Internet - How much faster?

[Crewman47]

Sorry if this is old news for some but I've recently just saw both on the TV and the Internet that Broadband is now being offered up to 20MB by a few of the major companies. Now at the moment I'm on 7.6MB broadband and can only imagine what 20MB would be like and how much faster it'd be but I was wondering, how much faster can we get till the internet becomes too fast, like having files and web pages donloaded in mere seconds rather than minutes. Instead of 20MB could we eventually see 50MB or eventually 100MB broadband sometime in the near future?

Any thoughts?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

I imagine a time when as soon as you click a link the page is shown instantly, I see when loading bars at the bottom of your screens are obsolete, a time when music and video can be downloaded within 1 split second.

Ah yes, the dream is near.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I think the Japanese already have 100MB and more to their homes. Of course, Japan is small and densely populated, so that's not very hard.

In the US, there's that whole "last mile" problem. I think we're looking at a future Internet that has several tiers of infrastructure and service quality. In metro areas and universities, we'll probably end up with enormous terabit-level infrastructure. In rural areas, I suspect they'll be stuck with satellite and cell access, both of which still have a long way to go in terms of speed and affordability.

100MB to the home is not unheard of, though. It just doesn't happen in the US.

 

[USS KG5]

I would have thought affordable fibre access will be provided in new build homes and for a fair price in current ones offering 1 Gbps and more fairly soon.

There is an upper limit on speed which is the resistance of materials in the cables physically carrying the signal, the overheads of servers relaying the signal, and so on - but the Internet going to the average home at the minute is decidedly "old tech" and has massive room for improvement.

 

[FordSVT]

Much of North America's internet is build on a phone system built 20-40 years ago. Upgraded and improved with all kinds of new tech, of course, but Japan it ain't. There are simply bottle necks all over the place and very large distances to cover that places with more modern communication systems spread out over smaller areas don't have to face to the same degree.

And speaking on a world wide basis, people sometimes forget that there are places that don't even have PHONES, let alone internet access. These places, especially in Africa and South America, are relying increasingly on wireless technology for their communications because it's so much cheaper and easier than trying to construct hard lines. I expect the internet to follow suit. So 25 years from now, if you're in a major city anywheres on the planet, you'll probably have access to near-instantaneous internet access with multi-GB or TB per second bandwidths. Out in the country, it will be a lot slower (but relatively fast compared to anything we have today). People who live in poor countries or in very remote areas will be stuck with the limitations of satellite and radio technology, which nevertheless should improve dramatically in the coming years. In short, you'll be able to get extremely large amounts of bandwidth access anywhere on earth that can receive a radio signal or connect to a land line.

Then again, applications for such a large amount of data are bound to become enormous themselves, especially given the massive increase in computing power that will occur in the same time. All kinds of room for HDTV, but less room if you're talking about "holo-TV" or "direct to the brain interactivity" or AI programs.

 

[Meredith]

When we get to the point where we can backup out conciousness in only a split second I think that should be fast enough, iof course if ultra high definition Holo TV takes more bandwidth than that, we will get it.


Maybe at about 1,0000 TB/s

 

[USS KG5]

FordSVT said:
And speaking on a world wide basis, people sometimes forget that there are places that don't even have PHONES, let alone internet access. These places, especially in Africa and South America, are relying increasingly on wireless technology for their communications because it's so much cheaper and easier than trying to construct hard lines.

Well also people in those countries do not have very much money so are not a huge concern for bandwidth. It is not likely in countries where the average wage is $1.50 a day that they will be downloading hi-def movies at $10 a go, which is REALLY what any push for higher bandwidth will be about, getting your hard earned out of your pocket.

 

[Paxil]

Just because your connection is capable of 20MbS doesn't mean most of the stuff you will download will come in at that speed. Its limited by the outgoing capacity of the server you are downloading from, which is usually much less than that.

 

[Saturn0660]

Crewman47 said:
Sorry if this is old news for some but I've recently just saw both on the TV and the Internet that Broadband is now being offered up to 20MB by a few of the major companies. Now at the moment I'm on 7.6MB broadband and can only imagine what 20MB would be like and how much faster it'd be but I was wondering, how much faster can we get till the internet becomes too fast, like having files and web pages donloaded in mere seconds rather than minutes. Instead of 20MB could we eventually see 50MB or eventually 100MB broadband sometime in the near future?

