Why We Don't Need Gigabit Networks (Yet) 359
AmyVernon writes "Most computers today can't support gigabit connections and current Wi-Fi networks can't offer those speeds either. The first trial of Sonic.Net's gigabit network was a speed test on a generic laptop that showed off 420 Mbps down; the laptop couldn't handle a full gig. Plus, few applications need those speeds. It's hard to justify such a huge investment in a network that will have few subscribers and few applications that need it. Of course, that can change, and then these networks will be vital. This story has a good analysis of where things stand and what has to change."
Could Not Disagree More (Score:5, Insightful)
Gigabit networks are important when working with almost any kind of file copy. I am not sure the last time someone tried to backup even just 100GB of data (Think backups) over a 100 megabit network. Copies like that can take for ever a fully saturate 100 megabit network and slow down traffic for everyone. While copies over gigabit rarely use the entire pipe its good to know that there is still bandwidth left over for other tasks.
Re:Could Not Disagree More (Score:5, Informative)
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This. I take large amounts of disk images, and it's really not worthwhile to do this anywhere but Gigabit, so I don't do it offsite.
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They aren't saying it's not needed for businesses, just most home users. And no need to argue that some home users still need it - those 0.1% might as well be qualified as businesses. Also, the article already mentions that off-site backups would be useful, but any decent backup system is incremental so the major benefit is only a one time thing.
Not that I'm saying I completely agree with the article - you and I may be in those 0.1% :) It is kind of dumb to use a laptop getting 420Mbps sustained as an e
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Wow... this was interesting (Score:4)
This was a total shocker for me though. I'm a huge fan of using wavelength multiplexing within fiber. Especially when the fiber in my house is a single fiber as opposed to pairs which are much harder to make look pretty in a house. However this is one of the funniest things I ever heard of.
It's taken a really long time for the industry to finally come up with a less than insanely shitty method of using coax cabling for digital media access. Oddly enough, the cable companies have more or less completely rebuild their coax backbones to make it happen... what makes it odd is that they wanted to keep the coax to avoid having to lay new cable.. haha wow that worked well.
Now, it appears that Verizon has decided to transmit the entire cable multiplex over a single wavelength, therefore allowing them to a) guarantee their bandwidth usage even if it's insanely high, b) decrease hackability of TV fiber as it is on a not so common wavelength and therefore difficult for consumers/hackers to get receivers for it. c) run less expensive multiplexers they wouldn't require conditional IP multicasting at the switches. d) decrease the cost of maintaining a huge TCP/IP network of devices as it would be possible to remove the IP layer altogether and use a more reliable ATM style layer.
This design so fantastically screws consumers into buying/leasing equipment exclusively from Verizon that it damn near guarantees Verizon a minimum of $30 a month extra per average household just in equipment rentals. And what's best is, they can claim "Sure, we support using third party hardware with our system Mr. FCC, but there's no law that says we have to help anyone make equipment that works with out network is there? But if anyone ever does... sure, we'll support them".
The only true benefit of this design to the consumer is that it would be possible to make a fiber to DVB-C converter that would theoretically make it possible for a TV to receive the signal using the digital coax connection within the TV.
I am SOOOOO glad I don't live in the states anymore... this stuff would infuriate me... it's bad enough I had to make an FPGA for brute forcing DVB-CAS in order to cut my power usage in the house by 100watts (24/7 since the shutting off the set top box from the fiber company requires a 3-5 minute startup time). Now I use an FPGA which consumes 5watts to crack the keys and shared them out with the rest of the house. Saves me a fortune. The FIOS thing would drive me nuts... oh there's the additional bitch about FIOS which is that it's DOG SLOW!!!!
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in any case, it seemed to assume that networks only have one pc attached to each end.
For a home of just 2-3 "computers" (quite normal these days, particularly when you count all mobile devices as "computers"), Gigabit could very easily be maxed out.
Exactly. We often have up to 4 client machines sucking stuff from the internet, and any one of them can saturate the 100Mb downlink on our fiber (just download an ISO from a good mirror). In addition, the web server is always connected, and a couple of smartphones are intermittently connected via WiFi, but they rarely use much downlink capacity.
