is why i rounded up. 1 gigabit per second is enough for full stereoscopic video in lossless compression. the compression actually used by studios to make movies fit on a bluray is miniscule compared to what fansubbers are capable of. and since both methods are lossy it hardly matters how lossy. but yes it is amazing what computers can do. especially if you know what you are doing and do the math right and such.
a bluray disc using 50gb dual layer media, stores most movies, even in 3d. only epics like desolation of smaug require 2 3d blurays to capture the wonder of the film. in 3-d eg 2 video streams probablly at theatrical dimensions rather than 1080p but that is another topic for another time. anyways 10 gigabits per second or (roughly)1.25 gigabytes per second would enable the transfer of one bluray in a mere 5 seconds. your math skills need refining.
raw 1080p is 358,318,080,000 for 24 bit color, 60fps for 2 hours. 4k is roughly quadruple but again this is for 2 hours. 1.432 gigabits is the actual raw 1080p bandwith for one second. note i said bits because that is the measurement that counts, bytes are dumb and always were but marketing sold people on it. anyways there are plenty of quality lossless compression schemes get at best 3:1 compression so lossless x264 would need
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
by 5 seconds i meant '50' seconds shoulda previewed, ah well
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:3)
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Agreed. I'd use 1 Gb up to do all my DVD ripping in the cloud (I think that would be a fun project, but hopeless at my current upstream).
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
What part of "cloud" means "and I don't have my own copy" to you? That's just crazy talk. Look at how OneDrive and Dropbox work: the cloud is the shared store, the computer you're sitting at is the fast store, to whatever degree it's had time to sync up.
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Sounds like a useful feature for the cloud storage apps! Actually, I'd be surprised if they didn't have that feature.
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:3)
But 20 or 50 mbit connections would do just the same for you unless you have a need to stream uncompressed HD footage from your plex server - and the other end has a sufficiently fast downstream link.
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:4, Insightful)
Which points out another flaw with the poll; it assumes that you'll continue your current usage patterns even with a much faster network connection. To me, the whole point of getting one is that it would make things practical that simply aren't a plausible option today. Backing up my whole hard drive to the cloud would be hopelessly impractical with my current 5Mpbs upload, but it would become plausible if I could upload 200x faster. The creators didn't think of that and add a "I would start doing things I can't today" option.
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
With the voting, what was missing was a question about existing speeds.
My download speed from an unencumbered website in bytes is between 80k to 120k per second. It takes me about 20 to 40 mintues to download a 3.8gig dvd image. I only do that every few months when a major release is issued. I am not a movie watcher, or a pirate, or even a collector of "software that I might use in the future"
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:3)
This.
I honestly believe that we will see a whole new Internet revolution if we'd return to the original vision of a peer-based network where every client can also be a server. When you can run your website from your home. A lot of the current Internet companies basically sell you content hosting on steroids. Their primary reason for existence is that for technical (bandwidth) and knowledge (how do I run a server?) reasons, most people can't do it themselves. So they upload their photos to Instagram instead of sharing them from their home PC.
The knowledge part can be solved by software. Your home router doesn't have to be dumb, it could be your gateway to the world, and the worlds gateway to your world. Of course security would be a major issue, but then again the distributed nature of the system alone would provide a higher barrier because to get 100 million user data you'd need to hack 100 million home gateways, not one big service provider. If there is sufficient diversity in products instead of a monoculture, that is quite a considerable barrier.
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
so how would "loaning" a digital copy multiple times be treated?
at the same time? illegal distribution.
If it can't be stolen, it can't be lent.
Re: More useful if symmertical (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a problem. You watching a movie file doesn't physically remove the file from the server, like loaning a DVD out does.
Stop thinking of digital data as physical objects.
Unfortunately the law still treats digital data as a physical object in most instances. Until that changes it's appropriate to discuss it as such.
Re: More useful if symmertical (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a problem. You watching a movie file doesn't physically remove the file from the server, like loaning a DVD out does.
Stop thinking of digital data as physical objects.