Any thoughts?

Damn my shit sucks... I only have 512 down and 128 up.. Or i could "upgrade" to 1024 down and 256 up...

 

[Amaris]

Paxil said:
Just because your connection is capable of 20MbS doesn't mean most of the stuff you will download will come in at that speed. Its limited by the outgoing capacity of the server you are downloading from, which is usually much less than that.

Yep.

I have a 10Mbps connection. I love it, except the only servers I get full, open bandwidth on are Microsoft's update servers, and C|Net, on a good day. I usually average around 2Mbps to 5Mbps on most servers.


J.

 

[USS KG5]

Paxil said:
Just because your connection is capable of 20MbS doesn't mean most of the stuff you will download will come in at that speed. Its limited by the outgoing capacity of the server you are downloading from, which is usually much less than that.

The most serious limit on capacity is bandwidth - server hardware performance will continue to grow at a huge rate over the next decade so at both ends the limit is bandwidth.

Your average server does not have a lot of bandwidth because it tends to be extremely pricey, and certainly your average one to one connection speed on P2P or BitTorrent is hardly a good measure - you are using a portion of someone elses home Internet connection!

Huge multinational media companies serving Hi-Def movies on demand would need truly massive amounts of bandwidth - so the whole infrastructure needs dragging forwards, but given the financial benefits it WILL happen. The technology exists the only problem is the cost of deployment.

 

[The Doctor]

All of this is well and good, but one of the major drivers in the tiered internet debate is the stark reality that there simply isn't the infrastructure to support the growth in streaming video and audio on the internet that we're experiencing. There is a very real possibility that the internet will be slower than it is now in the medium term, until the very costly upgrades that are needed become economically viable.

 

[USS KG5]

The Stig said:
All of this is well and good, but one of the major drivers in the tiered internet debate is the stark reality that there simply isn't the infrastructure to support the growth in streaming video and audio on the internet that we're experiencing. There is a very real possibility that the internet will be slower than it is now in the medium term, until the very costly upgrades that are needed become economically viable.

The problem is not as much viability as woh is going to pony up the money - there needs to be a bit of an industry consensus on it.

Fortunately the main activity on the web remains web browsing - whic uses sod all bandwidth, and compression technology is advancing in leaps and bounds.

Governments will take care of the big infrastructure investments, the smaller will be taken care of by enterprise, and the telecoms companies will eventually take care of our home connections.

It will all come together.

 

[Deleted 2]

USS KG5 said:
Fortunately the main activity on the web remains web browsing - whic uses sod all bandwidth, and compression technology is advancing in leaps and bounds.

It is?

 

[USS KG5]

Zero Hour said:

USS KG5 said:
Fortunately the main activity on the web remains web browsing - whic uses sod all bandwidth, and compression technology is advancing in leaps and bounds.

It is?

Well, to clarify, Im not sure which bits you are "it is"-ing!

Most web use by the average individual is currently very light, it includes mostly web browing, a little email , and even with the massive increase in the size of the average web page the bandwidth use of general browsing is pretty small - not least because you download a page, read it, download again - and therefore dont use much as an average.

In terms of bandwidth used on the Internet obviously the average downloader uses far far more, not least when using torrents or peer to peer where numerous server are involved co-ordinated hundreds of connections using bandwidth at a constant high rate.

So its a situation where hopefully the Internet will catch up before more than the early-adopters are chewing up bandwidth with huge hi-def movie downloads.

Hopefully...

As for compression technology the algortihms seem to keep getting better and better but if you are pointing out that user demand for quality will out-reach the growth of compression technology, I cant argue it might well be right.

 

[Deleted 2]

USS KG5 said:
As for compression technology the algortihms seem to keep getting better and better but if you are pointing out that user demand for quality will out-reach the growth of compression technology, I cant argue it might well be right.

Actually, I was wondering if the traditional compression techniques used in web browsing were getting better and better--I'm only aware of a few marginal improvements. But you seem to be talking about video compression, which I can't really dispute. I have a film encoded in h.264 that is just amazing to watch. I keep looking in vain for mpeg artifacts in the picture