My internets seem to be fast enough

[andrewducker]

I can now download TV faster than I can watch it.

I can download a 2GB game in half an hour (the new, free, Alien Swarm from Valve).

What would I gain from having a faster internet connection? Is there something I'm missing?

I guess downloading HD TV faster than I can watch it, or 3D HD TV. But that doesn't seem terribly important to me at the moment.

Comments

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

Damn city dwellers with your shiny technology. There are still those of us out in the sticks often struggle to stream a youtube video. Although we're not the worst, there are places only a few miles from here that still cannot get broadband and are limited to dialup.

The most bandwidth intensive application I can think of would be live streaming Blu-Ray quality video, which can use up to 54Mbit/s. Most likely the improvements required to make that a reality will be in the exchanges, so that if everyone in your area decides to watch a movie simultaneously the bandwidth is there to support that.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I'm curious as to what percentage of people are still stuck on dial-up. Getting everyone up to 2Mb is vital if we're going to move more services over to online delivery.

I could have 50Mbit/s here now, but I'm not paying that much for broadband :-> I also have VoD for HD programs over Virgin, but I'm not sure what bandwidth that actually uses, as it doesn't come over the internet.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

Roughly 7% of households still use dialup internet according to the ONS. That data is almost a year out of date, so presumably the number has fallen since then.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Not just places out in the sticks. I live in a city, but a couple of miles away from the exchange, and it's all crappy copper wire between there and here, so while I'm theoretically on (and paying for) 2Mb/s I'm lucky if I get 200k/s. Lucky I don't want to watch much video, really...

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

What would I gain from having a faster internet connection? Is there something I'm missing?

Well, if we just stick to the TV stuff, there's convenience. I've been able to download music and audio faster than I can listen to it for aaaaages, but it's still handy to be able to, say, sync several hours' worth of podcasts to a mobile device in a matter of minutes. And that's still true despite the fact that my mobile device now has bandwidth close to or above music/audio streaming speeds most of the time: connectivity is still patchy, especially on long journeys.

And wouldn't you rather be able to play a large new game after half a minute's rather than half an hour? Or have it downloading while you watch TV.

It's good to be content with what you have. Indeed, it's the only workable recipe for being content. But betting against the desire for greater bandwidth has not been a good one in the last fifty years or so, and I don't see any sea-change happening here. We'll think of compelling things to do with it soon enough.

[andrewducker]

Oh, absolutely, having the game faster would be nice - but half an hour to download a game that I'll play for numerous hours is getting to the "not a real problem" stage.

Of course, if it could download the bits I needed to start playing inside three minutes, and then download the rest in the background while I played, that would be even better.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

if it could download the bits I needed to start playing inside three minutes, and then download the rest in the background while I played, that would be even better

Certainly would be good! You'd be halfway to solving the halting problem. :-)

Actually, thinking about it, steps in that direction would require far less fundamental revolutions in computer science than solving the general case completely, and would still be pretty cool. Breaking a game in to chunks that you down/load in turn has been happening since the early 80s. And loads of games have a structure where you can fairly straightforwardly sequence a lot of it after you've downloaded the base engine. And a step up from that, all that nifty stuff that's happened in the last 10-20 years on processor pipelining and cacheing might transfer to a cloudy architecture.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

not a real problem

You are of course right. In our current environment, fretting about bandwidth above about 5 meg is emphatically the sort of thing that the Twitterverse calls a #firstworldproblem

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Bandwidth and 'net speeds aside, Alien Swarm looks shiny! *goes to download and hopes his laptop can run it* :)

[andrewducker]

It does look pretty cool. Hoping to try it over the next couple of days.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Just tried it for 15 minutes in the offline practice mode while on a teabreak. Does exactly what it says on the tin! Top-down Gauntlet-style Aliens shooter with the character classes (tank, medic, tech etc) of a Team Fortress.

Nothing groundbreaking but very pretty for a top-downer and just damn good fun. The mini-map is a motion sensor for those, "It's inside the room!!" moments and when they come at you in bucketloads you really do just get the urge to hold down the trigger, stand there and go, "Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrgggghhhhhh!" until either they all die or you run out of ammo and get swamped :)

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

It sounds like your internet connection is sufficient for modern speeds. However, that says nothing of future bandwidth requirements.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I'm just curious as to what those future bandwidth requirements might be.

Uploading my consciousness to the noosphere?

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Nah. More complex software, higher res TV, synchronized connections to online databases, etc, etc, and so forth.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Oooh oooh Alien Swarm!

Must see if it runs on Mac / my ancient PC. If so, you're on for a game :)

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

What's your Steam ID?

[darkoshi]

You could have multiple people in your household, each downloading or streaming a different HD video stream.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

Improved latency makes the Internet much more responsive. Try 1Gbps delivered over ethernet - it's much more responsive than 20Mbps cable / 10Mbps ADSL because the latencies are ~1ms rather than 10-20ms

[andrewducker]

Latency and bandwidth should have very little to do with each other unless you're maxing out your throughput and causing lots of retries.

[broin.livejournal.com]

What would you....?

Get the fuck out of here. More = better. :p

What if you were downloading Blu-Ray quality rips? Or what if you+Julie were watching different tv? We have 12Mb and streaming HD tv combined with QuakeLive gets clogged.

About 10 years ago, when we got ISDN, I was downloading 30Mb Simpsons episodes in about 20 minutes. :)

[andrewducker]

I rmember those episodes. They were pretty awful.

20MBit seems to have torrenting of TV and gameplaying working pretty well together. I'm sure I can max it out, but within a year the next level will come down in price (Virgin already have 50MBit available if you're willing to pay for it).

I don't see the point of watching Blu-Ray on my laptop or monitor, they aren't big enough screens to make it worthwhile. Worth it on the big TV, of course, which is where we watch most of our TV.

[matgb]

What would you gain? No idea.

LArge collaborative projects could be done much more easily though. Example, currently, I and Jennie are both thinking of running for Federal Policy Committee (the people that write the manifesto).

They mostly meet in person, and mostly meet in London. Imagine being able to have a fully collaborative version of the manifesto, for example, with all the separate sections, fully artworked but still being worked on, with changes tracked.

Most modern PCs struggle on their own with larger sized publication formats, let alone making them all collaborative.

It could make genuine meetings possible, teleconferencing that doesn't suck. Hell, holographic 3d displays, we could 'meet' without leaving the rom, and not rely on crappy lowbit skype displays or similar.

10 years ago I was resistent to getting a mobile phone, utterly pointless, my watch stored enough phone numbers, etc.

Now my phone is more powerful than my then PC. What do I use it for? Stuff I'd never imagined possible ten years ago.

[andrewducker]

Most modern PCs struggle on their own with larger sized publication formats, let alone making them all collaborative.
Really? I've not had a problem with that kind of thing in a while.

Certainly, if you want to collaborate then there are tools out there, and they aren't bandwidth constrained. I can edit individual files easily with Dropbox, and if I want to do real-time collaboration then sending a list of keystrokes and changes back and forth in google docs doesn't even register as a blip. Heck, I can share my desktop with multiple people without coming close to straining my connection.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

You can't tell what's coming. There will almost certainly be technologies introduced that require far, far faster Internet connections than those currently readily available, but it's a fool's game trying to work out what they'll be. In twenty years we might be shopping via virtual reality requiring fully realistic 360° environments with which we can interact completely and which stream to our computers on-the-fly. These would require connections that are orders of magnitude faster than the ones currently available.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I was hoping that someone would be able to think of something concrete that was on the horizon that would require the bandwidth, but I guess there's nothing at that point, it's all further out.