Does Faster Broadband Matter? 442
tsa writes "There is an interesting piece on Ars Technica discussing the implications of faster broadband services for the users, and for the internet as a whole. From the article: 'Most online activities, like standard websurfing, are not significantly sped up by high-bandwidth connections, and the few that are, such as downloading, are not typically time-sensitive anyway. Many service providers are starting to prioritize their own content at the expense of those from rivals. Many countries have started or are considering blocking Voice-over-IP (VOIP) traffic in order to protect the phone companies from competition.'" How does faster broadband actually impact your Net usage?
Is web surfing the only application? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess if you only consider standard web browsing when considering if faster broadband matters, the answer is likely that it doesn't make much of a positive impact. At least two things that this fails to take into consideration though are:
1. There are far more applications today that can utilize the faster broadband, both upstream and downstream. For a few examples, consider P2P, VoIP, video streaming, etc.
2. Increasing broadband speeds and their adoption rate enables new applications tomorrow.
Give many people more bandwidth; they'll find a use for it. Feel free to replace "bandwidth" with just about anything and it likely would be true as well.
Don't forget... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is web surfing the only application? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is web surfing the only application? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to wonder how much my net multiplayer games would be improved if I had a juicier DSL connection.
What kind of moron would argue that it "probably won't help anybody" if bandwidth continued to increase? I guess services like FedEx and transcontinental passenger flights wouldn't really be of any use to anyone either.
Re:Is web surfing the only application? (Score:5, Insightful)
Duplex speeds solved (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.newsdesk.se/view_pressrelease.php?id=72 553 [newsdesk.se]
http://www.northspark.se/ [northspark.se]
Re:Is web surfing the only application? (Score:4, Interesting)
The last job I had involved uploading a lot of high resolution images. It was faily painful to wait 15 minutes to upload a single image, and then get back "X needs to be just a tad more blue", spend 1 minute tweaking the image, and then send it back. Repeat about 100 times a week and that's about 25 hours a week wasted waiting on files to be uploaded.
Re:Is web surfing the only application? (Score:3, Insightful)
Until we are getting 100Mbps service, this conversation is useless.
Re:Is web surfing the only application? (Score:4, Insightful)
When I was on DSL, I was getting 150KB/sec, and I thought "This is the *shiznit.*"
Took about 1 1/2 hours to DL a 700MB ISO.
Now I'm on Cable, getting up to 600-700KB/sec, and the same ISO takes only ~1/2 hour to DL.
When it's done downloading I fire it up in Vmware and have **more time** to play with it.
My brother can be playing Xbox online while I'm seeding or DL'ing BitTorrent files, because he has more bandwidth to play with.
So yes, Faster is Better.
Re:Is web surfing the only application? (Score:5, Insightful)
640Mb per second should be enough for anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
How could anyone say that more bandwidth won't find applications? It's dumbfoundingly stupid.
On the other hand page loads are not really set by the connection speed. After about 40K per second it's the servers and the latency that sets the download speed. That's one reason why things like google's "secret" data-center-in-a-shipping-container project will be important to frontloading content closer to the destination.
We have yet to reach a point where one can replace a desktop with a thin client or dumb terminal. But Sun's sunray show this is indeed possible if you have enough bandwith for the video connection.
Outside of high performance LANs you can't do this. But with ubiquitous high speed connections of the future only a fool would actually want to own and maintain his own computer. It'll be a paradigm shift enabled by fast connections.
Re:640Mb per second should be enough for anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
What TFA says is, people aren't using the bandwidth they currently have, so giving them more won't make a difference. It's a win for the service providers, because doubling someone's download rate is just a matter of changing a setting in a switch, but then you can turn around and charge them an additional $N a month for it, while their usage doesn't really change. I know I appreciate being able to download an ISO in minutes, but I really only do this a couple times a year, so 99.99% of my usage is checking e-mail (~8 msgs/day) and surfing (maybe 1/2hr a day). Do I really need a 5Mb downlink? Nope, but that's the standard speed from my provider, they don't support slower connections. They will, however, happily upgrade my connection to their "premium" level of service and give me an 8Mb download for just a few dollars more.
Re:640Mb per second should be enough for anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
My phone is VoIP, and I have a total of 3 X-Box game systems in the house -- one for each kid. All three of them do the same thing -- get online (Live) and voice-chat with their friends in Halo 2 or America's Army.
I also work from home, with a lot of e-mail, IM and WebEx conferencing.
So, it is quite possible to have 4 VoIP connections running at the same time as a WebEx conference and a file transfer or two.
