How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds?

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/feamster/how-will-consumers-use-faster-internet-speeds/

by simoncion • 11 years ago

43 68 11 years ago

I live in Kansas City and have enjoyed Google Fiber for the last three years. (First the free 5Mbps, then the $70/month Gigabit)

The answer to this question, for me, is "Doin' the same shit. Slightly faster."

The speed test results are always fantastic, but real internet usage isn't quite as utopian as the hype makes it out to be. In some cases, I suspect there are bottlenecks between my house and whatever server I'm connecting to. In other cases, it almost feels like intentional throttling.

Netflix and Hulu performance is outstanding, but Amazon Prime videos occasionally drop into that super-blocky low bandwidth mode for seemingly no reason.

Most websites work great, but I've had super weird experiences with sites and servers that use IPV6 when I'm on my MacBook.

It's these weird quirks that probably keep me from noticeably changing my internet habits. But, as usual, YMMV.

jonny_eh• 11 years ago

Not to mention that most devices these days connect over wifi, which almost always offers less than 1Gbps speed.

noondip3• 11 years ago

Even using Ethernet and open source firmware on consumer routers (e.g., TomatoUSB on Broadcom-based ASUS), I wasn't able to get >100 Mbps. I guess many developers' own Internet connections don't have such bandwidth, so they're not incentivized to make improvements.

xirdstl• 11 years ago

I have that same experience with Amazon Prime videos. I instinctively want to blame Amazon, but who knows?

jlgaddis• 11 years ago

"Me three" re: Amazon Prime videos. Netflix and Hulu work wonderfully. We only occasionally watch something on Amazon Prime and I don't think there's been one time that we didn't have an issue with it (and I have fiber at home, 50x25 Mbps, and my ISP is well-connected network-wise).

cm21872• 11 years ago

To me the main difference is upload speed. Suddenly you can start using the internet as a LAN, and then only it starts to make sense to work in the cloud, save all your files there, not worry about the house burning down or being burglarised. Probably even more useful for smaller businesses.

riebschlager4• 11 years ago

I totally agree with that. I can throw a 100MB ZIP into my Dropbox folder without a second thought. Box and Google Drive are equally snappy.

With Google Fiber "Free" and Time Warner before it, I was capped at 1 Mbps upstream and cloud services were much more or a chore.

auganov• 11 years ago

1gbit/s is just under 120MB/s - the average read/write speed of an HDD. So yea, maybe you can backup your personal PC or two, but you still won't be using it for frequent reads/writes (latency issues aside). I have 1GbE LAN cabling at home and I'd really want 10GbE. Also to put things in perspective - HDMI 2.0 does 18gbit/s. PCIE v 4.0 x 16 rounds down to 260 gbit/s of bandwidth. Now please forgive me for being ridiculous and quoting these figures. :) But I don't think you need to be that crazy to imagine a few cool use cases for such bandwidths. Or the kind of resource wastefulness (in a positive sense) it would allow :-D

My point is - 1gbit/s - not as utopian as it first sounds.

infogulch• 11 years ago

So a 1gbit/s connection like google fiber provides is around the same bandwidth as a typical hdd. A typical hdd has around 13ms of latency, which is also easily in the realm of latency to a regional datacenter.

So any technical barriers to making all hdds obsolete are evaporating. I guess with the rise of ssds the only draw of hdds is now price, and I suppose that feature won't be supplanted by some service provider any time soon.

goda90• 11 years ago

I had Google fiber in an apartment with roommates in Provo Utah. In the same way, individual tasks didn't seem like they were amazingly faster(bottlenecks and device speed could have often been the culprit for sure) but the parallelism was great. Netflix, Clash of Clans and Battlefield 4 all running through the same pipe without a hitch. We never felt like we were stepping on each other's toes bandwidth wise. And I rarely felt the need to turn off my backup utility or stop large Steam downloads.

Fun story though, it was fast enough that I got kicked for an hour from my school's network because I was downloading way too much output data, way too quickly over SCP from the school supercomputer.