Unfortunately the law still treats digital data as a physical object in most instances. Until that changes it's appropriate to discuss it as such.
This is exactly right. Truth is, just having a digital, DRM free copy (even if 0 people are watching it) is pretty much illegal. In order to get it you had to either a) pirate it, or b) break the legally-protected encryption on the media you do own. You own the disc, and the right to put it in an approved player and watch it, but anything else you do with it is technically illegal.
Re: More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Slavery was legal once too. Yet it was quite appropriate to discuss freedom.
The 'law' isn't everything.
Re: More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Or make a copy before streaming it. If you have a legally made copy for private use, nothing stops you from making another copy (on disk or even ramdisk). So if you have two users whose access was legitimate in the first place, and they stream from two distinct copies at the same time, each copy is only streamed by one user at a time.
Copies could even have near zero cost in term of storage if on a deduplicated file system. In this case every user can have his own copy of everything beforehand. I don't know if it would stand to a legal test but hey, the output of 'ls -l' agrees that the files are different!
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
Re:More useful if symmertical (Score:2)
why
Oh, I misread it (Score:2)
I have a gigabit (Score:4, Informative)
I live in Chattanooga, TN where every house is able to get 100 mbit or 1gbit from the electric company. I can't tell the difference between 100mbit and 1 gbit because my laptops wifi card isn't fast enough
Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:3)
In real life, if you have Google Fiber, you're still going to get only, at best, 100 Mbps.
http://arstechnica.com/busines... [arstechnica.com]
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:2)
The highest download I ever see in practice tend to top out around 20-24mbps although I can run a couple of them at once.
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:4, Informative)
I regularly saturate 50Mbps downstream. I just timed it: 12 minutes for a 4.2GB Knoppix ISO. I also download Youtube Videos at 50Mbps. If you're seeing no more than 24Mbps (M is mega, m is milli, btw.), even though your ISP promises more, then check if your router is a bottleneck. The WAN-to-LAN throughput is CPU limited on most routers, and many can't handle a true high speed connection. (If I had a gigabit connection to the internet, the first thing I would do is build my own router from PC hardware, just to be able to use that bandwidth.) Another pitfall is that XP doesn't achieve full TCP throughput on high speed internet connections without a parameter modification. Obvious tip is obvious: Use a wired connection to measure throughput. WLAN throughput can be unreliable.
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:2)
How often do you download ISOs? I wouldn't think many folk, even here, would download them often enough to say they regularly saturate their link.
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:2)
And it also mean every step in the chain need 50 available as well.
Re: Also Check for DOCSIS 3.0 If On Cable (Score:2)
When Comcast upped my plan from 25Mbps to 50Mbps, I noticed an immediate improvement in download speed however I wasn't getting my full 50Mbps (it was capping out in the mid to high 30s consistently). This was pretty close to the limit you'd experience with a DOCSIS 2.0 so I decided to buy a DOCSIS 3.0 one to see if it would make a difference. I snagged a Motorola SB6141 and immediately started getting my full 50Mbps.
Hopefully they sent out new DOCSIS 3.0 modems to people who rent from them. However if you know you're not going to switch from Comcast for a couple years, a one time purchase can quickly pay for itself in lower cable bills (I got my 2.0 modem for $27, and the 3.0 one for about $65).
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:2)
On plus plus side, you have invented a way to post to the future.:)
sorry, 1.5/.75 just reminded of 1997. I we were glad to have it!
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:4, Informative)
I disagree with that article on the single point of multi-tasking. Right now, I have a 24 mbps connection from AT&T and for single tasks, yes it is pretty much plenty for me for general use (once I have my home server up this will NOT be the case though). The thing is if I could turn on all the things I want to at once, I could easily saturate 300 to 400 mbps half the day right now.
There are tons of services, background downloads, personal applications, and so on that I just turn on and off depending on what I am doing. When working on any websites, I have to turn some other stuff off so that I can access pages, upload files, etc. but with a 1 gbps connection I would not give one single damn what-so-ever. On top of that the many things I would like to implement and host from home I could run all the time (various game servers, home web hosting, file hosting for myself, client-server applications, documentation and my own personal "cloud" services, the list is kind of massive now that I think about it) without worrying about destroying everyone else's connection at my house. I mean I do like the idea of cloud hosting for instance, but not when someone else is the host and with that kind of connection I can be the host.
