Anyone complaining about this has never experienced the frustration of rural living when it comes to internet. This is absolutely amazing, and it will just get better.
Even a reliable 10mbps would be a godsend in many places.
Even a reliable 10mbps would be a godsend in many places.
It'll be annoying if you want to download the latest AAA shooter coming in at dozens and dozens of gigabytes, sure. But you can do a lot at 10mbps as 1-2 people needing the uplink. That's really nice.
Also - my frustrations over the last few days compel me to point out that the latest AAA shooter is in fact 227 GB, plus >100GB of updates.
Then again, I guess you have to store all those textures for the $9.99 exclusive hot pink and baby shit yellow digital camo shotgun skin somewhere...
But a lot of these games not only Reuse textures but also duplicate them. They do this to improve load times for levels/etc (less seeking).
Playstation DOOM is an early example of this pattern. The WAD files were actually 'per-level' and contained all sprites/textures/etc used in said level.
And that's not relevant to initial install anyway, which can/should be a single download.
You need a program that decompresses no matter what, and the ability to reference existing files barely changes it. It's not a post-processing stage where files get copied around. It's the ability to reference arbitrary chunks of data inter-file just like it can reference arbitrary chunks of data intra-file.
At the most basic level it's like taking a compressed file and chopping it in half. The user already has the first half, then they download the second half and "resume" decompressing.
There are possibly challenges in that however, my understanding of most compression algos (which may be inaccurate or incorrect) is that you'd run into limitations either with size of data overall or the memory requirements.
Of course, I'm sure there's other ways around that (And I have no clue if they are in use). One option would be to send over the assets in a master 'assets' package and then duplicate/assemble the data as intended during installation.
If the data isn't pre-compressed, or doesn't otherwise significantly vary, then using the right tools should de-duplicate the data. Things like lrzip, rsync batch mode, bdiff should work well. If large blocks are identical, many filesystem archivers/backup solutions should do good deduplication, and squashfs can be kind of nice.
Other than that I just don't know. Maybe they used bad settings for whatever is their compression algo and they don't have any experts who could actually identify the problem? It's a preposterous idea but I can't explain it otherwise.
- The bigger the game, the less space for other games.
- Much like adding metal to the inside consumer headphone purely to weight it down and give a premium feeling (they do this with other products as well). A larger program may be perceived as more significant.
Who wants a rock attached to their ears? In their carry on?
1) Fancy updaters with bindiff and compression take time and money. As a first step, you need repeatable builds.
2) A broken fancy updater results in a reinstall, support calls and refunds.
3) If the updates are pushed by the store, there is no incentive to reduce the cost.
With those three, if you can get away with shipping everything that's changed, you're going to do it.
If the engine starts compressing better then the map creators will just use that newly gained savings to add even more content.
Edit: these customers would be unable to use Stadia properly, because of bad latency; at least you can capture them as customers.
I never needed anything better than that to watch Netflix or program or enjoy basic internet browsering. It was awesome!
To get that out in a rural area and have it reliable is a game changer for a lot of people.
Also she refuses to learn computers so I gave up trying to get her internet but that's not related to this conversation.
On AT&T (technically a tablet plan) it gets deprioritized after 22 GB, but that's never been an issue for them, even the one month they did 500 GB. I've never seen their speeds affected. Costs about $20 or $25 / month. This is a riskier plan, in that AT&T could check the IMEI and shut it off at any time if it doesn't match (as they've done in the past).
The Sprint plan (hotspot plan with a public routable IP, $41/month effectively, but prepaid for a year at a time) does not get deprioritized, but it's probably not worth it unless you can get band 41. If you do get band 41 you'll see some very nice speeds though, at least download. But T-Mobile is beginning to shut down Sprint's band 41, and to my knowledge this plan is not permitted to roam onto T-Mobile yet. It's keyed in their system as a mobile broadband plan with a 20 or 25 GB bucket of data, however it has unlimited overage. I done hundreds of GB on it no problem. It exists only because of the licensing arrangement for Sprint to use the EBS band 41 spectrum.
What's the Sprint plan?
https://theconversation.com/rural-america-is-more-vulnerable...
Being in urban environment means higher dependence on fragile supply chains- food security is totally dependent on JIT grocery store inventories.
Rural homes, by virtue of being isolated, are easier to self isolate.
If urban environments start seriously breaking down due to a food supply chain problem, rural areas won’t be safe from desperate people.
Anyway, both approaches have their pros and cons, but as someone who has a fairly severe back problem and not much inclination to try to live off the grid, I’d rather be in an urban area.
At least for America, most city folk don't seem to understand just how armed their rural counterparts are. They'd be pretty darn safe.
Mass hysteria + lots of guns = not a place I'd like to be.
