Hacker News Reader

Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone do anything that would greatly benefit from a connection like this in their home or have any examples of things that aren't possible now and these speeds will make possible (businesses, technology etc)? I can only really think of backup that will be greatly affected.

I currently have 75/20 in my apartment and I don't think I've yet to be in a situation where I needed more speed or was frustrated about my speeds, the problem for consumer broadband seems to be that while there are people with good connections there are still tens of millions scraping by with 1 or 2mbps which is holding their internet enjoyment back a great deal. My parents are living with around 1.5mbps (with fluctuations) making even basic streaming difficult. Hopefully the fact that Google are managing to do this will make ISPs step up their game, although I'm not sure what Google are going for here (proof of tech? entering consumer ISP space?).

View on HN

> Does anyone do anything that would greatly benefit from a connection like this

Replacing optical media with high speed lines would allow some funky new market mechanics like...

Games:

- Instead of downloading the full 12Gb+ game, simply load levels/textures as needed

- Distributed game session hosting where the players temporarily and reliably become the host of a shard

- Something like OnLive could be high res/low image compression/ultra low latency

- Download 12Gb+ games on a whim and pay as you go for playing it - stop playing/paying for it and the provider can cancel the game's certificate and it gets pulled from the system. Want it back? Download it again in a minute, save games and all

Movies:

- Make way for 4k video via net

- Make way for low compression 1080p video via net

- Make way for every person in the household streaming 1080p...while video chatting in 1080p, while playing an RTS on an OnLive-like service...while backing up their files to a remote server. Etc.

The future is going to need some big pipes.

> Instead of downloading the full 12Gb+ game, simply load levels/textures as needed

Blizzard has already executed this impressively for several of their titles. Starcraft II is an 8GB download, but after about 400MB you can actually start the game. It'll then continue downloading non-invasively in the background while loading needed data on demand. Same goes for World of Warcraft, and probably other titles as well.

Continuing on the game theme, I recall that Rage originally had hundreds of gigabytes of textures, and they pared it down to the point that it would fit on a BluRay. That would not be necessary with such a fat pipe. How many design decisions have been based on the space limitations of BluRays, or, worse yet, DVDs?

And 1080p is nothing. It's already outmatched by the retina display on a Macbook Pro. Right now the utility of higher resolution displays is limited by the lack of availability of media, since net connections are too slow and BluRay is the best you can do with optical media, but that bottleneck would go away with higher speeds.

"- Distributed game session hosting where the players temporarily and reliably become the host of a shard"

I think that's how Halo's online gameplay has worked for a while. http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Connection_Host

That's how most Xbox games work. There was a bit of a uproar about it when the service started. Players were miffed of paying to play games they already bought, and not even getting dedicated servers. That quickly died down.

That quickly died down.

Not really. Host advantage is still a thing that happens in a lot of multiplayer games, and peer-to-peer multiplayer has never come close to the same experience as a dedicated server.

Oh, it's definitely still bullshit. You're right, it can ruin games directly, and even indirectly as others may assume you have an advantage because you're the host and quit. Dedicated servers are indeed simply better on games with more than two players.

I just meant the outrage over it seems to be much less a thing now. Now it's just accepted that this is how it should be done. I think like afterburner suggested in the sister comment to this one, those who were seriously offput by it have left and that's that.

It died down because the players who cared left?

I think most people just swallowed it. Sure, some went exclusively PC/PS3, but I don't think that many quit because of it.

Personally, I dropped XBL years ago because I was tired of children eager to sling racial and homophobic slurs. Playing games online just wasn't fun to me. I went on to play a lot of TF2, but virtually no one there uses headphones mics either. That, to me, was the appeal of Xbox Live. Everyone had a mic. We were to communicate and make the games fun on a whole new level. Instead, well, no. That didn't happen.

Download 12Gb+ games on a whim...

Sort of. 12GB (I presume you meant GB) still takes a minute or two to move around locally- storage isn't fast enough to flush 12GB in seconds.

