Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Rod Van Meter [rdv () sfc wide ad jp]
Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2008 5:31 PM
To: David Farber; dan () lynch com
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan

> ________________________________________
> From: Dan Lynch [dan () lynch com]

> I believe 622 megabits per second from any point to any other point is what
> will finally satisfy the visual cortex of human beings in an arbitrary mesh.

Dan, Dave,

About a decade ago, around the time of "Titanic" and "Apollo 13", my
friend Wook was Director of Digital Technology at Digital Domain, the
primary company that did the visual effects for those films, among
many others.  (Dan, you might remember Wook from his days at ISI; he
has moved around, and now holds a different position at DD.)  The
visual effects work on both of those films was absolutely stunning.

At a fantastic presentation Wook gave at a conference, I asked him if
he could imagine an upper bound to the amount of computing and data he
could consume, since the input bandwidth of the human eye is limited.
He responded, "No, because reality is always more complex than we can
model."

"Titanic" won an Oscar for visual effects, and "Apollo 13" was
nominated, losing to a pig with peanut butter in its mouth ("Babe")
(okay, "Babe" also had some very good effects, but not of the
technical complexity of "Apollo 13", and, IMHO, not as beautiful,
either).  Some DDers speculated at the time that they had lost because
even the relatively sophisticated Academy voters believed that they
had used NASA footage; anecdotally, DDers reported being asked
repeatedly how NASA had managed to film the Apollo launch from such an
angle.  And yet, at the time, Wook and his crew had relatively
concrete plans to use a million times more computing power than they
had available.  They used a farm of several hundred Alpha processors,
most running Linux, for the final rendering -- a large and complex
undertaking for a small company for the time, but probably exceeded by
a large factor by now.

So, if you imagine that the purpose of the Internet is to stream
canned video, yes, multiplying the bandwidth of the visual cortex
times the number of people on the planet is a reasonable upper bound.
One type of compressed HDTV stream is 36Mbps, but we know that its
resolution isn't adequate and it shows compression artifacts; a few
hundred megabits a second isn't enough for uncompressed
human eye-resolution material, but it's probably good enough.

But if you're talking some sort of interactive activity, the
you-satellite-server-satellite-you round trip time is half a second,
far too much.  You must move enough data and/or computation close
enough to the terminal to allow interactivity.  As Joe Touch is fond
of saying, "Everybody complains about the speed of light, but nobody
ever does anything about it."  It's a good line, but not really true
if you consider caching, AJAX, and various forms of speculative
computing to be "doing something about it".

So, there is no doubt some upper bound of "useful" bandwidth, but as
you noted, we still have a long ways to go :-).

                --Rod



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