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Comment by notjoemama | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant response and observations. I’m not sure I’d agree with this one tiny assertion though:

“1.87MB is not that big“

I have lived in rural communities most of my life and unless I’m on my own Wi-Fi, this actually is a big file to download. Maybe they have a workaround for mobile? Mostly I just want to add that rural Wi-Fi still struggles with Web 2.0 architecture. More often we’re operating on 2-4G speeds.

Although if you’re in any kind of metro area with a population that supports better infrastructure, 1.87MB has mostly become a small file size. Except maybe at 6pm when everyone on your cable trunk is streaming content. :)

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If you struggle with 2MB payload, how do you expect to stream video, which is usually hundreds of megabytes?

You’re right about 2MB being a large payload in some network configurations, but I think it isn’t that big in Youtube’s context.

I'm also in the rural 'my ISP is a WIFI ISP' boat.. I pay for 10/2! While they do burst its not uncommon for my speeds to dip down into single digits. Sometimes I have to tune my video streams down as low as they'll go. Packet latency can frequently be so bad that playing online games is VERY DIFFICULT so I mostly play single player, downloads of new games often take 24 hours+.

My ISP when I talk to them about their speed issues "Well, 7mbps is all you need to stream Hulu", which is.. a terrible response. Want to do something else while streaming? What if _two_ people want to stream? What if I want to stream a video while my partner is playing a game online?

Ads are simply a _HUGE WASTE_ of my bandwidth, so I filter as much as I can.

If I were to keep my insurance policy number in my car in the form of 9 bricks with a number on each one, I honestly wouldn't notice. The car would seem to drive exactly the same. There are even plenty of dead spaces to hide them where they wouldn't even noticeably consume cargo space.

Yet for some reason I will not place 9 unneccessary bricks in my car, nor tolerate them if I discovered them already there.

Is the "some reason" irrational?

Or, maybe you found the batteries, and assume that they must be the bricks they write the insurance number on.

Or maybe the batteries are doing a functional job for someone other than me.

720p or less.

I used to stream all my videos 144p less than 5 years ago because streaming any higher resulted in a stuttering buffering mess. Youtube was the only streaming service I could watch because most other sites didn't bother with resolutions/bitrates so low. Maybe that's why youtube won out. Much like how whatsapp made it their mission to run on every phone they could get their hands on.

Now we have proper internet I don't but don't for a second doubt that a sizable portion of the internet still suffer from slow speeds, even those living in developed countries.

I also have a theory that Minecraft got so popular on YouTube because the videos look legible with large textures even on 144p

As others pointed out, the article was talking about it as a CPU processing constraint, not a bandwidth constraint. In that context, it's not much. I do agree that it seems like an excessively large amount of metadata to be downloading just to play one video.

1.87mb is the size of the encoded protobuf. Almost certainly, it is being sent over a compressed connection, and I bet there is a lot of easily compressible string data in there, so the size over the wire is probably closer to 500k(just guessing).

It may be a big download depending on your bandwidth (which you're already doing if you are streaming the video), but it's not big in terms of a CPU trying to parse a protobuf. If you are decoding streaming video from YouTube, the extra CPU power needed to decode a protobuf of that size is barely going to qualify as a rounding error.

It's a little weird on HN to see someone refer to "rural wifi". Unless you're talking about a relatively rare form of mesh networking, there's not really any such thing as rural wifi, at least not in the sense that its different from any other kind of wifi - a very local RF network designed to share an access point. I assume you're using wifi as a stand-in for "internet" or "broadband".

4G speeds are completely fine for watching video - I do this often in very rural locations using a Verizon hotspot (4G only). Sure, less than that is problematic for video, but 1.87MB is still small over 3G.

I would guess he’s referring to a shared wifi network that connects to the internet through a low bandwidth link. That’s pretty common in small villages where I live.

1.87MB is definitely not small over a bad 2G link that you’re sharing with other people.

I can’t imagine a scenario where someone with that setup would be streaming YouTube often enough to spend the effort to block the ads. Seeing one ad a month isn’t worth the effort to manage YouTube ad whack-a-mole.

Having worked for an internet service provider its common for people to literally refer to their internet connection as their "wifi" and fail to differentiate between their network and their upstream connection or even fail to differentiate between more obvious categories of things like their computer being able to turn on and "the internet". Their mental model isn't a graph its an amorphous blob.

It's humorous if you ask them if they have a wire and wired device to test they frequently act as if you asking them if they have a vacuum tube or a teletype. Meanwhile they frequently struggle with wifi configuration problems with devices that are 3 feet from one another.

> its common for people to literally refer to their internet connection as their "wifi"

This. It's the same sort of error as when people refer to the web as "the internet" -- which common even on HN.

It blows my mind that people can be that disinterested in how the things they use actually work.

I would never want to be that dependent on first-level helpdesk to solve my problems for me.

> Unless you're talking about a relatively rare form of mesh networking

It’s not rare. Ubiquiti is very popular for setting up point to point links getting a single internet connection shared amongst a bunch of rural homes.

We have a small house in Cerrillos NM that has point-to-point networking, run by a co-op (shout out to La Canada, great people). But my experience has been that this is fairly rare - La Canada is the only example I know in NM for example.

Also, this isn't my understanding of what "mesh networking" really is. It's just providing RF access to a single wired access point. But it could be that I don't understand what mesh networking actually is.

In Australia, NBNCo (our national wholesaler) provides a 'fixed wireless' solution for pretty much everyone rural. "Rural wifi" would be a valid synonym, just as "wifi" is a valid synonym to "Wi-Fi" to you. This is different to 4GLTE etc.

I believe 1.87 MB was in the context of CPU processing time, not network.

My friends house sat for the chair of my university's Computer Science department. This was in Arkansas, and he lived a fair drive away from the university. He had a data cap of 15GB a month.

My parents’ cap is 10GB with $1/GB overage charge. They are on line of sight microwave connection.

I’ve downloaded forza horizon 5 yesterday, all 120 GB of it.

1) what. is. in. that. game.

2) what do you do if you’re charged $1/gb and want to play forza? Sit in a Starbucks for a whole day?

1) what. is. in. that. game.

A lot of very high resolution textures mainly. Also very detailed 3D models and audio recordings of 100s of cars.

2) what do you do if you’re charged $1/gb and want to play forza? Sit in a Starbucks for a whole day?

What was old is new again. I remember going to the library with a stack of 3.5" floppies and downloading stuff there.

The characteristics of the systems we use control the usage that we make of them. Not having fast internet means you don't do the kinds of things people do with fast internet.

It's more likely that people play console games they can buy on disk at walmart. Another alternative would be to use a pirated version that is highly compressed with extra crap removed. For instance fitgirls has a version of forza that is only 67GB. There are times when it might actually make sense even to buy a game to support the dev AND still pirate it.

So what can we do about the situation. Obviously we can continue to expand faster internet but as developers maybe we should offer our own compressed version if we can't bring ourselves to economize in general. For instance some games that top 100GB have 10s of GB of uncompressed audio that could profitably be reduced. We can ensure that locale specific content like languages can be disabled. We could break levels into content packs that can be downloaded AS the game is used. Maybe that 120GB can be reduced to 60GB of which 20GB needs to be downloaded immediately to start playing? How many users play some of a game and move on? My bet would be a LOT.

Wait until the first time it has a >10gb update.

I preinstalled it on my Xbox just before release, and it had a >20gb day one patch, as I recall.

Yeesh. I think I got better that 6 years ago on mobile broadband in the UK.

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