Interesting question: with a Gb downlink, how long would it take to use up the miserly monthly throughput quotas that ISPs in some countries are imposing? A 1Gb/s
Big surprise: Bad Summary (Score:2)
I think the gist of the article is that we don't need gigabit connections from an isp to the home. While that's debatable, that's not the same as saying that gigbit networks within a home or office are not necessary.
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My internet connection is 300mbps up/down so I definitely need a gigabit local network. A gigabit internet connection would requite 10gig LAN (so I do not saturate it with the internet data), but would be fun to have, I'm sure various torrent trackers would like me even more than now (on the other hand, I would have to replace most of my non-main PCs since they can barely handle 300mbps).
Re:Big surprise: Bad Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
I read the article as a laptop being too slow because of its drive not handling data that quickly.
That neatly bypasses a very real need for high speed low latency remote connections where disk speed is irrelevant -- remote desktops, remote apps and VPN, often in combinations. And in combination with other things that suck bandwidth too.
There's more to bandwidth than file transfers.
Anyone who Says... (Score:2)
...you don't need something is usually looking to take something away or prevent you from acquiring it.
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Exactly. On top of that, there are a large number of perfectly sensible reasons why ISPs should be installing gigabit networks today:
Even if 1Gpbs is not materially more useful today than e.g. 100Mbps, we don't actually have 100Mbps connections. And any 100+ connection is materially more useful today than the existing 10-20Mbps connections. So if you already have to roll a truck to do an upgrade you might as well not half ass it, because you can save money in the long run by making it all that much longer b
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More than that applications scale down to the lowest common connection speed. If that becomes 1Gbps then they could make some seriously amazing apps!
It's all for not though, greedy ISPs and their data caps make speeds irrelevant (as I sit on a 2Mbps connection which can only average 0.063Mbps due to extremely low data caps).
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You are a case in point.
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However, this being computer technology, "shit you don't need" might not actually cost anything, or it may be cheaper for you to just use the better tech.
For instance, with regular ethernet, the standard allows for 10, 100, and 1000 Mbit/sec. However, no one bothers making the 10Mb stuff any more, not only because it's slow, but because it's obsolete: it doesn't save any money to make a 10Mbit ethernet transceiver than a 100Mbit one, as the cost is in the silicon, not the speed. Even if 75% of customers d
HERETICS! (Score:5, Insightful)
How DARE you say we don't need faster networks! This article should be purged from the interwebs and timothy should be strung up by his gonads for even considering posting it!
Re:HERETICS! (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, it smells of "x should be enough for anyone" and does nothing but stifle progress. The thing with a lot of IT stuff is it's a bit chicken and egg, sometimes just because you don't need something now doesn't mean that someone won't come up with a novel use for it.
A few years ago, you could have argued that you don't really need much more than 1Mbit down. In an age of 56k modems, 1meg would have certainly made you king of the castle, as it were, but today 1meg isn't nearly enough for basic internet use.
Furthermore, their example as to why it's not needed - a "generic" laptop couldn't handle it, is rubbish. That's like saying we don't need better fuel sources because our existing power producers can't use it.
Re:HERETICS! (Score:5, Interesting)
The article is poorly written. It mentions "Jasper's ISP," but Jasper is CEO of an ISP. So is this a competitor offering the gigabit for $70/month? If you dig just a bit, you'll find he sells 10 Mb Ethernet connections for $600/month, so perhaps that's the real reason he doesn't think $70/month for gigabit service makes sense.
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There's no way that competitor can offer $70/month and not be oversubscribed. Based on the vast gap between the prices, I doubt that they're selling the same product at all.
That said.. I wouldn't mind being on an oversubscribed gigabit network if I had to be throttled to "only" 10Mb average.... For web browsing, a bunch of brief bursts of however fast you can make it really improves the responsiveness. I would pay a fair price for a product like that, if the average was sufficient for one netflix HD stre
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Such a service works well with economies of scale...
A lot of p2p traffic would occur locally, and never need to touch the internet peering... Similarly mirror sites of common downloads could be stored locally.
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Interesting. That is not available to me, however, as I do not live in Sweden, rural or otherwise. What is the immigration policy like over there?