More bandwidth means I can use video conferencing for some calls, where you have to actually see the product or layout and it isn't digital.
-Charles
Re:640Mb per second should be enough for anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
But most of the bandwidth we have today is pretty useless for anything other than web browsing and light downloading! You can't say people wouldn't use something they've never had access too. The pathetic upstream rates on US (and most) internet connections basically enforces the client-server model on the internet, as opposed to the peer-to-peer model it was intended to utilize.
Now granted, that's neither strictly nor technically true. TCP/IP is still quite peer to peer and all that. However, since upstream speeds are so poor (something that didn't matter much back in the day when 99% of the content out there was graphical) no one is really serving anything from their PC. Cooperative P2P applications are one of the few times people use much upstream bandwidth.
If we had more upstream, you would see a lot more 'casting of video, audio, whatever.
Re:640Mb per second should be enough for anyone (Score:3, Insightful)
I couldn't disagree more. I would say only a fool would want to have their computer hosted somewhere else. Many people are putting a lot of very personal, very sensitive data on their computer including their entire financial life (with tools like MS Money for example). I wouldn't trust a third party with any of this stuff (just last week, my mortgage company sent me a letter to t
You're not thinking about the interior (Score:3, Insightful)
Biased article, preconceived conclusions (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, most users don't use their broadband to full capacity. There's a huge different between a backbone internet connection and a consumer grade line. The entire consumer broadband business model is built on the concept that giving a very large number of consumers high speed access will work if only a small number of those users are generating substaintial demand at any one time.
He also misses the fact that current providers have adopted the asymmetric line speed model in an attempt to curtail peer to peer and hosted content by consumers. This artifical cap will slowly erode, as we've seen in FTTH and some cable offering already.
Also overlooked are emerging trends in smart houses, automation, video monitoring and tele-presence, all of which assume the easy availability of cheap, fast consumer bandwidth at the core of their business model. Other applications, such a remote medical diagnostics and imaging will also generate more usage and will be encouraged by employers and medical providers.
The entire premise of this article is biased from the outset. It really seems like he wrote the entire item to support a preconceived conclusion. Or perhaps it's another case of the media intentinally stirring the pot...
Re:640Mb per second should be enough for anyone (Score:3, Insightful)
As SunRays demonstrate you can send a nice sized screen over a modes sized pipe. But even if you wanted a screen so large and updating so quickly that you needed a FULL TIME 1.6GB pipe this will be cheap in the future. Mea
Re:Is web surfing the only application? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not in any particular order.
1. Home Office - VPN
2. Downloading my favorite linux distro in a reasonable amount of time
3. Video and Voice chat with family, especially my parents, who live out of state, so they can see the grandkids more than they normally would
In addition to this, having the "always on" connection, means it has mostly replaced the newspaper, telephone directory and a variety of other analog sources of information.
Re:Is web surfing the only application? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd love to be able to VPN to my home machine, but the internet connection at work is far too damned slow... it's almost as slow as dialup... things are bad when the sysadmin goes home to download updates from microsoft update on his own connection...
hey, redownloading the whole damn thing everytime there's a new release is daft and so last century... at least Ubuntu and Debian have got it right, just update your so
Re:Is web surfing the only application? (Score:3, Informative)
And of course, we really don't need all those gigabytes of ram, do we?
So I guess most people (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh, maybe you shouldn't ask this question on Slashdot.
Re:So I guess most people (Score:2)
Just because the marketing and network geniuses at the cable companies and telcos determine what the public should deem as an "acceptable" speed for broadband doesn't mean that Slashdotters shouldn't have a valid opinion on it.
I think that my 4mbit downstream is fine for what I do. I don't believe that my 500k upstream is though. I shouldn't be suffering for upstream (on a connection that 100% permits servers) with slow upstream just because a group
Re:So I guess most people (Score:2)
Faster download usually = faster upload. Exactly what I need. Hosting photos from my house while I am overseas is actually a big thing for me, a number of my friends host their personal stuff from my place as well as I can get better net access at my house than theirs.
I also run a CRM system and email for myself out of my house too, plus mobile phone sync.
All in all, although downloading ISOs isn't exactly a huge priority for me, gettting TV episodes which I missed on TV down (Which I want to watc
You are not unique. Others want what you have. (Score:5, Interesting)
150 years ago, most people did not have running water. If you wanted to know all the benefits of running water would you ask people without or with it?
If all you want is email and browsing you can get by with a modem. All you have to do is turn off Flash and other crappy plugins and get a half decent browser that let's you block images from ad servers. I've done it and shared the line with my wife and the "normal" use worked just fine. Getting pdfs and other large files sucked life, but you could do that at night with a good download program.
