At work, we signed up with MonkeyBrains for microwave internet service. We ordered the 50+50 mbit plan. It's actually speed testing about 350+350.
And at home, a guy from Comcast (our local cable TV pirates) knocked on the door and proposed to upgrade us for free, faster internet and more cable TV (including HBO) for about half our current price. They swapped out the modem today and the internet here is now running about
450+50 mbits. AT&T and Sonic keep leaving flyers on the doorknob offering us a gigabit.
Sounds like mad competition to give away bandwidth. The backbone fiber links must be moving astronomical amounts of data. Each county around here might need a petabit per second.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
On a sunny day (Wed, 17 Jul 2019 22:44:42 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
Yes, I got a similar flyer here last week, 'Connect to our optical cable, we are now near you... subscribe...' Threw it away, do not need that much bandwidth, and I am on 4G wireless now, so stuff works everywhere in the country. Even youtube works great... I will buy a Huawei 5G stick when 5G works here.
What do people do that takes so much bandwidth? Upgrade MS windows???
A few people will be constantly downloading video - which they probably never have time to watch. Others will send a few emails and do a bit of browsing using hardly any capacity. In an office with a few tens of people the internet usage tends to be quite peaky with a peak-to-mean ratio of around 10 to 1 during working hours for the offices that I look after. For a service provider this means that if they only provide enough backhaul for 10% of the capacity that they sell, hardly anyone will notice the difference.
Some however don't make even that much provision and they are the ones that suffer congestion at peak times.
I keep getting offers of gigabit ethernet from my cable provider. I am currently getting about 47 megabit downloads. I can't imagine what I would need anything faster than that for. If I had a large family and every individual was streaming a different program I might be able to use most of it, but there really aren't that many people that could use it all.
You mean "very few" which is the proportion that actually download video rather than watch it streaming, meaning in real time.
These days, even emails have embedded videos.
Isn't that rather a "duh!"... Even the phone company can only connect a small fraction of the number of possible calls which works statistically 99.999% of the time.
Yeah, well otherwise we would be paying more for the service. You get what you pay for... if you are lucky.
--
Rick C.
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Most people won't actually use that bandwidth. Web browsing needs short bursts. Even movies don't need 500 mbits. So averaged rates across multiple households will be much lower. But the backbone rates must still be amazing.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
Yes, so the providers compete to offer higher speed local connections which cost them very little, knowing that they will not need to spend much extra on the backhaul links because most customers will not use more data.
Going from, say, 30 mb to several hundred makes a nice difference when browsing. It's shocking to me that I can fill a screen with stuff from France in about a second.
I load a lot of pdf's too, and they are dramatically faster now.
I wish I knew how the Internet actually works. Apparently not many people really do.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
End of last year a guy from Comcast rang the door bell. He said we can now have 1Gbit/sec Internet. "Whoa, we'd never need that. What's the lowest tier"? ... "But that's only 60Mbit/sec" ... "We'll take it!". Bundled with landline phone it costs less than AT&T at more than 10x the speed (they only have DSL here).
They rely on that. Also, way down in the fine print there is a "monthly acceptable data usage" number. Ours was 150GBytse at AT&T and now
1TByte/month. We never get close but I was told that hardcore streamers do.
For me it is the same with phone data. Reluctantly I now have a smart phone but on the cheapest plan I could cobble together. Unlimited call,
500 texts, then a 30day pay-go 1GB data package. I need maybe 15-30mins phone per month, 30-50 texts and last time I used a whopping 0.003GB of the 1GB data package.
What I noted with all providers so far is that sometimes Youtube videos completely stall out. Maybe they don't like Youtube because they want to sell their own services.
I guess I am saying that has not changed. It was always like that and I ex pect the number is less than 10%. Most of the time most people are not eve n online. When they are their use is very sporadic unless they are streami ng which typically is less than 10 Mbps.
But you are right, they can advertise more bandwidth to the consumer like a dvertising 25 cup holders in an SUV, sounds nice even if they are never use d.
As someone has pointed out, what is more important is the latency. The res ponse of the connection needs to feel snappy. Again, I think most networks fulfill that easily.
As to the original claim, I think a petabit per second is not so hard to ac hieve. We had a big push for bandwidth that led to the dot com bubble almo st 20 years ago and things have only gotten faster and cheaper since then. So much fiber, so little time.
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Rick C.
-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
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On a sunny day (Thu, 18 Jul 2019 07:17:40 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
Sure, I downloaded (via 4G modem) a complete Linux based distro this week (xinutop), took a few minutes. Surprised me, and at least on my PC I can download that in the background if I like, got latest Debian too that way last month.. Speed is not so important for that.
I figured that out when I was having the servers at home.. It is actually simple, name servers are like a phonebook lookup for the IP number. Some things are encrypted these days but for the rest the principle is the same as any LAN. To navigate and see what's happening you need to know a few Linux commands, like for example: whois host traceroute ping etc etc And run some network monitor, I use 'snort'. Firewalls, Linux has iptables for that. Know about ports, and the most important tool in Linux: netcat :-) Really netcat is the coolest thing I have. It makes it so easy to set up a link to anywhere in the world with TCP or UDP, just from the command line or from a script. man netcat. Probably forgot some other stuff, but it is simple.
What I do not like is all that Java crap in browsers, THAT makes things unneeded complex and slow. cookies crap... I use an ad blocker, some sites stop you and want it disabled, too bad I just go elsewhere. Freedom.
Think I am drifting of topic...
Oh, and use 'wget' to get the files, not the browser.
Huh??? It's simply IP with very high data rates over fiber. What so hard to understand about that? Terrestrial round trip times are pretty fast with fiber. Satcomms not so much.
--
Rick C.
-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
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There must be millions of miles of multi-gigabit fibers all over the world and under the oceans. Gigantic switching and routing centers somewhere. I don't think it's simple.
I've been told that roughly a dozen people really understand the system, and that I've met one of them. Nice guy, but he doesn't talk about what he really does.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
There is a lot of JavaScript, but that is very /very/ different.
The two languages have completely different paradigms and objectives; the only thing they have in common is some syntax (which is irrelevant) and part of their name.
Yes, it is worth running adblockers and NoScript - but note the *Script*.
I can stream live TV from 3 Firesticks and still watch a youtube video on my computer without any buffering issue with my 60Mbps service. I wonder if I over spent :-) 30Mbps was $5 less per month.
Yeah, if you assume you are right and there is no way to indicate you are wrong, then I guess you are right.
I submit suggesting there are only a dozen people in the world that "understand" the world wide web is absurd. I suppose they are not allowed to be on the same plane or even in the same building at the same time?
But then this is the guy who says there must be intelligent creation "because"...
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Rick C.
+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
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