Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

toomanybeersies

I used to ask why anyone would ever need 100 Mbps, until I got 100 Mbps. Then I said the same about gigabit, until I got gigabit.

Now I've moved from New Zealand, with its amazing internet infrastructure, to Australia, where I'm lucky to get 10 Mbps, and it keeps dropping out. I couldn't even download a folder from Dropbox last night because my connection was too slow and flaky.

It should be the priority for governments on all levels, from town halls up to parliament/congress/whoever is at the top, to improve internet infrastructure to at least 100 Mbps. This is especially important for less populated areas if they don't want to wither and die out in the information economy.

What the USA needs is a grassroots movement to improve internet infrastructure. 120 years ago, telecommunications pioneers used barbed wire fences to build their own telephone infrastructure [1], this needs to happen again for the internet, but telecom companies apparently block this from happening.

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...

> I used to ask why anyone would ever need 100 Mbps, until I got 100 Mbps. Then I said the same about gigabit, until I got gigabit.

I wish more technologists who have become tolerant of stagnation in technology would remember that. A great deal of modern computing feels "good enough" when given only superficial thought. But replaced by something truly improved, the old rightfully feels outdated and decidedly inadequate.

The same was true with low-density displays. Many years back, I would plea in vain with vendors to give me high-density displays and it seemed everyone who overheard would say, "I don't get it; ~72 dpi is good enough!" Fast forward a decade and those people today would not surrender their high-DPI displays.

People forget that when you get a tool (like an internet connection) that is orders of magnitude more powerful (10mb vs 100 or 100 vs 1000), you don't get to do the same things you used to 10 times better/faster. You get to do completely different things. 56k connections used to be fine when web pages were static text. 1mb connections were fine when the pinnacle of multimedia was MP3s.

Netflix in 4k HDR was not even something you imagined back then though. If we had connections orders of magnitude faster with matching latency, we could, I dunno, ditch local drives altogether! Make my machine a dumb terminal again, even if it's a gaming rig! My imagination is rather limited, but I'm sure people will figure something out.

Yes!

What I want is an always-on high-speed virtual private network (in the traditional sense) of all of my devices. The devices should see one another directly via the always-connected virtual network (ala ZeroTier). I want that network to contain an application/compute/data server of my own.

I want all of my devices to be simple and concurrent views on applications running on that host, connected via the virtual private network.

More: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

Speed of light makes gaming hard to do remotely without building datacenters every 100 miles.

Other than that, the part of the computer you touch is heading towards a hybrid dumb terminal, where the terminal has plenty of local compute to keep the UI snappy, offloads the tricky compute and any long term storage.

You can cope with more than 1ms to the data center, latencyphile.

What can you do with 1gb that you couldn‘t do with 100mb? I got 50mb and for the first time can‘t think of a reason to upgrade.

At those speeds, its nice to start thinking about decentralization. At a GB speed, your network is about as fast as a typical HDD. So whatever you store on an HDD can now be twice as fast to load if your friend has the same thing.

It would actually be way better, than HDD, because you could do smaller requests. Hard drives take about 10ms to respond to a random access. Your friends could have the thing on SSD or even cached in memory. So you'll get a significant speed up.

1gb is a luxury. It feels like the entire Internet is running in your localhost. 4k streaming is clear and smooth. None of these is essential but it's nice if it's available to you for a little extra.

The slow part of Australia's Internet I get, that's a very common issue people talk about. What is the nature of the flakiness? If you don't mind elaborating. How frequently is it like that?

The flakiness is a byproduct of constantly degrading last-mile infrastructure that is prohibitively expensive to maintain.

With the exception of FTTP installations that were completed before the NBN[0] became a political football, the majority of consumer internet connections in Australia have a copper last-mile serving ADSL2+. Flakiness with this copper is caused by general network neglect (due to unsustainable maintenance costs) resulting in things like contractors wrapping tangled messes of cables in plastic shopping bags to keep them "dry"[1].

Anecdotally, several ADSL2+ connections I had over multiple years and residences in Australia would noticeably degrade for a week or two after heavy rains. I know others who experienced similar behaviour.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=telstra+australia+plastic+ba...

> the majority of consumer internet connections in Australia have a copper last-mile serving ADSL2+.

Half the point of laying fiber was _because_ of all the old copper and how unusable it has become. Exceptionally short-sighted.

I think this is one of the more interesting advantages that smaller countries have over bigger countries in the digital era.

Easier to dig trenches across and entire island and get everyone on fiber early.

There are plenty of places that want to.

What we need are less lawyers and lobbyists -- and captured markets spending our inflated fees to turn around and defeat us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com