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And of course there is the argument that even his cheap laptop did use half of it, which is 5 times as much as the next-slowest approach offers.
Re:Follow the money... (Score:5, Informative)
Um, probably not. He's rolling out fiber in my town of 7000. But it's also his business to know whether it's really going to be saturated so they can do the right network on the backend. Sonic.net is a pretty kick-ass ISP. They instituted outbound SMTP blocking. But they noticed I'm running my own SMTP server and sent me an email saying they weren't blocking SMTP to/from me, but I could enable/disable it just by visiting my member account page. Also, they just rolled out free fax numbers (gateway to PDF/email) and outbound faxing for everyone.
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it's also his business to know whether it's really going to be saturated so they can do the right network on the backend.
Naw, that's Jasper's Engineers' business to know. As CEO, it's Jasper's business to swim around in a pile of money like Scrooge McDuck.
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So they couldn't get a single laptop to fully exploit a gigabit connection?
Big deal.
The last ISP commercial I saw showed a house full of devices and some kid trying to upload a school project but unable to because the aggregate network usage of everything in the house was just too much. Clearly someone in the industry realizes that you might have more than one device at home.
Perhaps if networks were better, there would be a stronger motivation to release devices that can hog a gigabit connection all by thei
Fileserver (Score:2)
I am not sure how "one does not need a gbit connection". Even a small file server in 2006 could output more than 70MB/sec (practical test on large files).
Editing. (Score:2)
The problem is that TFA was not correctly edited.
1. She's talking about gig connections from your home to your ISP.
2. She's mixing wired and wireless.
3. She mixes gig and 100Mb/s.
4. $40 for 100Mb / $70 for gig is NOT a lot of money.
5. She's wrong. Computers today CAN handle a gig connection.
6. So what if the cheap router/firewall/whatever you have cannot handle a gig connection (it can probably handle a 100Mb/s connection)? That's the easiest piece for the consumer to replace.
7. The apps that would use it T
The point of downloading faster than real time? (Score:2)
Getting the WHOLE movie or song or whatever 100x faster means fewer delays from the consumer's point of view (perception).
From the consumer's point of view, what's the point of downloading faster than one can listen? I can see only two reasons: 1. to skip around in the file, which could be handled with out-of-order downloading techniques such as HTTP range requests; or 2. when a handheld media playert will soon be moved out of reach of a fixed Internet connection (the download at home and watch in back seat/bus/train/plane scenario).
Buffering. (Score:2)
Most of the systems out there already download faster than you can watch / listen to the content.
But they still have issues where there are delays and the play-back has to pause and "buffer" more content.
Simply put, the longer the download process is (all the way down to receiving the packets a microsecond before playing them) the more likely it is that something will cause packets to be lost or delayed and the sys
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Out-of-order downloading still works best over a fast link, though, because you want those out-of-order frames to come in quickly so you can stick them up right away....
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People I know who do lots of torrent downloading grab pretty much everything they might be interested in someday. They have stacks of hard drives full of movies, and then they don't watch most of it, because you can only watch so many movies. I can see why someone like that would want to have a terrabit fiber to his bedroom. What's less clear is why I would want to pay extra in taxes or connection fees to suppor
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How about I know that I want to download X things, and want to start listening/watching without having to set up the next download?
Then you put X things in your queue and you start watching the first as it downloads.
Also good if the network can have flaky connections
Good point. But in my opinion, you need only about 25% greater than real time to cover up any transient interruption longer than a minute or so. Anything longer is probably the handheld media player use case.
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Yeah, I hear you. I'd love to be able to backup my files to my friend's house. Offsite backup on the cheap? Yes please!
(As for how safe an option his house is, well, I know where he lives.)
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For the software end of this, check out CrashPlan. It saves incremental backups of your system to external hard drives, your friend's computer (also running CrashPlan) and/or the CrashPlan servers. It's great stuff, and works on Win/Mac/Linux. Plus, your backup data is encrypted before it leaves your computer, so you don't have to worry about the security of your friend's computer. (By default, your data can be decrypted on the CrashPlan server in order to support web access to your files. If you don't
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If I had the bandwidth, I'd just use some combination of freebsd, ZFS, rsync, scp, and/or FreeBSD's "gmirror" facility. (zfs send over an ssh tunnel, for instance.)