That's why you need to buy yourself a private, remote island, or at least a farm on a remote island. Also, if you don't live on it alone (regardless of ownership), it may not import more food than it exports, otherwise the other inhabitants will want to get your food.
Of course this is hard to find such an island as there aren't many such places and unless you're very rich it'll be beyond your budget anyways.
Also want to stress again that it won't be enough to just have an island, it has to be remote as well otherwise people just swim over. The number of boats is limited usually so likely few people will get to you.
I mean, there's a decent supply of islands (many with houses) that go for barely more than a Bay Area single-family home.
Something more remote is even cheaper, because there's a ton of supply of islands that are only accessible by float plane, and not much demand.
Consider yourself an outlier. I subscribe to several regional real estate newsletters, and for the last five months they've been all about people moving out of the cities and into small towns.
It's counter-intuitive but the access to testing and hospitals is very important.
As with any disease, the best treatment is prevention. Which is what being rural gives you.
Depends what kind of pandemic. If being in a city increased your exposure and infection rates 10 fold, and the disease is a killer without treatment, it's a lot worse to live in a city.
Some of this is simple variance, but rural areas are surprisingly dangerous over time where cities simply show up sooner.
Several factors at play:
- people thought COVID19 was not a thing outside of cities so people were more careless in rural areas
- wearing of masks is much less in rural areas than cities
- more local communities in rural areas (religious services for example)
But if you NEED to isolate yourself it's much easier to do it in the countryside than in a city.
In practice there are several flaws in that assumption. The lack of grocery deliveries is one major issue with rural isolation. Keep digging and you find several short vs long term issues. Consider, if you need a car you then need to eventually take it in for repairs etc.
Further, going to work is a larger concern. A higher percentage of people in cities can WFH indefinitely.
Yeah, I worked out the space requirements once, and it's actually feasible to stock a lifetime's worth of Calories in a fairly small apartment.
As other people have said, you can make it happen if you really want!
I'll take the one redback encounter every 5 years in Australia thanks.
Actually I lived there a couple years in my late teens and you look up at the power lines and see big spiders in them but that's about it.
I've been far more terrified of my encounters with Suzumebachi and Mukade in Japan.
And the one time I went to the USA I nearly had a panic attack as soon as I left the hotel and didn't spend more than 2 hours outside the whole 6 days I was there cos the idea of a lot of poor, disenfranchised, mentally unstable people with guns just freaks me out.
Knives and sticks are a different matter.
Compare to the USA. Cougars and bears should scare you MUCH more than anything in Australia. And rabies. We have no rabies.
Some rabies-like diseases but you would have to be extremely unlucky to get those (lyssavirus from bats for instance)
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/05/729901315/deadly-shooting-sho...
And yes one datapoint is all it takes to show you can die in Australia from a gun just like in the US and nearly, if not every, country on earth. What a wonderful thing to joke about.
I kind of assume those things are blown out of proportion in media much the same way our wildlife is.
https://youtu.be/t1uZZ_xRYvQ?t=153
Snakes and spiders are pretty much it. Snakes are very rare to see unless you travel to the bush. Spiders though, are common outside.
Once you've learned not to turn over rocks in your garden (with your bare hands anyway), you're fine. :)
You have no idea how ridiculous that sounds to me.
Red back spiders are poisonous, evil looking little buggers! ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redback_spider
Funnel web spiders are a thing as well, but they seem to be less common here in Victoria (south eastern Australia). Red backs though are everywhere.
BTW while checking that latitude (southern half of Tasmania), I found this interesting website.
"(Better Internet for Rural, Regional and Remote Australia)"
> While 60Mbps isn't a gigabit, it's on par with some of the lower cable speed tiers and is much higher than speeds offered by many DSL services in the rural areas
LOWER?! Cable doesn't even serve non-television use near me. Phone lines can carry 5 Mbps DSL if you're lucky. I happen to have a line-of-sight to a major radio tower so I get wifi from a mom-and-pop ISP, with a 10 Mbps cap. If I was on the other side of a hill, I'd be screwed.
All that said you can those speeds with Starlink anywhere, for much less than installing a phone line.
Starlink is leapfrogging the cable/telco industries by not needing the same infrastructure.
What? How do we 'know' that?
This is only a beta, and we don't know how carefully the testing was done, and we don't know how far away the servers were from the ground stations.
And some users already managed results of 20ms.
And I think you're being ridiculously unfair about hops there. If you're in a situation where your data could spend 20ms on starlink's network and 40ms on the ground, and they route it so it spends 30ms on starlink's network and 15ms on the ground, would you complain about that?
It seems clear to me that the 20ms number was about how much latency is unavoidable on starlink, the number you get without extra hops, because hops should be pure benefit. It's not like 20ms was supposed to include the path all the way to arbitrary servers, because that's blatantly impossible with the Earth being 130 light-milliseconds around.