Cyberdog2• 11 years ago

Given that so many folks nowadays just pipe their cable or DSL modems straight into an 802.11g or n wi-fi router and then use that to connect most, if not all, of their devices, I think many customers who pay for these gigabit connections might end up disappointed.

cm21872• 11 years ago

The limiting factor will become the local wifi network. I still find that real wifi speeds are a fraction of what is advertised and I know very few people who connect their devices with ethernet.

stephen_g• 11 years ago

Yeah, wireless standards tend to be advertised as the maximum speed you can get with perfect conditions, but WiFi drops the complexity of the modulation the further you get away from the router and/or the more inteferance you have around.

802.11ac can drop all the way back to 6Mbps under really bad conditions!

rayiner• 11 years ago

I wonder if there is a sampling bias given that they selected users who were already paying for 100 mbps, which is a pricier premium tier.

simoncion4• 11 years ago

You could always ask. :)

The fellow who wrote the article is one of the folks who performed the study.

robinhoodexe• 11 years ago

When 4K (2160p) video will become mainstream we're gonna need more bandwidth to stream it (Netflix for example). Even with h.265 or V8 it's atleast double the bitrate compared to 1080p.

ollifi• 11 years ago

Or we could stream 2K with less compression. They show 2K in most cinemas and it looks pretty decent with low compression.

mattbroekhuis• 11 years ago

I had 100 Mbps. it was 50/month. They sent out a promo for 1000 Mbps for 65/month. I got it, wired ethernet, can actually get around 950 Mbps on the test sites.

Saw basically no difference in day to day usage. Even saw 0 difference in download speeds off of VPS servers etc.

Was hoping my employer's VPN would be like I'm on site (or as close as one could get). Bottle neck there as well.

imaginenore2• 11 years ago

As internet speed increases, we will see computers turning into thin clients. Why pay for a ridiculously powerful desktop that's idle 98% of the time?

Once you reach gigabit speeds, you can do all kinds of crazy cool things, like editing 4K videos remotely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxHOzG-1KvM

astrodust• 11 years ago

This always seems to be one of those things on the verge of happening, but every effort to promote it has failed.

Even 10ms of latency can be a serious drag on your user interface. Thin clients kind of suck for this reason.

userbinator2• 11 years ago

Why pay for a ridiculously powerful desktop that's idle 98% of the time?

Because you actually own the physical machine; some may disagree, especially the DRM crowd, but there's a big difference between having hardware that is and on your property and just having volatile control over a machine in some unknown location.

DanBC• 11 years ago

People used to buy DVD machines and DVDs, now they have Netflix and set top boxes.

xorcist2• 11 years ago

Not really. So far the use cases have become wider rather than simpler, and we've simply found use for that extra power. You need a pretty powerful machine just to watch 4K video, and to fill up that gigabit pipe. And if you want to play modern games you need to get a very powerful one.

xiaoma2• 11 years ago

Until the speed of light starts increasing, latency will always be an issue for thin clients.

Fun experiment: Try ssh-ing into a web host or a school account. Peruse a few directories and open a few files in VI. Type in a paragraph of text. Now try the same on your local machine's terminal and compare the responsiveness!

imaginenore2• 11 years ago

I'm a developer, I SSH into remote machines and type code all the time. As long as you're 10-15ms away, it's not an issue.

AndyMcConachie• 11 years ago

It's strange to me that these researchers don't look at countries that have had 1Gb/s residential Internet connectivity for years. Why not investigate how Internet usage changed in Slovenia, or S Korea, or some other more bandwidth advanced country than the USA?

bjt• 11 years ago

A before/after in a whole country is not as clean an experiment as the randomized trial done in this study. With the whole country, there could be a whole bunch of other variables changing in the before and after time frames. (Like maybe some new service comes online that results in people using a lot more bandwidth.) The design of this study allows the researcher to hold those things constant.

mgbmtl• 11 years ago

While I understand that gigabit Internet needs to be useful to the average consumer in order to be sustainable economically, having more bandwidth (and IPv6) at home allowed me to do things I would have never thought of doing before. As someone in business where every penny counts, it makes a difference.

When your average consumer is stuck on low speeds, imagine what the consequences are on those who rely on this for their work (not to mention for those who tinker and innovate in their "garage").

Where I live in Canada, even for your average business, it's either a barely sufficient DSL/cable line at 70-100$/month, or fiber which usually starts at 500$/month. It's ridiculously expensive to get good bandwidth. Sometimes it's easier to stick point to point antennas on the roof and connect directly to a datacenter.

