Ask HN: What's next big thing in bandwidth? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's next big thing in bandwidth?

#21

Post by SwellJoe » Tue, Nov 11, 2008, 8:58 PM UTC

ram1024 wrote: post #14

the next stage is mobile computing. your smartphone will become a seamless integration with your home desktop and cloud SaaS products (your desktop will be part of the cloud as well, hell maybe even your mobile will have shared storage and be serving data). Live video telecommunications will become the norm. everyone will be a videoblogger. everyone will live with the internet at their fingertips 24/7. it's scary isn…

I have to agree here. We already have movies and TV on demand on the web, "life streaming", etc. More bandwidth into the home just means increasing quality, increasing interactivity, broader adoption, etc. But, phones are just now getting broad enough broadband to make it interesting.

I'd wager that everything old will be new again on mobile devices. How many of those are business opportunities for small new companies? I dunno. YouTube has been very effective on mobile, so user-created video content is probably not one of those opportunities.

Re: Ask HN: What's next big thing in bandwidth?

#22

Post by vzn » Tue, Nov 11, 2008, 8:58 PM UTC

All your home usual staff on the mobile gadged. I think 700Mhz Wimax connection across USA from "google" might be huge.

Re: Ask HN: What's next big thing in bandwidth?

#23

Post by orib » Wed, Nov 12, 2008, 7:13 AM UTC

Pelagic wrote: post #10

Symmetric internet links will be a big deal, if they ever happen - right now most places seem to be 8Mbit downstream and 1Mbit upstream - once symmetric high-bandwidth applications become popular p2p technologies can really start taking off.

What symmetric high bandwidth applications?

I can't think of any consumers that want to upload as much as they download.

Re: Ask HN: What's next big thing in bandwidth?

#24

Post by drewp » Thu, Nov 13, 2008, 9:54 AM UTC

geuis wrote: post #4

jfno67 wrote: post #2

I think people will stop storing their data locally. This will not mean bigger transfer than video, but the number of transfer could be huge. It is doable with the bandwidth we already have, but it will become ubiquitous only when locally or remotely stored will almost feel the same.

To go with this, we need to see a large drop in latency. I think the biggest obstacle will be overcoming the total write/read throughput and speed when placing data over the broader internet versus a local hard drive or SAN/NAS.

I don't see how latency would be a big problem for file storage. Home user file reads and writes are very spatially coherent, right? Keep the first N bytes of each file in a local cache, and when the user starts to read a file, you're pre-buffered. Note that this is just a cache; the whole file is still reliably stored at the remote site.

Users probably use the same small subset of files over and over again, too, so you don't even need to keep the head of all the files to eliminate most latency effects.