Also if buffers are configured to be very small then congestion does not have to add more than a fraction of a millisecond of latency. Bufferbloat is endemic but it is not unavoidable.
He said 20ms, and you are saying it'll be higher, and that's okay. You can't just shrink buffers to get rid of queuing latency. You introduce new problems with scheduling when doing so.
This first generation of satellites doesn't even have inter-satellite lasers. So those extra hops will never be an issue. It's a moot point. The 20ms number is about the first generation.
But some day, when those links exist, if data goes halfway around the world via satellite, it would be stupid to say "gotcha! longer than 20ms!". That's a complete misunderstanding of the context, and complaining about something that makes the data go faster.
If someone was going to use multi-hop results to 'disprove' 20ms, they don't even need data. Just look at the speed of light. Bam, already disproven! But that's because it's not what the 20ms number was talking about. He wasn't promising to violate causality.
But if we need to look at the numbers later, doesn't that mean you're conceding the point about it being "clearly not going to happen" and "patently false" that it will ever reach the promised number?
Or do you think I'm delusional to say "maybe it will, maybe it won't" and you're just humoring me by offering to revisit?
So SpaceX only has 2 PoP locations, and it happens to be the areas where they are doing trials. As soon as the ground system needs to backhaul the signal over long fiber distances, things change quite a bit.
In the real world, the copper in the ground or on the pole is close to a century old, and probably qualifies as cat2 if you are lucky.
When HughesNet came out, we tried it. It was horrible. Only if we were lucky would we get a signal better than our dial-up's download speed. The thing about Hughes is that we still connected with a dial-up for Tx. Only Rx came from space.
All of that to say HELL YES, those are amazing speeds. However, as an adult, I became cityfolk, and have full 1Gbps up/down via fiber.
Seriously though, I still do this out of habit, as it's just how I like to read. Skim a front page, open all the articles in tabs, and then go back and peruse them.
He whisked me over to his laptop and started opening tabs, before looking at me like he was the first man to discover fire
When I responded "oh, I've had that for years" he looked genuinely shattered at my reaction
I non-jokingly asked him which tree I should cut to 'accidentally' nail the worst sections of wire. his response was essentially 'they're all so bad you'd need to cut down a lot of trees'. Verizon DSL was my only choice beside Hughesnet or dial-up. I ended up moving instead.
I also forgot to mentiom how my DSL speeds got that low; one section of telephone wire on my rural street had literally no usable pairs left (they had all corroded into nothing). the linesman had to reroute our phone line about 1.5miles out of the way in the opposite direction of the CO to get us reconnected. after that, if you picked up the phone, all you'd hear was a ghostly whistling instead of a dial-tone. the only reason I still had a 'working' DSL connection was from modifying the firmware on my D-Link DSL modem to do horrifying things. :|
The maximum upload speed currently on sale on that network is 1 Mbps. And it’s a monopoly. Inequality in Internet access aside, that maximum is below the average fixed upload speed of 170 out of 170 countries listed by Speedtest.net.
1 Mbps. I did three months of complaining and got 5 Mbps. The local regulator doesn’t care because even though they’re not actively selling it, said monopoly network is “capable of 5 Mbps”.
Contention aside, this and 5G will be important for those jailed by infrastructure monopolists. Here an extreme example, but the same is true across North America too, for instance. Rural users sure, but this can extend beyond that.
You have my condolences :(
That's so bizarre to have that kind of low speed on fibre, though. I'm half an hour by car / bus from the 4th biggest city, and I'm reliably getting 10Mbps upload over the copper lines. (I was getting the full 20Mbps of my plan, until NBN recently botched the repair of a temporary line fault - their repair guy even said it was the legal required minimum speed and he wasn't going to try any harder than that.)
Is iiNet not available where you are? Though since it's all NBN now, the reseller telco shouldn't make any difference.
That 6th biggest city is awesome though - if I didn't live here, I'd move there. 3rd biggest is a nice place too.
No other providers are available. Technically OCCOM and probably still Exetel, but they can’t offer faster speeds and have to charge more than even Telstra.
My most recent communication with the federal communications department included this wonderful phrase:
> “Please note that this legislation applies only to the capabilities of the network. The plans offered to individual consumers may be limited to slower speeds.”
my first foray into 'rural' internet was during the late 90s, using a satellite+modem setup.
The bandwidth was fairly decent -- equivalent to a fast ISDN line -- but the reliability was horrendous.
Drops constantly, only to wait for a whole new modem negotiation and reconnect. Think about the idea of an analogue phone modem but over an unreliable aerial connection.
My point in this anecdote : don't take the upstream/downstream values at face value -- there are more things that go into a connection that's actually worth using.