Faster speeds: they will find a use for it, and everyone wins.

noonespecial• 11 years ago

Its not about what they'll do in a "what we always did just more/faster" kind of way. Its about the new, unimagined things that will take off once everyone is linked well at 1gbps.

When we went from modems to "broadband" (>1mbps or so) it grabbed the good-ole-boy music industry by the throat and shook them so hard they've still got PTSD. >10 and the movie/tv industry had their reckoning. Consumers won huge both times. Can't wait to see whats next.

petra3• 11 years ago

But we had music piracy before 1mbps , only limited. And we had video torrents at before 10mbps(and at low quality), so those use cases we're clear, and we could have guesses that maybe legal versions of those activities will also appear.

But currently the limits are more tied to physiological limits - the highest bandwidth channel for a human is the eyes and we know their limits (somewhere between 1080p to 4K depending on various things), and we've almost covered that.

The only open question is VR streaming, but i wonder whether this work considering the extreme low latency required ?

sgt101• 11 years ago

But currently the limits are more tied to physiological limits - the highest bandwidth channel for a human is the eyes and we know their limits (somewhere between 1080p to 4K depending on various things), and we've almost covered that.

This goes counter to my experience and thinking. I am sure that this is true on a phone form factor but 8k TV is definitely better than 4k on a 60"+ screen (I've never seen them side by side on a smaller device and I am unsure how big the demo set up was).

Current 4k has limited colour capability, ramping up the stage to richer pallets will increase the bandwidth demand, as will high frame rates and the increase in resolution to 8k.

VR streaming is interesting but I guess that filming it will be a big challenge !

cbd1984• 11 years ago

But we had music piracy before 1mbps , only limited.

Quality has a quality all its own. Music piracy in the era of Old Napster (before they went legitimate) was terrible. Horrible mislabeled MP3s at a bitrate best described as "wax cylinder quality" with no album artwork or other extras buying a CD would provide. Plus, of course, you were stuck behind dial-up, and even poor-quality MP3s go at about a megabyte of data per minute of music, so you were looking at substantial download times over unreliable connections for anything approaching a full album.

It was wonderful only in that it worked at all, and that it had music record stores wouldn't touch, at least not if you were out in the boonies. It was one of the few pre-YouTube channels for obscure and out-of-print music. However, that didn't make it convenient in any absolute sense, and it was usually only high-quality compared to not having the music at all.

These days, with most torrent software, you can download a whole discography, in high-quality FLAC with full album images and so on, well-organized and correctly labeled, simply by copying-and-pasting a magnet link. Multiple megabyte downloads go by in seconds. The difference in the experiences is night and day.

The music industry got angry at Old Napster. They're being crushed by Bittorrent.

lifeformed• 11 years ago

All sorts of new media experiences open up with more bandwidth. At the beginning it was just HTML. Then everyone was able to get streaming music and streaming video! Youtube was huge leap in people's internet experience was like. Then now with higher upload speeds, we're getting broadcasting services like Twitch. What's next? Maybe streaming game services can finally take hold. Or maybe just completely decentralized computing for all tasks.

Animats• 11 years ago

It shouldn't take that much bandwidth to do things. I suspect that what's really happening is that increasing the end bandwidth reduces the packet loss rate in the cable system's routers. Someone needs to test this with something that plays streaming video while noting packet loss rates.

Semiapies• 11 years ago

To load web pages with a gig of tracking Javascript on them.

Cyberdog2• 11 years ago

Ha ha ha… sigh. It's funny, yet also sad, because it's true. As someone who's been building web sites since the late '90s, page weights seem to have grown even more radically than the proportionate growth in the typical home connection speed. Connections get faster, but page loads get slower.

Don't forget the CSS "frameworks," gratuitous fonts, and gigantic auto-playing background videos, too.

B-Con• 11 years ago

Seems to me that it's more about what opportunities will arise to take advantage of higher speeds. Most services aim at the typical consumer, general public, so until the general public has high speed access on average there will be few "reimagine how you do X" type services that leverage it.

client4• 11 years ago

I co-run an ISP in Montana that started out wireless (40/10) and now does FTTH (100/100 Mbps to 1/1Gbps). We don't see much difference between our wireless and fiber customers in terms of consumption at the moment. I am interested to see what happens when streaming VR becomes prevalent. Our biggest streams are Netflix 4K streams; biggest downloads are steam/console game downloads (~25Gbps).