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Home servers (Score:3)
not everyone keeps/needs a server at home.
The misconception that people would have no use for a home server has led to prevalence of highly asymmetric Internet connections suited more to a spectator culture than to a participatory culture. Have you heard of the FreedomBox [freedomboxfoundation.org]?
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Slashdot I know, but neither of you actually read the fucking article, did you? They're talking about last mile connections, not your home LAN.
Still, I don't know many computers built in the last few years that DON'T have gigE, and even though 802.11N doesn't come anywhere close, it still delivers >100mbit in real world settings... so the idea that most computers can't handle it is inane. Yeah most people can't stream 100MB/s to disk or something, and lower powered gear or cheap chipsets may not be able
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Not everyone is a geek, not everyone keeps/needs a server at home.
a.) You don't have to be "a geek" to setup, use, and 'need' a fileserver. You only need to have a PC (Mac-inclusive).
b.) If you're not backing up your files to somewhere, you will some day lose them. P ( hard drive failure, t -> 5-10 yrs ) = 1
c.) There's Apple's "TimeMachine" boxes, there's HP's at home file servers, and so on and so forth. I'm pretty sure an average user could set up either of those first two options.
e.) You might have heard of "dropbox". 60 minutes a couple nights ago ran a pie
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Why don't they? If people have a use for "the cloud", they have just as much use for their own private server.
In any case, that "small file server" back in 2006 probably ran on a single processor, maybe single core system, using the same hardware you would have seen in desktops at the time. A modern home computer is likely much more powerful, and certainly has access to more memory and IO bandwidth. The problem is the application. I've got a file server in my basement, running off a low end Athlon64 X2
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There are many uses for a home server, even for users who don't think they need one:
1: Seedbox. I'm not meaning movies and copyright violations, but there are always things worth seeding and getting via BitTorrent and not having one's main machines deal with those.
2: Caching. LANs are sometimes orders of magnitudes faster than WANs, so caching just makes sense, especially for often visited websites. This can be DNS caching, Squid caches, or anything along those lines.
3: Security. Having a server filt
Re:Fileserver (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but the argument is "this cheap and shitty laptop could only manage to use half of the gig connection, so therefore no one needs gig speeds for the home".
An argument that is easily destroyed by saying "ok, do you live alone? Do you have more than one person using a computer at the same time?"
It's not just servers. I share a house with 4 other people and we can all watch HD streaming video on the connection we have, just. If the bandwidth goes up a little, or people start using off-site backup more frequently I can see a market for a consumer-level gig connection. I know you can already get them in some other European countries (here in the UK, the best you can get on a consumer budget is 100Mb (soon to be 200Mb) from Virgin cable).
One shitty laptop might choke on a gig connection, but three or four computers will happily share it.
1 GB, it's easy (Score:4)
I have 2 computers, a ps3, and a wii connected to the net. even if I am doing something simple like streaming a movie from one computer to the ps3 to watch on my tv while someone else is playing a game online, downloading something or the other, or just generally using the web to watch anything in HD, I could easily find a use for that bandwidth.
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Utilize gigabit *in* the home, sure. gigabit *to* the home - not as easily. In your example you'd still probably only be using 20-30Mbps over your Internet connection, unless your computer and PS3 are not in the same home :)
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Ok...
1. Netflix 1080p streaming is max about 6Mbps. I can do 3-4 of those at once with my current cable ISP. .isos" - I'm not even sure what that means. I have never seen a
2. VoIP bitrate is so low as to be insignificant (we're talking in Kbps)
3. "Home servers" is not an app. And if you mean serve something *from* your home, that's upstream bandwidth, which is a different issue entirely (these connections are highly asymmetric). Don't expect gigabit upstream for $100/month.
4. "Downloading Linux blu-ray
Infrastructure is long term. (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason this post is stupid is that infrastructure is long term. When you go to the trouble of sending out a crew to dig up and put fiber in the ground your putting in an infrastructure asset that should have a 15-30 year lifespan. The fact that can average machine can't saturate it today means we're being forward thinking.
