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Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App

nytimes.com

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Re: Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App

#21

Post by astrocat »

lozf wrote: post #12
zurn wrote: post #8

Cloud gaming. A lot of interesting things would happen if you just basically had a video terminal and the all the computation and rendering was happening Every game could in effect have their custom fixed configuration "game console" as hardware, instead of having to target the lowest common denominator of PC configurations or out of date console hardware. Networked multiplayer games would be freed from targeting the…

> This would appear to be a problem with latency rather than bandwidth. Increasing / improving one doesn't necessarily have the same effect on the other. This also impacts video-conferencing (as suggested above) and other real time applications.

This. Most people don't understand the difference between the two. You can have all the bandwidth in the world, but if your latency is high, browsing around the interwebs will still feel pokey.

Re: Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App

#22

Post by eevilspock »

The perfect testbed for a p2p or federated social network to supplant Facebook. Or any other thing where we need to cut our dangerous dependencies on Big Internet (e.g. Google, Facebook).

Imagine a p2p social network that worked more like messaging. Your posts, instead of going to and having to trust a central keeper (e.g. Facebook), would go directly to recipients.

At most we'd need generic store-and-forward services if we want to assume users won't be running computers that are up most of the time. We could just piggy-back on the email network, broadcasting posts to your friends via PGP encrypted email, with some special subject prefix or header, so your mailbox rules can keep them from cluttering you normal inbox, and so your social network client can pull, decrypt and display them in your "news feed".

Or we could use the BitTorrent protocol or similar for distribution. Again, PGP encrypted so other nodes that aren't the recipient of your post could still act to store and forward.

Re: Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App

#23

Post by sounds »

anon4 wrote: post #9

Piracy. The killer app for high-speed internet is torrenting and piracy. Ok, and Steam. Maybe really long movies on youtube, though I wouldn't watch an actual movie on youtube - they don't pay as much attention to good compression as movie pirates. The only thing I've downloaded legit over bittorrent is linux distros. Yes, you could stream from your home, or host 32-person fps servers, or whatever. But in the end it…

Bluntly: hollywood saw piracy only as something to be killed. Now, too late, they're trying to emulate what has been in the works for 15 years.

Right now, Comcast sees Netflix as something to be killed.

It may be true now; it will certainly be in the future that Comcast will try to kill competing fiber build-outs.

It'll be a close race, but I'm not betting on Comcast or Hollywood.

Re: Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App

#24

Post by sounds »

bane wrote: post #16
ScottBurson wrote: post #2

At some point bandwidth should be cheap and plentiful enough that it would be practical, instead of gathering people into a physical office, to let them work where they want, and do impromptu videoconferencing when they want to talk to each other. I'm actually surprised we haven't gone farther in this direction already. But the videoconferencing needs to be really really good, and that is apparently still fairly expe…

My company basically does this to some extent now. Group hangouts basically fills in for conferences and we all get rMBP issued so we have web cams. Since it's all 1:1:1:1, you can see people really well in the conference, facial expressions, etc. Run of the mill broadband is "good enough" for most of this.

Depends on your upload speed. How many HD webcams can you upload before your pipe chokes?

Re: Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App

#25

Post by sounds »

bsder wrote: post #6

Two problems: terms of service and (lack of)network effect. 1) Terms of Service I believe that the Google Fiber terms of service prevents you from running a server on the line. That kills 99% of the interesting applications that having fast internet would be used for. 2) (Lack of) Network Effect Since nobody else has anything at that speed, there is no useful application to take advantage of that level of bandwidth.…

Google Fiber's terms of service have been clarified on the "running a server" point: now it's only off-limits to "operate servers for commercial purposes. However, personal, non-commercial use of servers that complies with this AUP is acceptable..."

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/google...

Re: Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App

#26

Post by osmala »

Speed itself is killer app. Tenth of a second is the limit to aim for responsiveness. Now we have acceptable speed for surfing but it quite often doesn't look like instant.

Going from ADSL to ethernet reduces latency by order of magnitude for the connection to local internet. That is the big jump. And that latency reduction helps gamers too. This is the big advantage of going for Fiber instead of lets try how we can put as much bandwidth as possible through this copper never designer for it.

As for bandwidth, lets consider the other side of story where you get those bits from, they too have limited bandwidth and have to support maybe thousands of simultaneous users with it.

And once they found the killer app for the 1Gbit internet they are not going to recognize that. As bandwidth is only visible when there seems to be too little of it, not when there is enough of it, and those who have too little of it often just need to wait some additional seconds and never realize that it could be almost instant, and totally miss the point of having additional bandwidth. Only way to recognize the killer app for this is use with Gbit fiber and then go with friends house and use it with their ADSL and realize you cannot stand how slow/limited it is.

Once you start replacing last mile with Fiber there is no point trying to save few bucks in an expensive project and have order of magnitude less bandwidth than what they reasonably can offer.

Re: Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App

#27

Post by aaronbrethorst »

eevilspock wrote: post #22

The perfect testbed for a p2p or federated social network to supplant Facebook. Or any other thing where we need to cut our dangerous dependencies on Big Internet (e.g. Google, Facebook). Imagine a p2p social network that worked more like messaging. Your posts, instead of going to and having to trust a central keeper (e.g. Facebook), would go directly to recipients. At most we'd need generic store-and-forward service…

> Imagine a p2p social network that worked more like messaging

So, basically, email.

Re: Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App

#28

Post by bane »

sounds wrote: post #24
bane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company basically does this to some extent now. Group hangouts basically fills in for conferences and we all get rMBP issued so we have web cams. Since it's all 1:1:1:1, you can see people really well in the conference, facial expressions, etc. Run of the mill broadband is "good enough" for most of this.

Depends on your upload speed. How many HD webcams can you upload before your pipe chokes?

Not sure, I never had more than myself uploading. 4 or 5 downloading without issue.
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