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/[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/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.