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Comment by datavirtue | Hacker News Reader

"there is no compelling evidence that those expenditures are justified over the service quality of a 50/10 or 100/20Mbps"

How is that for imagination and vision. Thank God it's not their call.

It's forever youtube unless users can be empowered with the ability to stream. Right now, the barrier to entry for streaming is huge. Starting off small to prove a concept or boostrap a streaming venture takes a lot of capital and knowledge. Simply increasing upload bandwidth at the home will open up the possibility of starting a business for many. These people have no vision.

I'm sure someone else can think of another beneficial knock-on effect or two beside users gaining the freedom to stream--uncensored.

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“These people have no vision.”

I think you’re reading too much into it.

It reads a lot more like “we hear that you would like a better network, but we already make money. There’s no good reason to spend a lot of time, money and effort to build the same network most other developed countries are building when we get paid either way. I’m sure you understand. Just tell everyone else in the house to switch off their video calls when you want to play your game and it might work.”

The reason Starlink exists is most probably because they realised early on that not only could they build a useful product for rural users, but that building out wired/fiber networks was so expensive - and so marred in politics and lobbying - that traditional players have zero prospect of getting their act together in a way that would be competitive.

Absolutely

I absolutely agree with the first half of your comments but imo Starlink is just an amazing way to make staggering amount of space junks which we already had way too many in the orbit.

Absolutely. I’m not at all defending the extent to which they keep throwing more of those things out up there (although they at least seem to have a plan for bringing them down at the end of their life).

Space junk isn't a problem at the altitude that Starlink operates at and they harmlessly fall back into the atmosphere after a given number of years. Please take the Musk-bashing astroturfing elsewhere.

Starlink pollutes the sky, making it hard for astronomers to do their work.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/starlink-already-thr...

There is a good reason: the money they got from the government for exactly this purpose.

That's not a good reason. If the government gave you $100 million to do some very difficult task, but never actually cared if you did that task and never made you do it, would you have a reason to do it? Or just pocket the money? This seems like a no brainer.

Incidentally this also applies to quantitative easing with similar outcomes.

Now imagine that the government also had the same imagination and vision, and embarks on the nation's largest infrastructure project in its history to implement that vision.

That country exists, and it's Australia.

I see billboards advertising 75 Mbps down like it's supposed to be blazing fast, it's a complete farce. Zoom calls are often more reminiscent of slideshows than an actual video call.

The Australian NBN project has been an abysmal failure, even after shifting the goalposts, they've been unable to kick any goals. The project has been consistently behind schedule, over budget, and delivered results below expectation.

Meanwhile, a short swim away in New Zealand, 84% of the population has access to fiber, with average speeds of 250 Mbps down (and up to 10 Gbps down in some areas). The UFB project may be the only government-led infrastructure project in history that has been delivered ahead of schedule and under budget.

Yes, fiber is pretty ubiquitous here in NZ now. Took quite a while but lately seems like mostly everyone I know has it whereas a years ago when it was still being rolled out it was a bit more like 50/50 at that time.

I remember having a really fun time trying to get it when it was announced that it was available in my street, but my house was originally not part of that street when it was built, but part of the street behind it. As such the system didn't recognise my address as being part of that street which makes absolutely no sense. I had to wait another 6 months until it was rolled out to the street behind my house which was actually in a different suburb.

So, it wasn't perfect but we got there in the end!

I was a university student when they started rolling out UFB.

For whatever reason, our contractor was taking forever to get around to finishing our install, so one day we found another bloke down the street doing an install, and gave him a box of beer to do a rush job for us.

50/50 is a soft limit, technically the fiber used recently can flawlessly goes to 1000/1000, which should be sufficient for the next decade at least.

50/50 in this case meaning half of the people I talked to had it, half didn't.

Sorry.

Peer to peer.

Has a bad reputation because of copyright infringement but could be used to legally distribute patches. Some users could even get paid for keeping their machine on during off-hours and serving updates.

EDIT: Why the downvotes?

peertube all the way

As long as you have to muck about in your router settings to configure port forwarding or disable reflexive ACLs, peer-to-peer will never catch on with the general populace.

You might be young and not know, but this is a solved problem. Everyone and their mum ran napster.

Or for a younger audience, a Minecraft server...

To be fair, that was in a time when you could connect to Everyone and their mum's SMB shares over the Internet.

Also, torrents.

UPnP works well enough, if everyone would support it.

I've honestly never seen UPnP actually work before. It's been an option on all my consumer grade routers, but it just doesn't work.

I first know of UPnP because an online game was able to self-configure a port forwarding, so I go to my router and disable it.

It's more the sort of technology that you only notice when it doesn't work, otherwise it is subtle magic that you don't see. A lot of software relies on it in one way or another and works better with it, but of course it's tough to know when something is UPnP powered or using some fallback alternative.

With IPv6 it is pretty much doable almost with no config. With IPv4 you need to work a bit.

And what if we incentivize distributing (legal) P2P files/patches by paying the ones who share via a crypto token?

There is a BitTorrent coin, it’s an interesting idea.

https://www.bittorrent.com/token/btt/

That would work.

Big bandwidth users (0 day patch for games) might like buying less hardware and paying some users who have good bandwidth to distribute the patch.

It's a small leap from AWS outposts and snow*, to running an AWS hardware appliance in your home, pay as you go for self hosted compute and storage, and credit for spare capacity that is utilized by other customers.

They have vision alright. Their vision is a federally protected monopoly around a fabulously profitable "business" with virtually no overhead, and trapped customers. Anything that threatens this will experience the full brunt of whatever resistance they can buy. Whether it's lobbying, political bribes, astroturfing, sabotage, or subterfuge.

>> These people have no vision

AT&T's vision is to run commercials with Lily during every single break of every single game of the NCAA basketball tournament.

You'd think that with all that air time, AT&T would have made some effort to make the commercials mildly interesting, compelling or funny. Instead... boring, bland and idiotic.

> "there is no compelling evidence that those expenditures are justified over the service quality of a 50/10 or 100/20Mbps"

> How is that for imagination and vision. Thank God it's not their call.

100/20Mbps ought to be enough for anyone.

One person, maybe, for households not good enough.

Many households have 3-4 active concurrent users, using zoom or whatever.100/20 won't be close to enough

Zoom only really requires 1.8-3 Mbps for their higher quality upstream video.

There are definitely cases in which a family would want more than 20, so I wouldn't call 20 more than enough. But it's certainly usable for the average family.

I've got three adults and I run a plex server for my family and my 25 mbit upload is only occasionally annoying.

Yeah, upload speeds are rarely limiting in most households.

It is usually the network quality for the uplink which creates problems, issues like packet loss, jitter, sudden b/w drops etc become more prominent, When the rated capacity is "20" we rarely get 20 consistently, it is "up to 20" with all that entails.

Exactly this - once you get anything over 20-30 Mbps up things like continuous offsite backup becomes more viable - I recently upgraded to 500/75 FTTP in the UK and an initial backup on a new computer is so much faster.

As long as you don't have quotas.

once again, something that isn't a thing in the UK - I've used 4TB down 2TB up in a month before without any sort of warning or notice from my ISP

> Simply increasing upload bandwidth at the home will open up the possibility of starting a business for many.

not to contradict your point, but you can stream video just fine with 10Mbps of upload (twitch tops out at 6Mbps)

That's only feasible if nobody (or nothing) else in your household uses the internet at the same time.

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