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bingo! dial-up was "fine," but without future-minded broadband infrastructure (as we know it today), we'd never have had services like netflix, last.fm, pandora, or skype.
if you build a road just for the number of cars that would travel it today, you'll have a road that is too small by the time that it is done.
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The reason this post is stupid is that infrastructure is long term. When you go to the trouble of sending out a crew to dig up and put fiber in the ground your putting in an infrastructure asset that should have a 15-30 year lifespan. The fact that can average machine can't saturate it today means we're being forward thinking.
Also, data center LANs benefit from internal high speeds.
Kilobit networks should be enough for everybody .. (Score:4, Funny)
... and 640K computers.
Build a faster network and someone will invent more devices to connect to the network to shove around data that they don't need.
we can do better than that... (Score:2)
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Really ? Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquote [wikipedia.org]
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And how many electronic computers existed in the world in 1943? 1944? 1945-1953?
Do what? (Score:2)
Plus, few applications need those speeds.
That, I can agree with. How many high def uncompressed live video feeds can a household watch?
For example, ATSC "over the air HDTV" is only 20 megabits/sec, so I could watch 50 HDTV channels simultaneously...
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So basically, you just replaced your Cable Company with an online only service, giving you 50 hi def channels for cheap. That is a GOOD thing, since it takes the LOCAL Monopoly out of TV.
(oh, and how many houses only have 1 computer ?)
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So basically, you just replaced your Cable Company with an online only service, giving you 50 hi def channels for cheap. That is a GOOD thing, since it takes the LOCAL Monopoly out of TV.
(oh, and how many houses only have 1 computer ?)
Our house only has 4 people and 3 TVs, all with mythtv frontends. I could watch live TV on my computer, making 4 streams. It would be very challenging to find 80 megabits of live HDTV to watch simultaneously... Not the "find a signal" but the "worth watching" critera... Assuming its possible, that leaves the other 920 megabits of my "gig" service unused.
I am uninterested in sports, but I once ate lunch at a sports-bar that could probably make use of a large fraction of a gig, if they showed different stre
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Or watch one and record the other 49.
Mind you, once you trim out all the ads, reality TV, "OW, my balls!"-style shows and the self-serving "OMG, this is a show about celebrities!" crap, you really only have a need for 5, maybe 10 kilobits/sec on average.
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Mind you, once you trim out all the ads, reality TV, "OW, my balls!"-style shows and the self-serving "OMG, this is a show about celebrities!" crap, you really only have a need for 5, maybe 10 kilobits/sec on average.
Look, if you want to go with that argument, you could transmit all of 'good' TV with a 300 baud modem.
bizarre article with a bizarre premise (Score:3)
FTA:
"So we’re stuck at a point where a gigabit — or even 100 Mbps – sounds awesome, but it’s not exactly worth the prices most companies want (or need to charge). This is why Google’s and Sonic.Net’s plans to expand moderately priced 100 Mbps and gigabit networks will be so important."
The summary to this article is misleading. It led me to write a mini-rant about the usefulness of gigabit LANs. In fact, the article's talking about gigabit WAN connections at the home. Their denouncement has the tinge of that old Microsoft exec quote about the internet being a fad and no one needing very much ram.
FTA:
“If every consumer has 100 Mbps, we’d have some better applications,” Jasper said. ” At 100 Mbps, high-def video conferencing becomes a reality and you don’t need local storage anymore. You don’t even need local computing.”
You went from talking about gigabit WANs (at the corporate level), to the use of fast ethernet WAN at home. Somehow, there's a use-case at the home that isn't there at the corporation.
And this made /. frontpage, why? Can I get a +5 comment simply by using the words "100 mbps, gigabit, ethernet, 802.11[n-z], important, high-def, local, storage, computing" ?
The idea of faster network... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's like molasses tonight, and the connection is a bit slow too.
Never say never (Score:2)
"640k ought to be enough for anyone." "There is a world-wide market for about fifteen computers."
Time and time again people have been deeply mistaken about anything having to do with the future of computing. The first time I saw a VGA display I was so smitten that I thought "this is the best it can be". Well I was wrong and so were a lot of other people who thought that there would never be a need for something more advanced than what technology has to offer today.