GNU/Linux, with user driven development, is cutting edge and giving people exactly what they want from their computers. People want to share their pictures and dreams with family, friends and others interested. Blogging is now one of the easiest ways to do that, but it's not much harder to do your own when a Mepis CD will auto install Apache with most of the extras. It's actually much easier to make an html photo album on your spare computer than it is to carefully select and upload them to some place that will load them with adverts and go away in a few years. Getting your software off the network via ISOs or automated update tools are exactly what users want as well. Automated downloads from Debian, unlike some updating "services", are unobtrusive and can be trusted to keep your computer working well. Amazingly enough, people also want their Dick Tracy video phone.
Contrary to all of the above, the FCC is happy granting monopolies to greedy morons. By some twisted logic, they think that a cable monopoly competing with a telco monopoly will provide "enough" competition for people to get what they want and the providers to profit "enough" to provide new services. The greedy morons have been proving them wrong for five years or so. I can compare At Home and my choice of DSL to today and it's not favorable at all. Services have dried up with choice and the extra money is being put into an "intigent" network that will make competition in the future even more difficult.
Five years ago, things were much better. For less money that I currently pay for cable, I had better bandwith and fewer restrictions. Today, I have a cable modem with port blocks and a 60KB/s upload crimp. At Home provided the same without restrictions at all and the service was reliable. It was also much easier to get a DSL line, that did not suck, from someone other than the local telco. Today, we have the local telco and the cable company working to penalize each other's packets and the technology, of course, will slow everything up.
Greed, in this case, has been very bad. It's eliminated the companies that provided services people want and rewarded the assholes.
Up to a point, a lot! (Score:2)
However, when comparing cable modem vs. an even faster connection, no, it does not induce me to "surf" any more. I like having my torrents download faster, but I usually do that while I'm asleep so it wouldn't matter much.
OTOH, if I was inclined to use VoIP, I would certainly want the fastest connection I could
Does it matter? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Does it matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Does it matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
I often get above 1 megabyte when downloading programs and stuff.
And all this is for ~35 usd/month
Re:Does it matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Does it matter? (Score:4, Informative)
Local stuff I can get down pretty fast. Downloading FC4 iso from ftp.riken.jp at over 4MB/sec. I've not seen it go much faster than that so I probably don't get the full 100Mbit - what, 50Mbit?
But, its nice that my outbound is not restricted, so with a static IP I can host without being embarressed. They don't seem to have any restrictions about what you can and can't do with your line here (that I have found, at any rate) so hosting personal sites and mail is no problem.
Actually, it could go faster I'm sure if I didn't have such a cheap-ass ISP
I can get 800k or so from a good server in the US, but thats pushing it. Though, if I am downloading like 10 torrents at the same time I've seen it go up to 3-4MB/sec
So. Yeah. I think the more bandwidth the better.
Actually, the nicest thing is that I dont ever worry about contention. I can have my torrents running and STILL have enough bandwidth that my ssh sessions to work are not choppy. Without having to traffic shape or some other shenanigans.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Funny)
Must be fun waiting for 10 seconds for each bit...
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
SERVICE PRICE DESCRIPTION NOTES
Shared fibre (new) 6000 yen 1 Gbit shared by upto 32 users
Shared fibre (current) 6000-7000 yen 100 Mbit shared by max 32 users
Dedicated fibre 5000-10,000 yen 100 Mbit single subscriber
ADSL 4000 yen 50 Mbit Upload speed slower
Internet blogger Om Malik has written... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Internet blogger Om Malik has written... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Internet blogger Om Malik has written... (Score:5, Funny)
They call it a diary !
Re:Internet blogger Om Malik has written... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Internet blogger Om Malik has written... (Score:4, Funny)
Well this always comes up... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well this always comes up... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd also like to have someone with a brain on the other side of the support conversation when there is a problem with the connection.
Well in my area... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well in my area... (Score:2, Informative)
$200/month for the 30 down/15 up.
but only $40/month for 5 down/2 up. And gee...since Verizon turned on my neighborhood, my Cable Internet bill droped 35% ($55 to $40).
Competition is a good thing (tm)
Re:Well in my area... (Score:4, Interesting)
While the handoff is coax, DS3 transport is carried over fiber and split off an OCn mux at the customer prem. The difference between a fractional DS3 and the SBC offering isn't the medium, it's the network the packets travel on; decision-making on oversubscription differs markedly for consumer networks vs. business networks, based on the fact businesses generate more revenue overall and would be less tolerant of networks that don't run at rated speeds.
