My internets seem to be fast enough
Jul. 20th, 2010 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerI 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.
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.
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Date: 2010-07-20 07:56 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2010-07-20 08:47 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2010-07-20 09:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 09:10 am (UTC)And, of course, there are a lot of people still out there without any kind of internet at all.
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Date: 2010-07-20 09:20 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2010-07-20 09:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 09:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 09:54 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2010-07-20 10:28 am (UTC)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 :)
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Date: 2010-07-20 10:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 10:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 11:30 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2010-07-20 11:30 am (UTC)Must see if it runs on Mac / my ancient PC. If so, you're on for a game :)
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Date: 2010-07-20 11:34 am (UTC)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
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Date: 2010-07-20 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 11:38 am (UTC)Uploading my consciousness to the noosphere?
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Date: 2010-07-20 11:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 11:50 am (UTC)And for databases, I'm guessing it'll be stuff like real-time access to high-res Google Maps street view-like data that's also cross-referenced to various other bits of info so you can hold up your phone, look at the surrounding environment, and get a perfect picture of every location in your local vicinity, which you can then retrieve scads of data about.
In short, everything we do now, only bigger.
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Date: 2010-07-20 11:57 am (UTC)I already get scads of data on Google Maps, even on my phone. I don't need to synchronise a database, it downloads it when it needs it, and it's not that bandwidth heavy. To get a high-res sattelite picture of my location, a list of local points of interest, and then show more data on a few of them took seconds and only a couple of MB of data. Now, mobile data isn't fast enough yet - but on the desktop it's not even a blip on my connection.
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Date: 2010-07-20 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 01:36 pm (UTC)