Now, I will definitely give you that I am probably in the very small minority of people that could/would do this sort of thing, but that is the main advantage (right now) of 1 gbps connections. Beyond that expandability comes to mind since so many things are transitioning to run over internet connections. My TV and phone both run through the same line but are limited by necessity right now since things are run to me over such lower bandwidth connections. Considering many places want to completely get rid of POTS lines and most of your TV services are going to a vastly improved digital distribution service, high bandwidth connection are going to become much more useful in the future (not *necessary* for a while simply because it is going to take forever for this to roll out to rural areas due to the ROI being so much smaller for that kind of deployment).
If it isn't cost prohibitive to the consumer, bring on the increased bandwidth I say, can't wait until they roll it out to my area.
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:2)
Your bandwidth use would spike when you got the connnection but would reduce back to a more normal level after a short period of time.
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:2)
I get over 100mbps on FIOS right now. I've frequently maxed out my 150mbps connection pulling from a single server (well, single URL), particularly if I use a download manager which opens a few connections. It's true you don't usually see those traffic levels in normal browsing but for large file downloads it's not hard.
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:2)
Well that's the price for being ahead of the curve, recently I was sending a file to a friend and his 40 Mbit download was the limiting factor not my 100 Mbit upload. But it's been this way since we had modems, only now it's a thousand times faster. So what? When I'm on gigabit then 100 Mbit will be normal, 10 Mbit slooow and 1 Mbit stone age. Besides, it will probably mostly be burst transmissions. During "The Gathering", a huge LAN party with 6000 participants - obvious all at their computers most the time - they saw up to 14 Gbps of traffic total with 30 Gbit capacity, in 2012 they had 200 Gbit just for show but it was never close to being used even when they tried to get everyone to do a stress test. Of course people are there for all sorts of nerdy events not just to leech off that pipe, but still.
If you take the people there to be above average interested and above average active compared to the average person on an average day, it's still only about 2.3 Mbit/person. Imagine you had a gigabit line, bought a 20GB game on Steam? Okay it's done in less than 3 minutes but then you're probably going to play it for hours. Download a BluRay? That's 7 minutes but probably 1:30-2:00 hours run time. And that's only when you have actual leisure time, if you're asleep or at work or school or doing housework or hobbies those hours are already filled. I already download everything I want, gigabit would only enable me to do it faster getting back to idle.
Re:Nobody actually gets 1 Gbps (Score:2)
Seriously ? Which home-user needs that much ? (Score:2, Informative)
I currently am on 150/15 (megabit) and in May that will go up to 180/18.
(Docsis3 cable.)
The download is plenty. I can saturate it, but I really have to work hard to do that.
The upload is decent, but I really would like to have some more.
To move my backups off-site (have a 2nd Synology NAS parked at my sisters house, big updates can take more than a night) and for the VPN (I frequently need to upload files >200 MB) to the office.
And some more upload would also mean I wouldn't have to down-throttle usenet and/or torrent downloads while gaming.
Considering that nearly all curren soho routers can't even handle 1 Gb/s at wire-speed....
It sounds nice, but who is actually going to use it ?
Re:Seriously ? Which home-user needs that much ? (Score:2)
This is pretty much spot on.
As always, the polls here are worded, uh, oddly. I rarely ever saturate my current connection, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't use 1gbps quite a bit. I don't saturate my current connection because it'd be saturated.. I don't do a lot of things I'd like to do.
Ex. similar to your off-site synology nas, I keep looking at online backup services, but I can't justify the price for something I can't really use (my upload sucks REALLY bad). I'd be pretty happy with 100mb up, but 1gb would be really really nice.
Lots: It would enable things I can't do now (Score:3)
Like being able to have a remote fileserver replica
Great throughtput rates would be fabulous (Score:2)
but what I want is less lag. Really.
