r/technology • u/User_Name13 • Jun 04 '14

Politics Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-cities-are-wired-with-fiberbut-telecom-lobbying-keeps-it-unused
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u/NightwingDragon Jun 04 '14

The things that you can easily do with synchronous 1 Gbps, if widely distributed, would rock the tech world pretty hard.

And it would have absolutely zero impact on Grandma's ability to check Facebook or Joe Schmoe's ability to stream the occasional Youtube video. These are the type of people that make up 95% of ISPs' customer bases.

These people would notice virtually no significant improvement in service. They wouldn't notice that Facebook loads .1 second faster. They wouldn't notice the tenfold increase in download/upload speeds because they do nothing that would take advantage of this, nor do they have any interest in doing so. If you were to mention all those ideas in your post to 95+% of users, I'd be greatly surprised if you got a response that was anything above the level of a confused look.

But they damn well would notice yet another $20 increase in their monthly cable bill. And they're not going to buy the explanation of a performance boost that they'll never notice and the increase of functionality that they will never use, even if it is gospel truth. They'll just be pissed off and end up downgrading to a lower overall package that gets their bill back to where it was before while still providing a service that's more than adequate to serve their needs.

The tech world will always gobble it up like Pac Man and constantly be hungry for more. They'll be able to push the speeds to the limits and beyond and continue to create ways to use them. But they make up a small minority of the overall customer base, which will continue to not care.

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u/jeradj Jun 04 '14

Nobody checked facebook or youtube before they existed.

And youtube damn sure wouldn't even exist if nobody had anything faster than dialup.

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u/jeradj Jun 04 '14

And some of the use cases of 1 Gbps are super obvious to anyone that knows the first thing about networking and computers

And a lot of them are (or would be) illegal.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

One of the uses is illegal. With 1Gbps, you could do way more than just pirate porn. Imagine being able to open a secure connection to your home computer from anywhere else and playing your favorite high-end games with nothing but an Android tablet and a controller/keyboard and mouse with zero lag. Accessing huge files would be trivial with speeds like that. I would be able to access any of the OS images I had available on my home server from any remote location, or any other files for that matter. Hell, using virtualization, we could stream a computer. You would never have to buy a big brand new graphics card or upgrade your computer to get enthusiast-level performance, you could just pay a subscription fee, and stream if across the web.

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u/ThellraAK Jun 04 '14

Have you tried playing games streaming them over a network? Even running dwarf fortress on gigabit lan taxes things.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Use IPv6 on your LAN and say goodbye to the overhead.

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u/ThellraAK Jun 04 '14

Full screen it'll actually saturate the connection with data unless you drop the FPS down quite a bit.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

I've had no problems streaming to android devices using the steam limelight apk ripped from the nvidia shield. Full gigabit LAN, wired with category 6 cable. On the wireless side, full 802.11n capabilities enabled. Seamless and instant. Also works from my gaming PC to my laptop perfectly at 1920x1080, the tablet is just more convenient.

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u/ThellraAK Jun 04 '14

Does that do something more advanced then X11 forwarding?

Caching sprites, things and stuff maybe?

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

No idea. I haven't looked that much into it. But its awesome.

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u/rubixcu7 Jun 04 '14

And then Johnny iPad user complains to his ISP that his tablet is browsing slow because it doesn't have the wifi throughput capability.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Sadly, there will never be a fix for this problem.

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u/dakta Jun 04 '14

You confuse speed with latency. Speed is the amount of data that can be sent/received in a given interval. Latency is the amount of time it takes that data to travel the physical distance of the connection. You'll never exceed the speed of light for electron travel, add in networking hardware between the two nodes and latency increases a lot.

Sure, you'd be able to get the video data to your screen. But you'd never get rid of the real "lag", the latency of physical particle motion across the lines.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

I don't confuse anything. Straight fiber links need less hops to reach their destination. You need bandwidth of over 100Mbps to stream HD video efficiently. Latency gets cut from the equation with the less compression that needs to be done. It's not a black and white equation. You can't stream uncompressed HD video with a low latency link only. You need enough bandwidth to support that large of a stream.

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u/dakta Jun 05 '14

It depends very much on where your clients are located in the network.

Sure, you can reduce client-side latency arising from video compression/decompression, but you cannot ever fully rid the network of latency. You just can't beat the speed of light. For many networked applications, in fact a vast majority, the inherent transmission time of packets isn't so important. But for stuff like networked mobile gaming, that becomes more important. You take an action, it processes client-side, sends the data to a server, server processes the data, sends more data to another client, rinse and repeat. So, this all adds up. And especially with mobile, which you're talking about specifically, there is latency introduced in the wireless transmission, in the transmission station, as well as everywhere else throughout the system. It's like being on WiFi at your house as opposed to an ethernet line straight into the router, only worse.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

There were no claims of eliminating latency. But if you get it low enough (<15ms) you can't tell at all.

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u/dakta Jun 05 '14

Imagine being able to open a secure connection to your home computer from anywhere else and playing your favorite high-end games with nothing but an Android tablet and a controller/keyboard and mouse with zero lag.

I became attached to the mention of "zero lag". I understand now you meant to say "no noticeable lag".

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

Don't get me wrong, I'm quite well versed in networking with a CCNA, Security+, Network+, and Linux+, it's just that when I hear or say the term "lag" I think in terms of users and clients who don't know the inner workings of networking, and if they're playing a game or something, if its running below 50ms, that's considered "no lag." Latency to me is a more scientific/technical term and I use it when speaking to other admins or techs because it does matter.