SBC's lightwave or lightspeed or lightstream or whatever they're calling it, that 24Mb HDSL circuit the original comment spoke of, is intended for delivering large media files, specifically movies-on-demand. They're partnering with a set-top box manufacturer and a large web portal to offer these services to their customers. That should roll out relatively soon. These files will be hosted on-net within SBC, or via some private peering point with a fat pipe, so SBC endusers should have no issue getting the movies at 24Mb. However, the rest of their infrastructure (specifically their peering circuits) won't change much, if at all, so the Internet will be as fast (or slow) as it is now. That's not what they're interested in, that's not why they're investing gargantuan sums of cash for buildout, they're not doing it to provide fast HTTP access to the Internet for customers, they're doing it to sell movies-on-demand.
Personally I've got no problem with that. Give me the fat pipe now, spend the $$$ to get fiber to my house, then I'll gripe until you upgrade your throughput to the rest of the Internet. I figure that they will have to do it eventually.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Latency, latency, latency. (Score:5, Informative)
While what you say is right for the current crop of games, you are neglecting the improvments that game developers could implement if our customers had more speed. To put it another way, a higher-speed connection won't improve your Counterstrike game (much), since, as you say, that mostly depends on latency. However, if more people had more speed, there are many things developers could do to take advantage of that. Just being able to trim the amount of time we spend optimizing our net code would be a big help, allowing more time for bug-fixing, and preventing many bugs outright, as highly-optimized code usually means brittle code, which over time becomes buggy code.
So, everyone, take Gandhi's advice, be the change you want to see in the world, and always push for faster connections. If you don't do it for yourself, please, think of the developers.
If it's there... (Score:3, Insightful)
Either by bandwidth-hog bloatware-infested websites or by actually useful applications. I'm not sure which one I'd bet on.
Re:If it's there... (Score:3, Funny)
Full Speed Ahead (Score:3, Insightful)
<rant>Also, one thing that's VERY worth mentioning is that the Dial-Up accelerators do much of their acceleration at a proxy server level. They take graphics and compress them through a super-lossy algorithm to 1/5 or more the size of the graphic on the originating server. This causes many online graphics to look like crap.</rant>
Anti-competitive? (Score:2)
I live in the U.S. and can't insightfully comment on laws everywhere, but don't most 1st-world countries have laws making things like that illegal? Doing things that are in the interests of companies at the cost of consumer choice sounds downright wrong. If the phone companies are so worried about VoIP, why don't they just get into the VoIP business? How about
Re:Anti-competitive? (Score:2)
DMCA, software patents, not going after Sony for their rootkit....
I'll take it as fast as I can get it... (Score:2)
My 5/512 (Ha! as if Charter Cable ever actually has it going that fast), is typically maxed out all the time.
Re:I'll take it as fast as I can get it... (Score:2)
Re:I'll take it as fast as I can get it... (Score:2)
AJAX-ish stuff can be better on a bigger pipe (Score:2)
As more
Re:AJAX-ish stuff can be better on a bigger pipe (Score:3, Interesting)
Whoa, fundamental networking concepts... having a faster pipe doesn't equate to lower latency.
Latency for your net connection with a given provider is pretty much fixed. Whether you have their budget 256/128 service or their "Pro" 5/768 service, your packets are making all the same hops. Upgrading
Is time not important? (Score:4, Insightful)
Excuse me? Downloading... not time-sensitive? If downloading isn't time sensitive, I don't know what is. Even for leisurely things like movie trailers, I don't want to wait more than is necessary. For people who transfer large files as part of their job, download and upload time is even more important.
Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not everyone who wants faster uploads speeds is running as Quake 3 server...
Re:Well... (Score:2)
Obviously! (Score:2)
But what's this thing about protecting phone companies by blocking new technology that competes with their monopolies? Seriously? Shouldn't they be punished for this kind of thing?
confusing terminology, this "broadband" (Score:4, Interesting)
Marketing are to blame for the confusing usage, where broadband means "really fast". This means we can look forward to terms like "ultrabroadband", "superbroadband", "megabroadband" and "bukkakebroadband" in the future (where "bukkake", meaning "to splash" in Japanese, will refer to a newer form of "spread spectrum"). For proof that marketing is to blame, see this link above and look for "confusing".