My lag in server-based games runs in the teens of milliseconds, but I would like to push that below 10ms. My own reactions aren't getting any faster, so a bit less wire delay would be a nice compensation. (Ok, not much compensation, since human response times are easily an order of magnitude slower than that, but still...)
Re:Great throughtput rates would be fabulous (Score:2)
Yeah. I was going to ask about latency.
A minivan filled with micro SD cards has incredible bandwidth but horrible latency and no fault tolerance.
Re:Great throughtput rates would be fabulous (Score:2)
I doubt it (Score:2)
You might be able to get teens of msec of latency if you stay within your ISP and local area. You're almost certainly not going to be able to get sub-10ms to an external server.
Heck, my ISP doesn't connect to the local competition anywhere near here so my packets travel 1800 miles to cover a true distance of 160 miles.
Missed the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Having an uber fat pipe is not really what most people need. Having a nice low latency (eg below 10ms) is what will really enable realtime thin client apps, cloud based n-tier apps (where part of the business logic layer is on the client), MOBAs and MMOs. I don't want Gigabit because I pump huge volumes of data (about 50Gb per month), I want Gigabit because I hit my latency wall several times every day.
Re:Missed the point (Score:2)
.
I'm actually quite happy with my 12mbit down / 5mbit up DSL link - not just because the bandwidth is plenty for my needs, but because the latency is pretty good (a canonical "ping 8.8.8.8", which should always resolve to a nearby Google DNS server, is about 25ms) - and it's pretty consistent at any time of day or night. (Unlike a theoretically fatter cable pipes, how many of my neighbors are watching pr0n doesn't affect my own speed since the DSL line is single-user all the way back to the DSLAM...)
Latency is especially important to me because I still do a lot of character-based terminal sessions and getting that single byte echoed back fast is golden. Given the option, I'd probably take a halving of present latency over a doubling of present bandwidth. Though with Gig-level fiber, I assume I'd get both....
Re:Missed the point (Score:2)
You wouldn't. Your latency would decrease only slightly. If you get 12mbit down, then you're located only a couple of miles from your DSLAM. You wouldn't reduce your latency by even 1% by having fiber to the home.
Re:Missed the point (Score:2)
I have a pretty fat pipe VDSL (45 down/6 up), and am only a couple hundred miles physically away from Google headquarters, but I still get a 55ms ping to 8.8.8.8, or anywhere, really.
It's fairly annoying, but I still like having that bandwidth available for when I need to install a new game on Steam to play with my friends.
better than mine... (Score:2)
I've got a 25Mbps link, but my ping to google DNS is 46ms. I'm in Canada though, so that may affect it.
Re:Missed the point (Score:5, Informative)
Then you're going to be disappointed.
The speed of light in optical fibre is about 200km per millisecond. So a round-trip ping of 10ms, ignoring all other sources of latency, limits you to a range of 1000km (call it 600 miles). And that's never going to change.
Yep (Score:2)
Bandwidth helps latency only if the amount of payload you have is a significant contributor to the time it takes. Like if you were transferring frames of video and each frame was a megabit and your link was only 1mbps, it would take a full second from the time you requested it to see it, on top of connection latency because it would take that long to transfer the data. In that case even a 100mbps link would still have 10ms of additional latency between the time the data started to get in and a complete frame.
However, for games n' such, the payload is small. They transfer data in little tidbits about what is happening, and it is just information about what is going on, your computer handles all the drawing. So it adds very little.
The speed of light in fibre is your biggest obstacle, as is the time routers take. More speed won't help, unless you've a really slow connection and then still it won't help but a little.
Light is fast, until you talk data latency. It gets worse in fibre on account of the index of refraction of the material slowing things down.
Re:Missed the point (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think getting gigabit would help latency much. Latency is largely a function of how many routers you're going through and physical distance, neither of which is affected by whether you have fiber to the home. Furthermore, your internet connection to your home is just last mile stuff anyway. The vast majority of the distance your packets travel is over fiber even if you personally are using dialup.
