Inter-planetary internet... How do you play a game when few of the players are on Mars?
entangled quantum pairs?
Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
11–20 of 230 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#12Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#13Interesting question. Do we still have Internet infrastructural problems left? Akamai solved POPs (point of presence). Equinix solved DC. Both are matching towards table stakes in the context of internet infrastructural. (Not business models). We have lots of under-sea cables / international expansions on-going and planned. And it is now more of a cost efficiency problem, not an infrastructural problem . We have a de…
Dealing with denial of service attacks in a way that doesn't involve needing to own more bandwidth then the attacker can saturate would be something to look into.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#14Those companies were not created to solve those problems, but to profit by them. Do you think that, say, Cloudflare would like a better web protocol which would be impossible to DDoS?
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#15I think solving the "last mile" problem in the US is our greatest problem, especially in rural areas. Too many state and local governments have been paid off by lobbyists to pass laws to block any competition from offering cheaper and better options.
Too many people are stuck with slow, expensive, and unreliable cable and/or DSL ISPs. Some have no choice whatsoever. Some others get to choose only from two equally awful options. We need legally available competition EVERYWHERE.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#16IPv4 exhaustion is still probable to happen at some point
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#17Inter-planetary internet... How do you play a game when few of the players are on Mars?
Even with high ping, application layer is probably the wrong place to solve this problem. We'll likely get email working as one of the first problems and be back to correspondence chess and the like. Even Civilization 5/6 works over email.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#18I think solving the "last mile" problem in the US is our greatest problem, especially in rural areas. Too many state and local governments have been paid off by lobbyists to pass laws to block any competition from offering cheaper and better options. Too many people are stuck with slow, expensive, and unreliable cable and/or DSL ISPs. Some have no choice whatsoever. Some others get to choose only from two equally awf…
Unfortunately that problem space is so large (every new line of fibre has how many stakeholders?) that a single individual or organisation might not be able to have any impact here. Which I think is the root of this question.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#19Interesting question. Do we still have Internet infrastructural problems left? Akamai solved POPs (point of presence). Equinix solved DC. Both are matching towards table stakes in the context of internet infrastructural. (Not business models). We have lots of under-sea cables / international expansions on-going and planned. And it is now more of a cost efficiency problem, not an infrastructural problem . We have a de…
TOR is slow and unpopular, stuff like that and content addressable protocols like IPFS are probably where the next problems are.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#20[DISCLAIMER - I run Transcelestial which is building laser comms and we think about this question quite a lot]
Some background maybe first.
There is a massive Global Internet Distribution challenge which works around the cost/bit equation. They are:
1. Undersea cable networks - USD 0.5-1B to deploy over a multi-year project. 10s of millions to maintain with regular cable cuts. Typically now only deployed through consortiums of Internet and Telecom companies. Carry 99% of world’s international data.
2. Inter-City Distribution - National Fiber and Copper networks which connect tier 1-3 cities, towns and villages with a backbone to the nearest Internet Exchange OR telco data center (which in-turn would have a hard line back to Undersea landing stations).
3. Last Mile or within city/urban connectivity - last & middle mile within a city/town connecting homes, offices, towers and DCs.
IMHO the challenges still remain but get worse from top to bottom, costs and complexity often jumping in orders of magnitude from one to the other, with Last mile obv being the craziest.
Telcos nationally in most countries still own most of inter-city distribution and tier 2/3/4 POPs (point of presence), leasing out capacity from POPs to ISPs and Enterprises. The investment in laying these cables is EXTREMELY prohibitive and is the main cause for high Mbps rates, high latency and onerous terms when it comes to in-country network distribution (big e.g. is South Africa). Numbers range from orders of magnitude more expensive (e.g. $1.6B for Telstra Australia in Phase 1, $130-150B for US) than Undersea cables primarily due to Right of Way and operational costs of deployment.
People are now moving from Rural to Tier2-3 cities/towns and also there is reverse-migration from megacities like Manila to Tier2-3 cities/towns (as evidenced by rising cities like Cebu, Bali, Miami, Austin, Pune, etc where housing is more affordable and earning potential remotely is nearly the same). Bandwidth and latency demands are going up 100% Y-on-Y in Tier1-3 cities, especially in WFH COVID times. Starlink & others in LEO wil definitely help with most rural unconnected places (Mid-tier cities & towns where by far the larger total bulk is accumulation will need a LOT of attention and more latency optimized, cost/bit minimized backbones.
Finally, humanity's push to get into deep space in the next decade will require building out infra to support robotic and autonomous missions. Thinking of deep space objects as islands or continents is a helpful model and tightbeaming laser comms to them as "undersea cables but in space" could help address some bandwidth allocation problems in the early days (but local distribution will again have challenges)