Sadly, Ars has lost its mind (Score:2)
Other factors (Score:2)
Also, give me a damn decent upload pipe. I know why they don't want to do it. It's a business thing. Home users shouldn't be sending large amounts of data blah blah blah but we need more than 256 kilobits up. My h
Not time sensitive? (Score:2)
Did you ever try to download the demo of an anticipated game? These things are as large as 1 Gb these days. Did you ever try to watch the high-res version of a trailer? They can reach 300 Mb easily. Did you ever try to buy an album online and want to listen to it RIGHT NOW? Well, I never bought music online, but
Faster UPLOAD speeds would be nice (Score:3, Interesting)
The simple answer is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bandwidth speed does not matter -- latency is the key to a happy user. These two do NOT have to go hand in hand, though.
I started (back in the BBS days about 21 years ago) at the age of 30 with a 300 baud modem, and quickly jumped to a 1200 baud modem. I took in information quickly (of course, a young mind is a sponge). My phone bills were $300+ per month -- requiring me to work.
I transitioned to modem's fastest and then transitioned to ISDN. The ISDN's latency was intense -- everything was amazing, comparable to the few T1's I had worked with up to that point.
I was the first of a very select group of DSL (IDSL) testers in Illinois before it really hit. I believe Michigan had it first but I had a consistent 144kbps up/dn connection and it was QUICK. Not as snappy as the ISDN, but download speeds were over double. Web sites, though, were not as snappy.
I switched over to ADSL and the snappiness went down but the downloads went up. Then SDSL, then cable modem, to where I am today -- cell phone dial up.
I just switched to T-Mobile's EDGE network. I get a consistent 150kbps down and 40kbps up from my PDA/laptop bluetooth tethered to my t809 phone. The latency sucks. The bandwidth is just about perfect, though.
I still download, upload, blog, e-mail, browse, etc. I have access to a T1 (at a customer's office) and an OC3 (also at a customer's office). Even though my PDA and my laptop both support WiFi, I stay on my bluetooth 150kbps connection -- just to keep things simple and keep battery life UP.
I've spoken with users of all sorts -- laymen and power users -- and they all tend to agree. Faster response is better than faster downloads. This is untrue for the younger users with time on their hands: they NEED fast downloads for BitTorrent and porn. Once you become part of the grind, you want quality web views with quick response times. I've switched some clients from high bandwidth DSL to low bandwidth DSL that offered lower latencies. They're MUCH happier.
FWIW, the order of need in my life:
1. Be available everywhere (EDGE/GPRS is close)
2. Have a low latency (EDGE/GPRS does not have this)
3. Have a decent download speed (EDGE/GPRS has this)
4. Be priced in an unlimited transfer package (EDGE/GPRS has this)
The only thing my current connection needs is a better latency. This will come with time, I hope. As for VoIP and the like, who cares? My cell phone bill is around US$100 per month -- offering unlimited everything. This price will only go DOWN over time, so I believe the phone companies are too little, too late.
Not when they throttle us back (Score:2)
Now I'm on charter's 3megabit plan, and I'm still locked at no more than 50kb for downloads.
And I'm not talking about P2P or bittorrent. I'm talking about downloading from HTTP or FTP servers. The fact that when I combine downloads, and they are still capped, lets me know its Charter doing the throttling,
Can't make butter with a toothpick! (Score:4, Funny)
Downloading movies.
new services (Score:2)
Forget down speeds. Stop the uplink stranglehold. (Score:2)
I am more frustrated by the stranglehold that most ISPs utilize regarding uplink speeds. It's absolutely ridiculous that I have a 6 Mb/sec down speed but 128 Kb/sec up speed. If I'm uploading a major web site upgrade or getting on-line with some Battlefield 2 action, the up speeds are much more important. When my nephew
As someone who recently went from dialup to cable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As someone who recently went from dialup to cab (Score:3, Interesting)
9600 on a 33.6 modem meant I was having a good day.
It does matter, in BOTH directions! (Score:2)
Everyone is always advertising faster speeds, only focusing on increases in the downstream, but no one is ever trying to advertise faster upstream speeds.
Highly asymmetric internet connections (and the proliferation of NAT, to some degree) are leading to a very one-way Internet. Its all about "
network neutrality (Score:2)
All networks should be as fast as they possibly can, this coincides with the theory of natural selection does it not? Even if you aren't getting a faster connection necessarily, it is good to know that your connection is as fast as technology allows.
The big issue here in terms of broadband... (Score:2)
We're hitting the point that many web sites are reaching their bandwidth limits depending on the web host, and going from 1.5 mbps ADSL to 20 mbps fiber connections won't improve things much, sad to say.