Fiber might help latency slightly, because it would improve the speed of transmission for the final 0.1% of the distance. However, I'd guess the overall difference in ping times would be pretty slight.
Re:Missed the point (Score:3, Interesting)
Optical fiber is ~.66C, while crap copper cable is ~.78C. You'd lose latency... (Excellent copper cable can hit .9C, though it's insanely expensive, big, and unwieldy hard-line coax).
No the point is fine for some if not you (Score:2)
Re:Missed the point (Score:2)
Upload is the key, but there are other factors too (Score:5, Insightful)
More download speed would be nice, but hardly revolutionary. My biggest problem with Internet speeds is lack of upload bandwidth.
We're well into the 21st Century. We're supposed to be able to do full-screen video calls, and the technology does exist to do that. My Mac comes with a barely-HD video camera, which takes 1Mbps [apple.com] to do a single video call. That's more bandwidth than most of the AT&T U-verse deployments. And this video call will glitch if anybody in the household does anything else at the same time, because the entire 1Mbps upload bandwidth is needed for the ACK packets on any downloads.
Countless applications have been eliminated because of this fundamental lack of upload bandwidth. I think it's the second-largest barrier to Internet innovation right now. Right behind lack of IPv6.
And then there are quotas, and latency, and bufferbloat, and extreme overselling. Internet in the US sucks.
Re:Upload is the key, but there are other factors (Score:2)
And in the other factors list, lets not forget the '286 apparently slogging away uploading the data at the other end.
The last mile is no longer my bottleneck, but getting the data on the fiber in the evening seems to be a challenge for someone upstream.
Re:Upload is the key, but there are other factors (Score:2)
Agreed. I'd love to double or triple or even 10x my upload bandwidth. SDL would be ideal (synchronous -- upload = download).
The main reason I pay for a 6Mbit link instead of a 1.5 is for the *upload* difference, not the download capacity.
Ummm, I think you over generalize (Score:2)
Maybe YOUR Internet sucks, but that doesn't mean all US Internet sucks. I have 150/20mbps cable Internet and I'm quite pleased with it. It gets those rates too, in my tests. I can download from Steam at like 16-18MB/sec. This isn't some special test market, it is just the speeds my cable company offers in my area. Anyone can have them, though few people opt to. Most would rather save $20-30ish dollars per month and go with their slower service (their 25/4mbps package is popular).
You are also kidding yourself if you think that bandwidth and particularly IPv6 are holding back innovation. What, pray tell, do you think IPv6 will do?
In terms of video calls the thing holding it back is usefulness. Video calls always seem a little weird, since nobody is looking you in the eye. Cameras being out of alignment with the screen means everyone is perpetually looking down, which looks strange. It is also rather useless on mobile devices, since you have to stare at them which limits their mobility.
The technology exists, people use it sometimes, but all in all a regular audio call is just better in most cases.
I think you're thinking too small (Score:2)
Maybe YOUR Internet sucks, but that doesn't mean all US Internet sucks. I have 150/20mbps cable Internet and I'm quite pleased with it. It gets those rates too, in my tests. I can download from Steam at like 16-18MB/sec. This isn't some special test market, it is just the speeds my cable company offers in my area. Anyone can have them, though few people opt to. Most would rather save $20-30ish dollars per month and go with their slower service (their 25/4mbps package is popular).
Of course not all US Internet sucks. Google Fiber is in some neighborhoods, a few places have FiOS, and Chattanooga has an electricity company. Better Internet connections are available if you pay, but in most of the US including yours, it is too expensive. [bbc.com] In my workplace's part of San Francisco, we tried to get Internet from the cable company, but they said they didn't have the cable in the ground in that part of the block. I guess we could have tried digging some fiber at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a monthly cost of thousands of dollars. Instead, we went with Sonic.net Fusion [sonic.net] bonded 2-line DSL. It was affordable because AT&T Business phone lines are expensive.