It is fun to watch new customers bandwidth consumption. It maxes out for a few days to a week...and then then drops. As far as we can tell people back everything up, update everything, torrent everything .... and then run out of things to download / upload.

rabboRubble2• 11 years ago

I won't be using faster internet speeds. At least I won't until I'm assured data caps are a thing of the past.

I "self-throttle" data speeds by opting for for the lowest tolerable internet service to keep me under my cap.

F@#$ing Comcast.

Frqy3• 11 years ago

Data caps are likely to become more prevalent with faster end user access pipes.

ISPs have been (similar to yourself) using the limited access speeds to self-throttle the data usage of customers to limit their aggregated backhaul costs.

rabboRubble2• 11 years ago

If data caps are to be more prevalent, I'd like to see ISPs regulated as a utility. If I use more power, or make more phone calls I'm happy to pay more for that use because the connection fees are equal between high and low demand consumers.

If I pay higher monthly connection costs for high speed access (the monthly service charge) and pay to actually use the service at the intended speed (additional fees generated by a data cap), I am being double billed for service.

Data caps in conjunction with a higher costs for high speed access are a predatory business model.

jegoodwin3• 11 years ago

Obligatory educational link on bufferbloat

http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Introduction

'One of the most insidious things about bufferbloat is that it easily masquerades as something else: underprovisioning of the network. But buying fatter pipes doesn't fix the bufferbloat cascades, and buying larger buffers actually makes them worse!'

xorcist2• 11 years ago

In northern Europe gigabit to the home isn't uncommon. As long as you start to wire up new developments with off the shelf ethernet equipment, the rest pretty much follows. I'd wager ethernet is probably less expensive than cable TV-cable, and ethernet carries everything.

The big difference with faster speeds is that you don't have to muck about with QoS. Just throw bandwidth at the problem. This means you can actually sell a product that would depend on it, since support becomes manageable.

1 Mbps is adequate for VoIP. But at 10 Mbps I can use it without thinking. I can get an account with any provider, start simultaneous calls, and there are no dropouts even when torrenting.

100 Mbps is adequate for IPTV, in broadcast HD quality, when the streams are over a controlled network. But with 1Gbps it becomes just another service, even if my kids stream too.

The big difference, as someone else pointed out here, is when upload speeds catch up. Assymetric broadband is quickly ACK limited, which disturbs real time streaming in the other direction. Latency is key here, and just getting rid of that cable modem and hit the wire directly really helps.

Regarding piracy, I think it is obvious that it goes down when real time streaming gets practical. It's more convenient, really. So more broadband really does transform markets. The problem for the past ten years has been that it's not really deployed globally, and many of the rich western countries are stuck with cable modems because of lock in effects. This should be an obvious opportunity for an entrepreneurial spirit, just wire up a suitable area and you can be first to sell IP services to them. Cable TV and phone service are moving to IP, it's just a matter of time.

jokoon• 11 years ago

Low latency gaming, I hope.

That could even open the door to P2P multiplayer paradigms, which might make MMOs support more player in a same world.

Havoc• 11 years ago

They won't use it - not soon anyway. There just isn't much of a usage case for gigabit in the home context even if you're a family that needs multiple 4K streams for some bizarre reason

singularity2001• 11 years ago

4K virtual reality web in 3D. Next attempt at vrml / second life might be it

ginko• 11 years ago

Well I'd hope that many of the 'consumers' will become 'producers'. Although I'm not too optimistic, considering Internet companies have done their best effort to turn the fundamentally decentralized architecture of the Internet into an centralized one over the past decade or so.

dawnbreez• 11 years ago

The real impact of Google Fiber--assuming it doesn't get sued to oblivion by one of the other ISPs--is that it sets a new standard. Because Google is now providing better service than, say, AT&T, AT&T must now up their game to keep customers.

Thus, as Fiber rolls out to new areas, expect the pre-existing players to either improve their own services (to everyone's benefit) or try to undercut Google (to their own detriment).

nitwit005• 11 years ago

A good portion of the bandwidth that has been added so far has simply been consumed by more bandwidth intensive versions of existing products. The user behavior hasn't necessarily changed.

See Facebook's auto-playing videos as an example.

How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds?

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