Now, if your device just had comical amounts of RAM, you could manage it.

How is ~12GB ram comical? It's a lot easier for the common consumer to get 16 gigabytes of RAM today that is to get the kind of network speeds we're talking about here.

16GB of RAM is only $55-$65 depending on the speed, and 64GB SSDs are around the same price. Compare that to the price of one of those 12GB games, and you can see that local storage bottlenecks need not be a problem for gamers.

The PC in front of me has 24GB - it should have had 32GB, but one of the modules was dodgy and I never got around to replacing it.

Pay-as-you go gaming is actually a really interesting idea.

It is a little bit strange that in this community there seems to be floating surprisingly lot of opinions in the spirit of "Who needs more than 640k RAM?". I find it obvious that more storage and faster network connectivity both are immediately benefiting consumers. Almost everyone produces or consumes some form of digital media and with ongoing improvements in quality of these products, the requirements for comfortably storing and transferring of media are rising also.

I think that a lot of people from kids to elderly ones are sharing their digital photos or videos and in my opinion it clearly improves the experience when you upload somwhere or drag-and-drop your 500 vacation pictures to your aunt in your favorite IM and BOOM - they are already transferred instead of waiting for minutes or even hours.

As the pipe gets thicker the client can get thinner. So services like this allow us to move more and more to the server side. If you follow this line of thinking you see a few interesting things become feasible:

* Your computer can become just a screen with a Ethernet cable in the back. The desktop comes from the cloud.

* Dito for your TV/Games console. Instead of buying a PSP or XBox that can all be run in the cloud and just streamed to your display.

A whole bunch of things we do today just get an order of magintude easier - streaming video and audio to and from the house, downloading content, hosting services out of our home, etc, etc

But at the same time, everyone is moving away from desktops and certainly away from wired connections. Most people are using wi-fi in the home, and more laptops, tablets, mobile while desktops are dying. Wireless is still only at 200mbps. It's going to have to get faster for these speeds to mean anything for the average consumer.

200 mbps is plenty. Problem is that real speeds are mostly lower. Note that most office networks still operate at 100Mbps and are doing just fine. Arguably so though.

>Your computer can become just a screen with a Ethernet cable in the back. The desktop comes from the cloud.

>Dito for your TV/Games console. Instead of buying a PSP or XBox that can all be run in the cloud and just streamed to your display.

Oh boy I can have even less control over my stuff than I do now.

A simple idea — look how Apple now only releases OS updates via download. With speeds like this (~GB) we may be able to forgo updates altogether. Boot the entire OS from the cloud/remote server.

Perhaps then software will become versionless, and we just run the latest and greatest that has been pushed to the public.

I have 50Mb/s over 10Mb/s which I pay handsomely to Comcast for. No cap is nice. No packet inspection is nice. No QOS on ports is nice. I've had it a year. We very easily do 500-1000GB a month, and are just pulling down SD video at about 300-500MB per file.

I have backups with Arq once an hour to S3 that take longer than I want. I keep a full time VPN on the media server that downloads torrents, there's a few phones, tablets, etc. it's pretty easy to saturate the upstream. And I would live to lite up the VPN network wide.

Funny that the VPN service is unlimited and faster than my connection and I only pay $29.00 a month plus get much more than just VPN. It could be lower if I just wanted VPN.

The VPN provider can afford it, are making a profitable business out of it, and push it to 100% of their users. Yet Comcast and AT&T would like us to believe 1-5% of their users could even make an impact on their network if they tried?! If they can, that's sad that a small business can better manage their infrastructure than an actual upstream wholesale provider and/or cable supplier. Comcast shuffles uncompressed HD from their feeds at 6.6Gb/s [1] all day long. NetFlix drops the data at their front door so it's free. They have plenty of overhead for us Internet users.

http://www.ciena.com/connect/blog/How-much-bandwidth-does-Br...

