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Every tech downturn has a silver lining

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Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#41

Post by ponker »

mikequinlan wrote: post #36
bawolff wrote: 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.

Then why do I never max out my home internet bandwidth? My home infra can handle it as I transfer files locally at 1Gbps but never find a use for this kind of bandwidth externally. In the last two years my home Internet bandwidth has gone up by 10x and I've had no new scenarios enabled from it.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#42

Post by MattGaiser »

bawolff wrote: post #3

> Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield might be a household name today, but in 2001 'Kay. Maybe in your household. Is this really a tech downturn? Yes, some companies are laying people off, with gig-economy things particularly hard hit, but the entire economy is a mess right now. It doesn't seem like tech is relatively more affected than other industries. I do agree with the general premise that a bubble bursting is…

> Is this really a tech downturn? Yes, some companies are laying people off, with gig-economy things particularly hard hit, but the entire economy is a mess right now. It doesn't seem like tech is relatively more affected than other industries.

If anything, tech seems more insulated. Where I am (Calgary), software engineering job postings seem to have grown. Granted, many of them are not that great jobs for companies that are mostly desperate to get back up and running, but work is there which is more than can be said for other fields.

http://blog.indeed.com/2020/04/30/labor-market-spotlight-job... software is doing better than average.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#43

Post by adamcharnock »

> 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.

I’m literally sat in a bank right now opening a bank account for my new ISP company [1], so this is nice to hear!

I’m hoping to deliver speeds of around 100Mbit to the rather rural area of Portugal I live in.

[1]: https://gardunha.net

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#45

Post by mikequinlan »

kortilla wrote: post #39
mikequinlan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

4K TV (from Netflix) recommends 25Mbps for each stream. I know that this isn't 100Mbps but Netflix supports streaming to 4 devices at once (with the premium account). You also have to allow for other simultaneous usages (your kids playing games while you are streaming video, etc.).

This doesn't answer the question of what 10Gbps would be used for, but there are at least some applications today that use a significant portion of 100Mbps bandwidth. This is just speculation on my part, but history suggests that once 10Gbps is available inventive people will find a use for that bandwidth.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#46

Post by [deleted] »

jack1243star wrote: post #33
jordanthoms wrote: post #21

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.

[deleted]

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#47

Post by EdJiang »

bawolff wrote: post #34
jack1243star wrote: post #33

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

For all the net-neutrality proponents: isn't this an argument against net neutrality? If ISPs could discriminate depending on traffic and apply better QoS priorities to sensitive content like video calls, reprioritizing downloads and p2p applications, we could have video conferencing that works, 99.9% of the time.

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#48

Post by criddell »

jack1243star wrote: post #35
bawolff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought a lot of phone calls were actually routed over the internet?

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#49

Post by MaxBarraclough »

mikequinlan wrote: post #45
kortilla wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

4K TV (from Netflix) recommends 25Mbps for each stream. I know that this isn't 100Mbps but Netflix supports streaming to 4 devices at once (with the premium account). You also have to allow for other simultaneous usages (your kids playing games while you are streaming video, etc.). This doesn't answer the question of what 10Gbps would be used for, but there are at least some applications today that use a significant…

The counterpoint to this is that once you've got enough bandwidth (and low latency) to stream an interactive session with negligible quality issues, you can move anything that requires more bandwidth offsite ('the cloud') and just stream the audio/video output.

As things stand though, it's as kortilla says: we don't even have any such bandwidth-intensive applications in the home. 4k video streaming is the most bandwidth-intensive problem we have. 10gbps may improve download rates for large archives, like modern games or perhaps major OS updates, but that doesn't strike me as a very compelling selling-point. It's a relatively rare occurrence, and reducing the download time by an hour (say) isn't worth reworking your Internet infrastructure. Even here, there's no gain if the Internet connection speed exceeds the write-speed of your storage hardware.

edit It's not quite the same, but I think 5G faces a similar problem. What's the point? 4G is more than enough to stream video. The biggest issue with 4G isn't the bandwidth, or the latency, but the coverage, and I don't think 5G is going to help there. (There are still parts of central London without reliable 4G coverage.)

Re: Every tech downturn has a silver lining

#50

Post by FartyMcFarter »

bawolff wrote: post #32
harpratap wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

VR may require higher bandwidth too, in order to stream at 90-120 frames per second.
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