I forgot to mention that 1Mbps is not an end goal. Apple FaceTime is barely HD, 720p with huge blocky artifacts. Full HD and actual video quality take exponentially greater bandwidth. Simultaneous calls also multiply the bandwidth. That's just video calls.
Additional bandwidth creates additional opportunities. An interactive Javascript web app like Gmail doesn't work well on 56k dial-up. It needs hundreds of kbps broadband. Photo sharing like Facebook requires several Mbps of bandwidth. 4K video requires several more. If you want to be watching videos from your own personal library, no copyright owner restrictions, no corporate tracking and monetizing, then that needs to be upload bandwidth. Greater upload bandwidth would also enable other fascinating applications that haven't been invented, yet.
You are also kidding yourself if you think that bandwidth and particularly IPv6 are holding back innovation. What, pray tell, do you think IPv6 will do?
IPv6 could restore end-to-end communications on the Internet. The Internet was invented as a peer-to-peer network. You want to chat with someone, you get your computer to connect to their computer. Simple, direct, hard to spy on. Then NAT came along, and most computers cannot connect to each other. We need middlemen, servers with global IP addresses, to do anything. For most applications, middlemen just destroy your privacy and make you more dependent. For latency-sensitive applications, middlemen can break the application. [arstechnica.com]
It has long been known that NAT is the main problem for VoIP and video calls. All peer-to-peer communications are immensely more complicated than they should be. As IPv4 exhaustion moves into crunch time, and carriers start installing CGNAT, then I expect applications will have to start budgeting their use of outbound ports to avoid exhausting the CGNAT's translation tables. IPv4 needs to die.
In terms of video calls the thing holding it back is usefulness.
I hope you'll one day look back on that with chagrin. Every new technology has faced ridicule. Why would you want the instantaneous social pressure and low sound quality of telephone when you could have easy-to-read telegraph? Why would you want to see actors on a blurry television screen when you can hear them perfectly well on the radio? Technology improves. My barely-HD FaceTime is already much better than the webcams I used in the 1990's, and even better technology exists. [cisco.com] These
not on my cable (Score:3)
Currently, TWC cannot even deliver HD cable reliably. I get pixellation, long drops, ... whenever the cable is busy, presumably moving data.
If the USPS would just condemn and use a right of way on the sewer lines for fiber, and give me an IPv6 address for a router, THAT I would pay for.
Re:not on my cable (Score:2)
If the USPS would just condemn and use a right of way on the sewer lines for fiber, and give me an IPv6 address for a router, THAT I would pay for.
I never knew the Postal Service had that kind of power. Or that they installed communication infrastructure.
Then again, it is run by a General...
Re:not on my cable (Score:2)
Data limit? (Score:2)
I depends on what your limit is. If you're allowed 1GB/s but have a 200GB/month limit, it's not going to be much fun.
Distributed Caching (Score:2)
Re:Distributed Caching (Score:2)
It already exists for Netflix at least... https://www.netflix.com/openco... [netflix.com]
Re:Distributed Caching (Score:2)
My connection handles my needs (Score:2)
In fact, Cox sends out nastygrams to me if I use more than 250 GB, which represents less than one day of full advertised bandwidth usage.
P2P video games will never be the same (Score:2)
Re:P2P video games will never be the same (Score:2)
Re:P2P video games will never be the same (Score:2)
Backups. Backups! Backupsbackupsbackupsbackupsback (Score:2)
Assuming I got at least 100Mb/s up (preferably a gigabit), this would make online backups for any more than a few GB feasible. A friend and I have been mulling this over for a decade before "cloud" became a thing and before even commercial online backups became viable, but it would be effective for those too.
I have a NAS. He has a NAS. We can both set up encrypted containers that the other one of us doesn't have the key to. We both require offsite backups and have the nouse to tunnel rsync through an SSH tunnel or a VPN. Wouldn't it be great if I could just set up a cron job and do a weekly sync to each other?