Just for fun I throttled my laptop down to 2Mb/s synchronous, remembering back to the day when I paid $600.00 a month for a T1 at 1.54 Mb/s and people were amazed. I felt at the throttled 2Mb/s the connection was non useable.

We are falling behind. The only way this is going to get fixed is if Americans start to see that we are sitting at ~13th place in some "contest", and that China, Iran, Africa, Bulgaria, and third world countries we have a general sentiment of dislike for — are winning the "contest".

At that point Americans will care. How dare the Russians beat us into space. How dare the Koreans can build a better Internet than us!

I don't think people will care until those places can do awesome things we can't do. If they can buy a $500 TV that does everything their computers do (stream UHDTV films, games, etc.) then maybe they'll care. But, until then, so what?

And really, even then, so what? People's hearts just don't seem to be in that contest anymore. I think they're more likely to care about beating their friends in fashion than another nation. And if their friends don't have it, then they don't care much either. Hopefully this is here something like Google Fiber makes a difference. But then, without software to make it stand out...

I think it'll take true spectacle to get people really interested. As much as you or I would like this kind of thing, I just don't know what would sell it to the average person without requiring the purchase of additional tech as well.

> With speeds like this (~GB) we may be able to forgo updates altogether. Boot the entire OS from the cloud/remote server.

Speed isn't the biggest issue. Reliability is. Until my broadband is as reliable as my power supply, that's not an option I'd tolerate.

> Perhaps then software will become versionless, and we just run the latest and greatest that has been pushed to the public.

That's a terrifying prospect, given that pretty much every major software upgrade I've experienced have broken one or the other feature I like or need. I'll take my software upgrades when I'm prepared, thank you...

My internet service has been more reliable than my electric power for several years now... the power goes out once a year or two, but I still have internet access on batteries.

But I'm like you and prefer to have control over my own software and data. I might use it for tablets or ereaders though.

Streaming HD quality video, remote access to files, heck even something as simple as photographer's portfolio sites who could start using images that are way bigger, higher quality, etc. which is especially useful with ever increasing screen sizes.

So many applications for this, one can't even begin to name 'm all.

.edit: ooh, remote desktop gaming... sweet!

Check out Mozilla Ignite (https://mozillaignite.org/). We are trying to get people applying for their grants to move to our fiberhood.

I think one of the goals of the project is to seen what develops when bandwidth is increased by 2+ orders of magnitude. The constraints suddenly change and it's hard to predict where it might lead. Think about our connections today and what we wouldn't imagine if our connections were two orders slower.

Anything involving video would be much faster. I work in entertainment and it takes hours to move files around, not to mention transcoding to lower resolutions to allow the files to even fit through the "pipes." Some people are still delivering DVDs by courier around here if you can believe that.

Anyone who works with video (editors, compressionists, whatever) could do their thing remotely in a much more feasible manner. Several dozen gigabytes of video still takes quite a while to move around even on a 100/100 Mbps connection (I have 100/10 Mbps at home myself), and a gigabit connection would really help with that.

4k video. It's here, now. Still camera resolution is also not going to stop expanding. The cure for discontent with digital audio is more bits. Hangouts that approach a sense of telepresence.

There is no shortage of high-value, broad-market cases.

You could have remote recording sessions between musicians within a 100-200 mile radius, with live video, if the packet switching latency is low enough. Within the same city, it could feel like being in the same room.

Tor.

Limiting factor is the slowest node in the circuit. Not your connection to the network.

Yes, so if many more people have 1 Gbps connections then it will be easier to establish circuits where the slowest link is a gig link.

Perhaps more relevantly, the limiting factor is the upload bandwidth in the circuit. Faster consumer speeds would seem to have a very relevant effect there.

Telecommuting high def video. Upstreaming dozens of security cam/robot videos from your house. Caching data. Google can cache much of youtube and web right on your internet router so that you pay the electricity bill instead of them. Telemedicine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com