The incipient digitisation of everything

[andrewducker]

10 years ago I had a 28.8 kilobit modem connecting me to the internet, and I was charged by the minute for my connection (plus a £10 a month subscription fee).  I was doing pretty well, the internet wasn't widely known by that point and most people didn't have any connection at all.  This, of course, was in addition to the £10 monthly charge for my phone line (with call costs that increased if I wanted to phone somewhere more than 5 miles from where I lived).

Sometime in the next 30 days I will have 10Megabit broadband, and I will be paying around £35 a month in total for it.  I don't have a phone-line any more - I use Voice over IP instead, which costs only £6.99 and gives me vast amounts of free calls to anywhere in the country, and incredibly cheap calls to most of  the world.  Another supplier has just announced 24MBit broadband for only £24 a month.

All of which leaves me wondering if we're starting to hit the limits of how much I care about broadband.  I can already download music faster than I can listen to it.  I'll shortly be able to download video faster than I can watch it.  I don't need to download entire libraries of congress or Linux installs every ten minutes.  My online gaming is now largely dependent on my reflexes rather than how long it takes the signal to get to the server and back (the final barrier being the speed of light itself, unlikely to be shattered in the near future).

I'm so used to bandwidth being a problem I pretty much failed to notice when it stopped being one (about a year ago, when I moved to 2MBit downstream - and the only reason I got that was that I needed the 384kbit upstream to stop BitTorrent knocking the phone out).  I'm sure the 10MBit connection will make a bit of a difference, but we're now reaching the same kind of areas as Microsoft and Google competing over whether users should have 1Gig or 2Gig for their email storage - it just doesn't affect me.

I'm sure that some day it will again - when I need to upload my entire personality to my backup servers under the Siberian tundra, I'll complain that it takes nearly 30 seconds, and I really need an upgrade.  But until that point I think I can consider it a dead subject for me.

Comments

give me the speed i need

[mirukux.livejournal.com]

I don't have a phone-line any more - I use Voice over IP instead

do you not still have to pay for basic line rental? i don't really worry that much about speed atm, but it does get rather annoying when i've several things downloading and the mp3 stream i'm listning to starts to skip.

Re: give me the speed i need

[andrewducker]

I don't have line rental - I'm with Telewest, not BT...

Re: give me the speed i need

[mirukux.livejournal.com]

ah right, fair enough. locked into using one service provider though? ;)

Re: give me the speed i need

[andrewducker]

Yup, although I believe there's a BT phoneline into the property, so I could go with someone else if I had the need.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

10 years ago? Although I'm in the US, I'm not certain we had access to 14.4s as the high end of our modem technology back then.

[moniqueleigh]

Nope. In 1994, Rockwell modems allowed 28.8 connections, as did the Hayes Optima 28800 V.FC + Fax. I haven't found an exhaustive list, but Byte.com had a July '94 article listing 14 modems at 28.8.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Yes, but my point was that I wondered if those were the equivalent of having a Radeon X800 now. My family couldn't afford a 28.8 back then by any stretch of the pocket.

[moniqueleigh]

Eh, I'm fairly certain we bypassed 28.8 totally. In 1995, we bought a 14.4 that was immediately upgradeable to 33.6.

[aitkendrum.livejournal.com]

I got to 1 MB downstream and at that point bandwidth worries became pointless, The only issue has been downloading too many things on Limewire and then Pisica accessing the router from another machine.

Wanadoo now do 2MB as standard but charge you the sum of £20.00 to upgrade and do I really need it?

Now 10MB, wow, do you get go faster stripes and chrome on the router?

[mirukux.livejournal.com]

Wanadoo now do 2MB as standard but charge you the sum of £20.00 to upgrade and do I really need it?

that's bleedin' cheeky. when bt wholesale lowered the price of 2Mb they offered service providers the chance to upgrade their customers for £5 a pop. most isps including bt yahoo/business broadband (who i work for) and pipex (my own isp) absorbed the costs and upgraded users for free.

[aitkendrum.livejournal.com]

New customers get 2MB as standard but existing ones get the 20.00 charge.

Yes it is heartless as almost everyone else I know gets upgrades free!

the 12 month contract ends soon si I am changing provider. Not sure who but one without any download caps or excessive charges :)

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

If you threaten to switch providers, are they likely to waive the £20?

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

It is a bit when plusnet do a 2Mb/s connection for £15 a month, and that comes with unlimited usage.

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

Useful data point - they'll waive that if you say you're going to another provider.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

The bandwidth will probably increase. Even at 10Mb/s you can't stream DVD quality video over the net. There has been talk for years about video of TV on demand, streamed over the net, which is the one remaining application I can think of that requires faster speeds.

The current barrier I would think, is the relatively slow upload speeds. Despite my 2Mb/s download speed, I am still likited to about 128kb/s uploading due to the nature of the copper wires coming into my house.

[andrewducker]

DVD bit rate is about 7Mbit/s. Easily doable on a 10Mb/s connection if you're not downloading simultaneously.

Telewest are rolling out VoD right now - you can get it in some areas, I should have it next month...

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

HDTV has a bitrate of 19.3Mb/s, so perhaps there is a need for a slightly faster connection, but not significantly so. I can't think of any non-specialised use for a faster connection than that.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I access my yahoo account once every few months. I haven't deleted the spam in about four months, and I have currently used barely 3% of my total space...

[opusfluke.livejournal.com]

You buncha bastards. I get Net access at my parents when I visit for once a month. I got here today and will be going back up along with geriatric bits of kit on Sunday. I am still astonished that this thing isn't still running Win95.