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Every tech downturn has a silver lining

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31–40 of 66 posts

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#31
post #17

> My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes. In some places, you can get a gigabit per second. Now imagine what we could do if, in ten years, we all have 10 gigabits per second in our homes, and we have in-home networks that are fast and fat. Hmm. Kind of an interesting take. I…

Bandwidth doesn’t make up for the lack of good AR/VR equipment to make use of it.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#32
post #17

> My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes. In some places, you can get a gigabit per second. Now imagine what we could do if, in ten years, we all have 10 gigabits per second in our homes, and we have in-home networks that are fast and fat. Hmm. Kind of an interesting take. I…

Streaming Games? Streaming VR and AR content? Lower latencies will allow more seamless video conferences. Right now our interface planes are still very 2D, which still has a steep learning curve compared to our 3D world.

Sure, but latency and bandwidth are different things. Reducing latency by a few orders of magnitudes would open up tons of applications (not sure i agree that video conf is one of them, dont think latency of internet is the main issue there) but i don't think we are likely to see much beyond incremental improvements (light only travels so fast)

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#33
post #17

> My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes. In some places, you can get a gigabit per second. Now imagine what we could do if, in ten years, we all have 10 gigabits per second in our homes, and we have in-home networks that are fast and fat. Hmm. Kind of an interesting take. I…

I'd settle for IP-based video conferencing that actually works, 100% of the time. As far as I can tell the major issues with that now are more from WiFi - Bufferbloat is particularly bad there and interference causes small dropouts (run a ping to a local router in the background for a while, and you'll probably see jitter eventually). It's pretty noticeable here in New Zealand where most people are now on fiber conne…

> IP-based video conferencing that actually works, 100% of the time.

This is oxymoron. Our packet-switched infra simply cannot fulfill such promise.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd settle for IP-based video conferencing that actually works, 100% of the time. As far as I can tell the major issues with that now are more from WiFi - Bufferbloat is particularly bad there and interference causes small dropouts (run a ping to a local router in the background for a while, and you'll probably see jitter eventually). It's pretty noticeable here in New Zealand where most people are now on fiber conne…

> IP-based video conferencing that actually works, 100% of the time. This is oxymoron. Our packet-switched infra simply cannot fulfill such promise.

That's a bit pedantic - the poster would cleary be happy with something that worked 99.9% of the time, and there is no technical reason why our packet switched network can't suppot that in theory

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#35
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IP-based video conferencing that actually works, 100% of the time. This is oxymoron. Our packet-switched infra simply cannot fulfill such promise.

That's a bit pedantic - the poster would cleary be happy with something that worked 99.9% of the time, and there is no technical reason why our packet switched network can't suppot that in theory

Yet there's not one implementation that does work? I am not an expert on this, but I don't think current Internet-based solutions can compete with telephone/cellphone voice call on reliability, not without some drastic infrastructural change.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#36
post #17

> My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes. In some places, you can get a gigabit per second. Now imagine what we could do if, in ten years, we all have 10 gigabits per second in our homes, and we have in-home networks that are fast and fat. Hmm. Kind of an interesting take. I…

"640K ought to be enough for anyone" said by someone, possibly.

If we have 10GB networks, applications will be found to make use of it. Possibly (hopefully) applications that we haven't yet even imagined.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#37
post #17

> My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes. In some places, you can get a gigabit per second. Now imagine what we could do if, in ten years, we all have 10 gigabits per second in our homes, and we have in-home networks that are fast and fat. Hmm. Kind of an interesting take. I…

> latency

I think this is where we need to go.

so many experiences will become transparent with decent latency.

Not just usable, transparent.

It's like typing at the command line. If delays are less than 0.1s then a program is "interactive" and doesn't disrupt your thought process. Once you start noticing the delay you get poor results.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#38
Yes, the downturn may result in new technology and ideas, but almost all of them would have been possible without the pandemic. This article seems to be speculating a bit to find positives. Many of us are privileged to not be as worried about finances, but for the vast majority of Americans this is nothing like a snowday, as the author puts it. Some times are simply not as good as others, and that's okay.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#39
post #17

> My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes. In some places, you can get a gigabit per second. Now imagine what we could do if, in ten years, we all have 10 gigabits per second in our homes, and we have in-home networks that are fast and fat. Hmm. Kind of an interesting take. I…

"640K ought to be enough for anyone" said by someone, possibly. If we have 10GB networks, applications will be found to make use of it. Possibly (hopefully) applications that we haven't yet even imagined.

But the point is that applications haven’t even found a use for 100mbps to the home. I have 1gbps to mine and about the only time it’s been useful is when a friend wants to play a game I have on steam but not locally.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#40
post #17

> My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes. In some places, you can get a gigabit per second. Now imagine what we could do if, in ten years, we all have 10 gigabits per second in our homes, and we have in-home networks that are fast and fat. Hmm. Kind of an interesting take. I…

I'd settle for IP-based video conferencing that actually works, 100% of the time. As far as I can tell the major issues with that now are more from WiFi - Bufferbloat is particularly bad there and interference causes small dropouts (run a ping to a local router in the background for a while, and you'll probably see jitter eventually). It's pretty noticeable here in New Zealand where most people are now on fiber conne…

Apple FaceTime is about as close to perfect as I've seen. Of course it's only 1 to 1 between Apple devices which is a fairly narrow scenario, but it absolutely nails that scenario in my experience.
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