Of course it would, but even on a "decent" downstream connection (let's take my 24Mb/s ADSL2 connection with a ~2.5Mb/s upload) I wouldn't even get halfway through my deltas for the week (of which disc images of my windows boxes or a major component size-wise). Sure, I could periodically pop on the train with a hard drive once a month or so, but even then let's say I need to restore a 5GB file pronto when he's off on holiday - the restore would still take hours, possibly days.
If we all had a full gigabit up/down, I'd build NASes for friends and family for free if I could use them as backup locations which would also have the nice side effect of finally letting me put the oblig. XKCD http://xkcd.com/949/ [xkcd.com] to rest.
I would enjoy it for one day (Score:5, Funny)
After which my usage limit would lock me out for the rest of the month.
Solutions and problems (Score:2)
My current ADSL serves me well. I can stream all the usual video services (YouTube, Netflix, Acorn, etc.) in decent (near-HD) quality. The only time I could use more bandwidth is when I want to download something big, like an OS upgrade.
With that said, I'm sure if I had gigabit internet I'd find something to do with it. :-)
...laura
It's not what I would do but what I could do (Score:2)
Or I could potentially start getting all my friends to run our machines together as a single compiling pool. Some sort of setup where if a machine has spare computing cycles it will help with a distributed compile. None of us are compiling all the time but most of us are regularly compiling throughout the day so speeding this up would be really cool.
It would be like when the threshold required for video was being broken services like Youtube popped into existence. If this wildly huge bandwidth also applied to my phone's dataplan then I could even envision where my phone would have my desktop do some hard work that it would then display.
Needs of my connection (Score:2)
email
news
check a couple forums
look at ebay for junk
updates to software/OS
Nossir, I don't need it.
Gigabit UP and DOWN creates new needs (Score:2)
While many say that they don't do things that would require Gigabit, would they find a use for things they currently CAN'T do with a limited connection?
Consider: With Gigabit available (like Google Fiber here in Kansas City), your connection to the Internet is the same speed as your LAN connection. If my best friend has Gigabit as well, then we are able to send and receive to each other at a Gigabit (confirmed by friends with Google Fiber and by Google themselves at an event I attended).
When you take the concept of a LAN, and extend it out to the Internet, you need to challenge your paradigm of "Internet". Cloud storage is then the same performance as NAS. Your buddy, via a private VPN, is on the same network as you despite being miles apart (handy for LAN gaming!) Private FTP servers will be a viable option for moving files around.
Then take the concepts that businesses use LANs for, and you will see new applications available for home users. Collaboration tools become effective over the Internet. Face to face meetings with full video are ready to rock (Think a computer with multiple monitors doing a virtual family reunion with a monitor (or Window) dedicated to each person.
Finally, what does a high bandwidth, low latency connection allow? Perhaps we could finally get our robo-presence devices going (think the Episode of the Big Bang Theory where Sheldon went to work virtually via a robot with a monitor for a face at the office.)
My point is that the things people think they use the Internet for are limited by the tools and such developed in the last 15 years since the broadband introduction. But how many people would say they needed that speed when they were on modems saying "All I do is log into AOL to check my email and sometimes go to a chatroom to talk about cats? What would I need to do that faster?" Oh, that's right... until the speed was available widely, the applications weren't available to do other things. This isn't something that can be easily judged by the "Gigabit Have-Nots", because they do not yet comprehend the possibilities. The times are changing, and the demand will increase as developers find the market opened up for its use.
From time to time (Score:2)
Right now, I'm downloading a 25GB game. I had to cap it to 128KB/s so I can still use my internet connection, which means it will take roughly two days (though since I will be uncapping it overnight I expect that it will only take one).
With a full gigabit connection, it would take about three minutes (assuming my hard drive could keep up - it cannot, though it should only slow me to five minutes or so since I have a dedicated high-speed drive for games).
However, now that I have all my games downloaded save for this new one, I do not regularly use that much bandwidth. I would probably be quite satisfied with 20Mbps.
NONE (Score:2)
...because I have one already.
So there's no "upgrade" option for me at the moment.
Of course, it's gigabit only in theory (for now). In practice, because I have software LAN drivers (onboard LAN), my connection speed is limited by CPU speed and of course HDD speed.