That said , I have nothing but hope for Starlink. I still frequent rural areas that , if broadband is available, it's severely limited bandwidth. I'm glad there will soon exist an alternative -- let's hope that efforts are made to keep the astronomers happy so that this network can be a real boon to humanity.
Reliability of the connection was much more important than the throughout.
That's actually pretty impressive.
Satellite latency is so bad most people with smart TVs can't stream to them because most streaming buffers empty faster than the network responds with more packets. They are usually stuck with their computers to pre-download content or increase buffer size/decrease video resolution.
Dial-up - if its offered still in your area,
Point to point internet - if you have neighbours in line of sight also participating.
or Satellite - if you are in line of sight to the satellite
Many people I know up-country usually all they get is satellite, so yeah starlink may not the promised 20ms, but its hella lot better than what traditional satellite is providing (also hopeful starlink provides better reliability and tech support which in satellite is quite atrocious as well)
Heh - as far as what's promised vs delivery, read the fine print on satellite internet plans, they have wording saying the hope is to provide the advertised speeds but there is no guarantee that they ever will.
And most people don't care about latency. Bandwidth is far more important.
Nobody who has ever used existing satellite says this. Latency becomes a huge issue at 500ms.
A single web page load of a “modern” website requires 10s of TCP connections to load resources from CDNs, each of which requires TLS handshakes taking 1.5 seconds, which are not initiated until the initial page is downloaded enough to see resources to load.
I had to live on this Internet for a summer. It was awful and was only good for long downloads. Everything else was literally better on dial-up. And this was 15 years ago.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/118663/spacex-starlink-20m...
Version 2 is not at a lower altitude. In fact, most of the latency incurred is not from altitude at all. They are moving several hundred kilometers from their highest to lowest orbit, and if you do that math that's not accounting for much of the 20ms.
It's impressive that they are not too far off, while the service is still in beta. And compared to regular connections you can get on Earth, it's a very decent ping.
As a side note, press announcements are made to generate buzz and create headlines, so you should always expect hyperbole instead of strict facts. If you look at video games announcements, press releases constantly state that every new game is the best ever in their genre.
That's better than the latency on my fiber connection
As soon as I can get Starlink I'm on it.
Won't it get worse when it's generally available? More congestion on the same channel means less per-user throughput right?
The market for this is huge. It's probably not going to displace high-end broadband in medium sized to larger metro areas, but it can clean up when it comes to anything outside of that. The only possible competitor is fixed wireless using next-generation modulations that provide incredible range, but that's hard to deploy over a wide area if the land is not really really flat. I guess 4G could compete too if they radically cut their prices, but I'm not sure the backhaul networks out in them 'thar hills would even be up to the traffic.
The only thing to watch out would be pricing. I hope there is more competition so the price remains competitive.
Caveat: Of course I've never used either service myself, so I can not speak to the actual download speeds vs advertised speeds.
I haven't experienced either service, but I regularly read that they are riddled with disconnects and spotty service.
Currently we're paying a ridiculous amount, $200/month, to Unlimitedville for what is literally just a 4G hotspot in our house, but with an actual, usable data limit (1tb/month).
I have some serious concerns about Starlink, but until we decide that internet is a utility and rural people need access too, I guess I'm happy to see at least somebody is trying to make rural internets better.
Curious, what kind?
Maybe that you might be forced into an NDA for a service that never ends up delivering on promises?
A couple of years back we lived in some mountains in Mexico and the best connection around for miles was less than 5Mbps. Most people had less than 1Mbps.
We then moved closer to civilization and I remember being amazed to be able to watch Netflix in 4K with a 20Mbps connection around 2015 or so.
> latencies or ping rates ranging from 31ms to 94ms
That's on par or better than what I can get with either point-to-point wifi to small ISP or LTE.
What are some applications that requires more than 10mbps speed in rural places?
Example: Downloading modern software over anything at 10mbps is a royal pain- VMs, docker containers, bloated IDEs, gigabytes worth of OS updates, tens of gigabytes for games, you name it.
Streaming services cap quality, or stutter out horribly. Don't even bother trying to stream over satellite (even at 25mbs with hughsnet, for example), you'll blow your cap out of the water in a hurry and it'll make you resent leaving the 90's.
The amount of updates you have to download weekly is insane.
cripples my connection to do anything else for hours at a time. Have to switch to "metered connection" to trick it into thinking im connceted to internet on a smartphone with super expensive$$$ dataplan, so to leave any updates as 'frozen'.
(for a non tech saavy person, they would be driven nuts... every day their computer would just grind to a halt doing network stuff and not know why)
Why do rural areas need any lower internet speeds than you do in the city? What are you doing in the city that they aren't?
In 10 years people will be talking about 50MBps like they do 3G today. I cannot operate hardly a single app on my phone on 3G. It's worthless in 2020.