Ask HN: What would you do with 1Gbps to the home? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you do with 1Gbps to the home?

8 pointstc12 comments

More specifically, what types of products and services would you create in a world where 100+ million homes in the US had 1Gbps internet connections?

Equivalently, when's the last time you've been thinking about a business idea or a product feature, and thought to yourself, "this would be great, but people don't have enough bandwidth?"

I talk with lots of people in telecom, and the perception is that there is no general demand for connections faster than about 10Mbps downstream, except to the extent that people want to keep up with the Jones' or get the best 'value' possible. I always answer with the standard party line about how we can't even conceive of the type of services that will use super-fast connections until we have them.

But seriously.... what are we going to do with 1Gbps?

(Personally, I'd like to see better latency, jitter, and packet loss characteristics become widespread first. A 1Gbps connection will still suck if there is a possibility of your packet getting caught in a buffer for 300ms.)

1) High-res voice and video over IP.

2) Streaming HD movie rentals

3) All-services-in-the-cloud - store even my larger chunks of data (like music, movies, etc) on a cloud service.

4) Taking this one step further, if the bandwidth really is that cheap and plentiful (and reliable), this may obsolete the concept of having your own media... Why bother keeping tens of gigabytes of music locally when any song you want can be downloaded in a tenth of a second when you want to listen to it? Why keep even more movies when you can download whatever you want instantly?

One of the consequences of this would be to make storage a whole lot cheaper by demolishing the demand for it. Only big cloud providers would bother buying hard drives anymore.

5) Why not stream the entire OS experience? Turn every computer into a dumb terminal that just displays images sent by a server that never crashes, never has slowdowns, can scale in parallel indefinitely... could make most applications instant. Never wait for a photoshop filter again. It would turn the OS licensing model on its head.

6) Obsolete TV for good - with that much streaming content being that ubiquitous, why would even TV stations bother with broadcasting on the air waves? HD content with personalised ads for everyone.

Edit: Note that I am assuming a high-quality 1gbps link - i.e., 50ms latency or so. Not some crazy hack with huge buffering in the ISPs that means that while they technically deliver 1gbps, they only do so for static content downloaded by a lot of people - I don't call that a 1gbps internet link, I call it a TV.

First I'd increase my TCP window size. Otherwise I'd be latency limited :)

Being an IT Director I try to think of what I can't do without my local 1Gbps LAN. I'd say a big one is computer re-imaging. With that type of band you could build a good reference OS install and push it anywhere in the world that had a similar band.

I'd also turn this around and say "how will the content providers deal with that kind of demand?" Serving thousands of users at those speeds is a non-trivial task. The bandwidth demanded from the server is a multiple of the bandwidth increase to each client. If you solve this, your customers will have big money on the table. Rather than figure out the "what" will go over those links I'd figure out the "how".

With the current applications I'd say latency is a bigger issue. 100Mbs at <50ms is more useful than 1Gbps at ???ms. I don't buy the idea of "dumb terminals" AKA "web OS" without less latency. The biggest reason I use RDP, VNC, or Citrix is to trade a bandwidth issue for a latency issue, so why would more bandwidth == more terminal usage? If anything I'd expect the reverse.

Server performance has outstripped Internet performance for so long that I don't think this will be a big problem. A $2,000 server can probably serve 10 Gbps from RAM... if you actually use your processor power instead of wasting it. Throw in cheap private peering and CDNs, and you can solve the bandwidth and latency problems at the same time.

As it stands, it seems the only real demand for ultra-highspeed (40Gb/s+) is in the data centers of the facebooks and googles of the world trying to shuffle around all the data between their own servers. I don't think the average home user really cares about moving around petabytes of metadata around a network so I can't really come up with any ideas based on exisiting needs for such speed.

Other than multiple HD streams and telepresence type stuff I am at a loss for ideas that don't completely ignore efficiency of the traffic. Certainly, I can saturate a 1Gbps link, but I can typically do the same with less bandwidth. You'll probably see a lot more of consumer cloud based computing and such assuming the latency and whatnot is also solved in the process.

1) High-res voice and video over IP.

Yes. And by high-res, I want fully immersive experience: the feeling of being there. I spend so much time on skype or on the phone talking to people remotely: it's BAD.

2) Streaming HD movie rentals

This only requires 20 Mbit/s tops. It's already available today in several countries. I don't need 1 Gbit for that.

2) Streaming HD

Given that large a pipe, I'm sure higher quality sources would start being available, that start at 20-Mbit and only increase from there. Throw in 3D, which for some reason is seeing a resurgence, and you easily increase the bandwidth requirements.

Also latency. Streaming movies seem to require a large buffer such that scrubbing back and forth on the timeline (to find where you left off of) is cumbersome. Taking advantage of a faster link would improve that part of the experience.

I'd have a room with rear-projection screens for walls. The wallpaper & hanging pictures would change depending on who came over.

It would be used to virtually attend concert events.

There'd be some sort of virtual reality mode that scaled images to adapt and make the corners invisible, so it could look like I'd be eating my microwave dinner at the top of Mt. Everest, or underwater in a coral reef.

This only requires 20 Mbit/s tops. It's already available today in several countries. I don't need 1 Gbit for that.

Unless you happen to have more than one person living in your flat, in which case any single member of your household could be doing something different... the MBit/s do add up fairly quickly.

I would do what I have always wanted to do. Write a small scale search engine as a hobby. I have run crawlers before but always ran out of bandwidth long before I could get any sizeable portion of the web.

Huge amounts of bandwidth would solve that issue for me.

Download Real Player and turn off the buffer.

Seriously, though, if Google were to provide a static IP I would start hosting small web projects from my house.

Real time, FULL, non-PITA offsite backup from the home office.

(Some of my artistic endeavors can generate a lot of data quickly. Upstream is slow, and I could exceed my bandwidth cap in the course of a month.)

Synchronous or Asynchronous? Honestly I don't have use for more than 10mbps or 20mbps downstream. I'd kill for 100Mbps upstream, though, so I could either back up all of my media on a remote server, or just store all of my media on a remote server or (sigh) "the cloud".

My camera currently generates raw photos that are 22MB in size, and if I get shutter happy, it's not too difficult to fill up a 16GB card, especially at a concert or a big event. Keeping my media reliably backed up is pretty difficult, and currently involves two hard drives, one of which I bring with me to my Seattle datacenter whenever I can. And forget about Video, I have 2TB of high-res home video just waiting to be lost in the event of a dual spindle crash.

The other thing would be to use some sort of telepresence service for chatting with my daughter, who lives with her mother. All of the normal video chat systems (skype, yahoo, google) are pathetic imitations of what popular science promised we would have had 20 years ago.

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