We expand technology by pushing against th
Bad test (Score:2)
So, just because a single "generic laptop" was sold with a crap GigE card then no one should be able to get such a connection?
It looks like a desperate attempt to bullshit their clients into believing that they want what they really want but the ISPs don't want to provide, and instead what they really want is what the ISPs is already providing. It's the "640kb is enough for everyone" shtick, but bullshittier.
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I plugged my DSL cable into my laptop's modem, and when I dialed up to Earthlink I only got 48.2Kbps. So my laptop can't even use my whole 7Mbps DSL connection, and therefore no one needs that crap.
Stupid article (Score:5, Interesting)
When you wake up to the obvious facts of 1999, let me know, and I'll give you an invite to the 21st century. Cuz I'm k3vvL and rollz like dat.
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And all that would be at most 3x54Mbit = 162 Mbit if you're streaming three BluRays. Currently I'm on a 60/60 Mbit/s connection (as in real, I've had 6+ MB/s actual transfer speeds) and honestly it's just ridiculously fast. I'd certainly take higher if they were reasonably priced for bragging rights (they offer up to 800 Mbit/s now, but for absurd prices) but it's not really many places I'd need it. Sure, that 20GB download from steam could be a little faster but really... it's fast. By the time I've watche
how meny people / homes only have 1 system? (Score:2)
So useing 1 system and a laptop for that is a poor test.
Why not test a desktop system? A system with a SDD?
Test with 2 systems on the same link at the same time?
Indeed (Score:2)
There's no point in having network cards handle that much data, networks don't have that kind of capacity.
Netware ! (Score:2)
Time to recycle those old Novell Netware licenses !
Useful and not more expensive (Score:2)
100 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps costs the same. Both require FTTH and the expensive part is the fiber. The equipment to run gigabit on that fiber is almost the same cost as 100 Mbps equipment.
Gigabit internet is also not expensive. It turns out that most people do not use huge amounts of bandwidth just because it is possible. They will take advantage of faster download and upload speeds. They will do offsite backups. But since that backup now is 10 times faster it takes 10 times shorter. When you are done, someone
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A 100Mbps connection requires one 10GbE aggregation router for every 1,000 users, a 1Gig connection requires on for every hundred.
This is not so. As I wrote we have 1000 users on a gigabit with only a peak of 300 Mbps used. This is fact, that is the way our network operates. Everyone here has gigabit in their home.
So yes I have little hands on experience with the "industry" but I DO have hands on experience with a network with 4000 people and 1000 subscribers. Do you?
And yes the routers are expensive, but not THAT expensive. A router capable of routing 10 Gbit/s is NOT hundreds of thousands of dollars. We have a HP 5412 switch for our
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At the moment, when I watch youtube videos, I either watch them in 480p or 720p (if I really care and want some nice viewing). If I had the capacity to do so with no stuttering or loading, would I have watched all at 1080p? You bet.
Of course. But not as much as you think. The network I base this on is already gigabit, everyone are already watching 1080p, e.t.c.
When you hit 100 Mbps you have probably already the hit the maximum network usage for any normal user. At 100 Mbps you can watch that YouTube video at 1080p and everything else you want. Going further up will only mean even faster downloads. But you will not generally be downloading more at gigabit than at 100 Mbps.
Shared networks (Score:3)
Get rid of flash (Score:2)
And other bloated tech.. and we will never need it.
Overlooked: the LAN and the very near future. (Score:2)
Summary (Score:2)
Me! I need it! (Score:2)
As a Virgin Media customer, I need gigabit internets as the upstream will be ( if the ratio is similar to my current service ) 60Mbit.
More speed always wins (Score:2)
(paraphrasing) "No one needs that kind of speed at home. This is strictly for business servers."
Speed it up, and they will come.
What a load of manure (Score:2)
This is like saying back in the dialup days "who needs speeds faster than a T1? It's not like the text is going to get read any faster"
Going to faster throughput makes other things possible that previously weren't.
I don't see the Koreans or the Swedes giving up their fast-as-shit-through-a-goose internet connections because "they don't need it."