When i download large patch files on my SSD I get about 70 MByte/s throughput but my 5400 RPM storage HDDs suck badly, they can reach as much as 30-40 MByte/s in a good day.
The CPU (for non-hardware LAN chips) and HDD speeds all work against a high speed bandwidth.
Upload is capped at around 120 Mbit/s but that doesn't bother me at all.
All for 18 bucks a month, 3G stick included. As a matter of fact, I can get TV+Gigabit LAN+free 3G stick+2xUnlimited mobile phone subscription (with no SMS bundle but we're in 2014, that wretched thing's gotta die) for as low as 40 bucks a month.
In a George Burns voice: (Score:2)
"You ever try doing even just ASCII over a telegraph? Let me tell you, it ain't easy."
I've got 24Mbps up/down with Surewest (Score:2)
And that's about all I ever really need or use. I suppose my behavior might change with better bandwidth (maybe I'd start downloading like a madman), but getting a 11ms ping on Battlefield 4 basically is all I care about.
When you get Gigabit at your home... (Score:2)
Theoretical Maximum Speeds Are Irrelevant (Score:3)
10ms pings would be better (Score:2)
Already have one (Score:2)
That option is missing from the poll
Real answer (Score:3)
The available answers seem to be talking about present usage, and whether you are currently pushing a lot of data around. The truth is, I'm not constantly saturating my connection. But that's not really the point. I'm not pushing lots of data around specifically because my connection is slow, and so uploading/downloading lots of data can end up being too slow for practical use. If I had gigabit Internet, I would do things that I can't currently do (e.g. regular online backups of terabytes of data).
Re:Over-subscription at its finest (Score:3)
I work with an ISP ...
Just out of curiosity, what are you doing about IPv6?
Re: Over-subscription at its finest (Score:2)
The problem we have run into is that as you go native IPv6 your world gets really small.
Surely it just seems small in relation to the huge vastness that is the IPv6 address space, right? Right?
Re:The semaphore flags are getting ragged (Score:2)
... and the Cub Scouts I employ to signal my messages with the flags are complaining of their arms being tired. I suppose that interwebby thing might not be a newfangled fad after all.
I've heard you can get Power over Ethernet, so what you need to do is, invest in some of this PoE gear, run the cables out to your flag holders, and when they start to tire just hit em with some electrical charge until they start waving enthusiastically again.
Re:Missing option (Score:2)
Indeed US-centric ... but the poll was not about if you got it or not, but how much bandwidth you would use if you weren't limited. Apparently 1Gb/s is an astronomic figure to an American ...
I recently got upgraded from 100Mbit/s to 1Gb/s, and I did not even ask for it - Internet is included in the rent in the apartment block where I live and there was no price increase. The portion is around $15/month or so.
Indeed I was surprised recently when I heard how much US:ians pay for their low-speed Internet. Apparently, it is because networks were deregulated in 1995 in a way that allowed the largest providers to consolidate into an oligopoly, quashing the competitors by buying them instead of competing with better prices and/or services. The Tek Explains it [youtube.com].
Re:Got 200/200 MBit soon (Score:2)
Maybe I'm one of the lucky few, but in my area, fiber is readily available. I can get 200/200 megabits on fiber (not a typo, it is two hundred both ways), and although expensive, the entire building with 30 apartments will share it, so it is expensive divided by 30, which makes it managable
But if 30 apartments share it, you also get slow speeds at peak time.
Worst case is 200/30 = 6.7 Mbps, but even if only 13 users hammer it at peak time, you're down to 15 Mbps.
What's important isn't the "up to" rates. It's the actual rates you get during typical prime time use, and the guaranteed minimum rates.
Re:Got 200/200 MBit soon (Score:2)
One of the other important factors is the number of small packets sent all the time and the response time to those.
Yes, latency is important, unless all you do is streaming.
I have both cable and bridged DSL, and for gaming, I often set the routing to only use the DSL connection, because even though the bandwidth is lower, the latency is also lower. Being a LPB always helps.