It's all about QoS (Score:4, Informative)
The main reason for this is that if they started accepting priorities from their customers or peer networks, then their customers and peer networks would all set their packets to the highest priority. The end result is that traffic would be routed the same. For QoS to be of any use, there has to be a reason for people not to use it. And, money is the best way of doing this -- if you want to limit the number of high-priority packets going across your network, charge the people who put them there more than if they put low-priority packets on.
Streaming media requires a different type of service than do web pages -- if your GIF logo takes an additional 100 ms to load, you probably won't notice. If, however, a chunk of your phone call takes an extra 100 ms, you will notice it.
The problem comes in when Internet Video becomes widespread, because its need for high bandwith will overwhelm the rest of the content on the network. Prioritization won't help because almost all of the traffic will be video.
The real reason for allowing prioritization is that network operators won't increase their bandwidth without it. Think about it -- why would your cable company spend a lot of money on its Internet service so somebody else can use the Internet service to compete the cable provider's pay-per-view service? The only way the cable company will do it is if they can get a cut of the action.
Truth . . . is in the numbers . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Our observation is . . . that the faster the customers go, the faster they get on the Internet, the faster they get their surfing done, the faster they get off. And, the proof is in the numbers. With a sample of 500 link speed customers linked at an average of 800kbps up and 5000kbps down, we use no more than 5000kbps of upstream bandwidth on average and 9000kbps at maximum.
And, we have played with the numbers. Slowing customers down to 2000kbps was completely un-noticed by the customers. But, the average and maximum upstream bandwidth rose slightly. Slowing the customers down to 1500kbps was noticed by a few customers. But, the average and maximum upsteam bandwidth rose by 30% respectively.
So, by the numbers, the article is right. Customers use about the same amount of network no matter what. It is a matter of convenience/efficiency for the provider to give the customer a faster pipe . . . for their own benefit.
Does this mean that everyone is being manipulated . . . sure . . . but, it isn't the fault of the network guys. Blame marketing . . . They are the folks who like to manipulate people.
Upload! (Score:2)
VPN and VNC? (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course it makes a difference... (Score:3, Insightful)
That aside, the value of broadband (pseudo-static high-speed) and increased bandwidth isn't loading web-pages, but all the other nifty things possible: hosting your own services from home, point-to-point video conference/chat with friends and family, finally being able to share video -- even publish it as channels a la Broadcast Machine or video podcasts.
Obviously, the entertainment industry and ISPs don't want you to distribute your own content (for that matter, government might not be keen on citizens publishing their own stuff on the net either), but therein lies the promise of broadband.
A problem you wish you had? (Score:2)
When I first subscribed to Comcast, the line was roughly 3Mbit. Over the last couple of years, the downstream speed was first bumped to 4.5Mbit, and then recently to 6Mbit. I live in a generally poor urban area (85% of the households receive some form of assistance, mine not among them) and I think I'm the only one on the local node - because I get every last bit of that 6Mbit, 24/7. Sounds great, eh?
Well, truth be told, I just don't need that much bandwidth for my use. What would be ideal, is having the
Nope, doesn't matter at all (Score:2)
Websurfing runs at only about TWO KILOBITS per second, and nearly everything else except downloading DOESN'T EXIST. Downloading turns out to have some natural limits as well; at 100 Kbps, you can download enough TEXT for 24 hours of READING in only TWO AND A HALF minutes per day. The practical result, confirmed by ME, is that the faster speeds yield only a extremely modest increase in real traffic demand.
Look at websites now, and back in the 14.4 da
depends on application (Score:2)
For the majority of "standard web browsing users", there's not a great deal of difference between 512K down or 6400K down. Although occasional downloads of software or updates do matter. My father tells me that at dialup speeds, web surfing was okay, but microsoft updates were a killer.
However, so many average people are sharing music and video, and web content is including more music and video, so higher speed does matter. My father receives email from us with family photog
It depends what you use it for (Score:2)
* Latency (gaming, voip, browsing)
* Upload Bandwidth (p2p, servers)
* Download Bandwidth (media downloads)
* Stability
ISPs today like to advertise a single number, the download speed. Unless you are mostly using your connection to download large files from servers, that number means very little. Add the fact that lots of ISPs oversell and have usage caps and you have a very ugly market where it is almost impossible for a cons
faster malware propogation (Score:2)
the faster the broadband the faster the malware propogates.
I wonder if anyone has ever logged the ave speed of internet connections and the speed of these darn viruses?
Re:faster malware propogation (Score:3, Insightful)
the faster the broadband the faster the malware propogates.
Address the problem of malware, don't stifle bandwidth.