--
BMO
Wah! My craptop couldn't saturate the network (Score:2)
This is the most pathetic excuse for an article ever posted by Slashdot. It's complete bunk.
Gigabit NICs are standard equipment. Just because a single machine can't saturate the link due to other IO bottlenecks doesn't make the technology premature or useless. It just means you've got a really, really crappy laptop.
20 years ago, 14.4kpbs was 'just fine'. (Score:2)
'when for today’s applications, a cable modem offering 12-14 Mbps down will do just fine?'
So we can get better applications. So Netflix can stream without butchering the content like it currently does. Because you really have to worry about multiple users and aggregation. You can really see this with GoToMeeting and WebEx: I don't care what their service claims are, every time we have more than a couple people on a meeting the voice and video are crap.
How about the up being much more constrained than
Forecasting the past (Score:2)
"It's very interesting, but I cannot foresee any practical application"
etc etc blah blah blah.
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Bill Gates, 1999: "I don't understand why Jobs is back at Apple. He must know he can't win."
Just like 56k modems were enough... then... (Score:2)
... broadband and on and on.
What the hell are they talking about? (Score:5, Interesting)
My organization is on the verge of needing to move our equipment to 10gig soon, because the 1gig network is starting to become a serious bottleneck...
Most systems cannot support GigE??? (Score:2)
Gee... what third world country or year is the OP posting from??? My workstation, built in 2007, supports GigE and is capable of speeds nearing the theoretical limit, just as it can on a 100Mbps link. I also have several of my servers connected on the same GigE VLAN. As for 10Gig... my old employer had racks and racks of servers which we tested and found to be able to use a significant portion of a 10Gig link. Of course, these systems were using NICs which were at the time (about 2 years ago) running ab
1 Gbit better than 100Mbit... (Score:3)
I have heard this argument so many times before, but it is just stupid to say: You can only use 400MBit, so better keep your 100MBit instead of getting that full GBit, as you would not be able to use it fully. It might not be 10 times faster, but it still is 4 times faster, which might well be worth the price to some.
Fix Bufferbloat first ! (Score:2)
Speed is not important, latency is. And even more so are the current problems with buffers.
Here is a presentation on the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbIozKVz73g [youtube.com]
Here is the website which deals with the problem and is trying to fix any problems in Linux (drivers and TCP/IP stack):
http://www.bufferbloat.net/ [bufferbloat.net]
Why would you plug a wire into a notebook? (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously, you plug the Gigabit Ethernet into a router and serve multiple computers with Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Then you can run Netflix all day in the living room and still have fast access from other systems.
And all Macs have had Gigabit Ethernet since the turn of the century, with the exception of older MacBook Air models that don't have Thunderbolt. That is a lot of data heavy users, video people and so on.
And any machine with Thunderbolt or PCI-Express has a faster connection than Gigabit, so the idea tha
I disagree (Score:2)
Analysis fail (Score:3)
Of course the summary leaves out the part of the conversation where bandwidth is also a measure of well, bandwidth. Just because one single individual device can only get ~500MB does not mean that GbE is worthless. What if there are two laptops sharing that connection? It will be tapped out. Put another one on there and all of a sudden a one gig pipe is not big enough.
How stupid are people, really?
Re: (Score:3)
Live streaming (Score:5, Insightful)
The streaming model can die the death it deserves at that point.
Streaming is still the only model I can see for live events such as news talk shows, sports, scripted sports (e.g. WWE PPV), concerts, and the like where viewing begins before the whole video has even been recorded.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Time to build (Score:4, Informative)
Eh.. nothing wrong with the streaming model, as far as network bandwidth goes, and there are advantages for things that lots of people are trying to get: under the streaming model, you can use multicast a little better. For instance, if something just needs to be downloaded, you can multicast it in a continuous loop and clients can assemble the pieces in the right order at their end, waiting until they have enough to finish.
Or you can have multiple streams staggered (for say, video), so that people can join in at almost any time and get on a stream.
The other advantage of streaming is that if, say, a client is downloading video and the user decides halfway through to stop watching, you don't have to send any more bits.
Re: (Score:2)
Living sustainably on a healthy planet?