If the typical OS did not have swiss cheese like security this would not be an issue. Also for those of us that actually know how to maintain and use a secure system this is not an issue, and faster bandwidth is always welcome.
On Slashdot... (Score:2)
Tim
What I REALLY want from my ISP (Score:2)
TV ! (Score:2)
At the moment, quality of service ties the delivery of video to the ISP. But who knows, maybe one day we will be able to buy video from somewhere else. My
Cable upstream capacity (Score:5, Informative)
And no, there's no simple way to reallocate frequencies and have more of it used for upstream capacity. Assignment of frequencies for cable video is a matter of federal regulation.
Bandwidth is to trash as... (Score:4, Funny)
Two topics conflated (Score:3, Interesting)
The first, higher speed, is "a good thing": A faster connection is always nicer though as many have pointed out the limits are often at the server-end, not the client end. Also the entire ISP model is asynchronous, assuming that we'll all be good little consumers and never be transmitting anything but the occs'l email and requests for more packets, not having our own servers or sending our own audio or video streams.
This is pretty much not what Tim Berners-Lee was thinking when he first developed his World Wide Web, and what he and others have been trying to rectify ever since. Indeed it is contrary to much of the intrinsic nature of the internet architecture where all peers are inherently considered equal and it is all superficially one big dumb network with the clever bits innovating at the edges. Unfortunately this is also pretty much contrary to what ISPs and media companies would very much like everything to be; just another variation of the centralized broadcast model where they plug in a pipe and you get to choose ABC or Disney (oh, they're the same!)
The second topic, monkeying about with what, where, and how packets get transported, is a creeping phenomena that is indeed slowly taking hold. A good early example is the TOS for many of the 'unlimited' wireless digital data services from cellphone companies:
To borrow a line [globusz.com] from HHGTTG [wikiquote.org]:
Already many ISP's block ports, typically port 25 to either stop email spamming or prevent customers from using 3rd party email servers. Also port 139 is often blocked, so Windows users don't accidentally share the contents of their hard drives to the online world. However many go on to block (or significantly degrade traffic on) ports for unambiguously self-interested reasons, such as p2p, or increasingly vendors with whom they compete. One well known [bbc.co.uk] example is Telus in Canada who black-holed traffic to a union website (and several thousand other websites unfortunate enough to be co-hosted with it) during a strike. Another is Rogers, also in Canada, who are apparently currently messing about with traffic [dslreports.com] to/from Apple's iTunes websites.
VOIP is the big target these days. Already several rural US ISPs have had their hands slapped for trying to block it. The ISPs were extensions of the local rural phone companies, heavily Federally subsidized, who'd gone into the data business (also often Federally subsidized). However when their customers stopped making analog calls and started making cheaper VOIP ones they tried to put a stop to this loss of revenue / increase in traffic. Ultimately they were denied this but the issue is one larger and larger ISP's are taking up. BellSouth's chairman and others have increasingly been making their own noises along these lines, and this could indeed be the big flash-point w
The Internet as we know it is doomed ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Step 1. Major backbones provide tiered service offering lower latency and higher speeds to content providers who pay a surcharge. Everyone else is assured that their service will not be adversely affected because they have plenty of execess capacity.
Step 2. Major networks, studios, advertisers, software companies, and national magazines all sign up for prefered status with the backbone providers. Consumers sign up for broadband in droves so they can watch truly high quality streaming media from the major content providers.
Step 3. Excess capacity gets used up. Banwdith partition devoted to those paying for prefered status expands, bandwidth available for everyone else contracts.
Step 4. A consortium of SBC, MTV, Time-Warner, and Ticketmaster buys all the Internet backbones. Web 2.0 becomes Cable TV 2.0. Microsoft re-launches Blackbird. The rest of us go back to using dialup BBS systems over 56modems that are then transmitted over VOIP.
I'd be happy with connection speeds when.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Dare to Dream.
Yes, it matters (Score:3, Insightful)
I have full cable, which I think tops off at around 5000Kbps but usually does betwen 1000-3000. My mom has 'Lite Speed' cable, which I think is 256Kbps, and it seems agonizingly slow to me. Both are considered broadband however.
For my mom the Lite Speed is fine because she doesn't download many big files and mostly uses it for web and email. For me I'd die if I had to go that slow 'cause I do games and pictures and stuff.
Lastly, I seem to remember similar questions asked in the past: 9600bps vs. 2400, 28800 vs. 14400, etc. Same question, and same answer.
Bandwidth isn't my problem (Score:5, Informative)
... queueing is. What I want isn't more bandwidth, it's QoS.
I have a cable modem (~4Mbps down, ~400kbps up) and I use it pretty heavily. I run a mail server and a web server, frequently use VNC when I'm away from home, VOIP when I'm at home and often have a bittorrent download running (usually getting some recent TV show), not to mention the normal surfing and downloading activity of a half-dozen computers.
My problem is that latency can get really bad for interactive usage when something else is sucking up a lot of the bandwidth. When someone is receiving or retrieving a big e-mail, for example, surfing can get annoyingly slow, remote telnet/SSH/VNC connections get unresponsive and VOIP becomes useless.
The problem is that one network connection may receive a burst of data that the ISP helpfully queues up for me, so they can keep my incoming pipe full. I also see problems when I saturate the outbound connection for a little while. It appears that they do a lot of outbound queueing as well. The symptom is that round-trip packet times across the cable modem link increase to upwards of _3000_ milliseconds.
I can use traffic shaping to prevent queuing at the ISP, but only by severely restricting my total bandwidth. It makes my VOIP smooth, at the expense of slowing down everything to about 1.5Mbps incoming and 200kbps outbound. For those who aren't familiar with it, traffic shaping basically involves using a router to prioritize and manage the network traffic.
Let me explain how it works (as I understand it, corrections and suggestions are welcome!):
Prioritization of outbound traffic is a no-brainer -- if the router has a VOIP packet, an SSH packet, an HTTP packet and a bittorrent packet all waiting to be sent, it should send them in that order. Management of outbound data volumes is a little less obvious, but still pretty simple: The router limits the rate at which it sends packets. It has very shallow queues and rapidly starts dropping packets which can't be sent without exceeding the specified maximum data rate.
Inbound traffic shaping is less obvious, but also works fairly well. It relies on the fact that every decent IP protocol is not only tolerant of dropped packets, but actually takes dropping of packets as a hint to self-tune. TCP is marvellously good at this. So inbound traffic shaping keeps track of the data that has arrived (both volume and type) and if a connection has exceeded the limit, the router drops the packets. It may seem wasteful to drop data that you have actually received, but doing it will cause the sending TCP stack to slow down the rate at which it transmits, resulting ultimately in a smooth, continuous flow of data at very close to the target rate. To prevent a big "stall" when the data rate crosses the threshold, Random Early Detection (RED) can be used. RED will randomly drop packets even before the maximum rate is reached, with the probability of a drop increasing as the rate approaches the maximum.
Ideally, I should be able to configure my shaper to limit incoming and outgoing data rates to just a little less than what my cable modem can handle, and that should ensure that my high-priority packets (like VOIP) always get through right away.
It doesn't work.
Why? Because the ISP does too much queueing, and does it with a straight FIFO... no prioritization. So while I actually can get a sustained download rate of 4Mbps, latency goes to hell in a hurry. At anything above about 2Mbps my latency goes through the roof and to reliably avoid queuing I have to keep the inbound rate at 1.5Mbps or below.
I understand why they do it... so they don't have to buy as much total bandwidth. Queueing allows the ISP to serve more customers for a given amount of bandwidth to the backbone (yeah, I know, it's not "a" backbone any more). It makes congestion on the ISP's network connection less apparent to the end-user. Suppose I'm doing a big download, sustaining the maximum data rate my cable modem c
It is like car insurance (Score:4, Insightful)
Two words: (Score:4, Insightful)
Video on demand over the internet will be HUGE. The time-to-DVD for hollywood films can go down to zero, if there is a world wide release in theaters and homes. Piracy would be greatly diminished if people could watch any movie without needing to store them for a small price.
Latency over bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends on your definition of fast. Most people equate fast to the amount of bandwidth they have. The fact is, most online games will not saturate your typical broadband connection. When it comes to online gaming, you really need low latency. It doesn't matter if you have 10Mb down and 1.5Mb up if you have 500ms latency!
The problem is that residential broadband service providers crank up the bandwidth but do not guarantee latency. Perhaps someday they will sell a product geared towards gaming with a latency SLA.
SLA?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
What cable/DSL providers give you a service level agreement (SLA) where they guarentee and back financially their uptime/availability, let alone the speed of your connection. They all provide no remedy for downtime, no guarentees of bandwidth as it depends on your area and usage. Why would they guarentee latency that has so many additional factors including line quality, distance, and the routing equipment used.
You won't find an SLA on anything less than a ISDN/T1+ connection. Maybe some sort of corporate broadband does, but in my experience even $75-$150/mo 'business' broadband has no guarentees either.
-M
Re:Article misses the point (Score:2, Insightful)