more on comments? Does faster broadband really matter?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Les Vadasz <les () vadasz com>
Date: December 28, 2005 8:07:04 PM EST
To: "'David Farber'" <dave () farber net>
Subject: RE: comments? Does faster broadband really matter?

Dave,

This is an interesting argument, and not a new one. Why does anyone need
more bandwidth? Let me give you a personal experience.

I created picture album for the family, using Adobe Photoshop  
Elements. I
than converted it into a format recognizable by MyPublisher.com, a print
service that creates a picture book, based on your design. After their
compression engine, I ended up with uploading to MyPublisher.com over  
100
Mbytes over my DSL, which does that at 200+ Kbit rate. (my downloads  
are at
about 1 Mbit rate on a good day...) This was fine, just took a while,  
and
fortunately my DSL did not go down in the middle of the session.

The trouble came later. I received an email from the publisher that I  
made a
mistake in my edits. I was not home, so I tried to access my files via
GoToMyPC, and download it to my location. This was an even bigger  
file, as I
needed to make corrections way earlier in the process. Needless to  
say, I
could not download 250+ Mbytes... So, I traveled an extra 170 miles,  
and had
an extra day delay in the process, which in this case did matter...  
but that
is another story.

Frankly, I do not think that this kind of application is that  
outlandish, or
that futuristic. To me the right barometer should be that anything  
you can
do at your machine, you should be able to do over the network. Yes,  
we are
not there, but this should be the long term goal.

In the meantime, I would love to have 100 Mbit, symmetrical, end-to-end.

Les Vadasz




-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2005 3:18 PM
To: Ip Ip
Subject: comments? Does faster broadband really matter?




Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: December 27, 2005 11:28:55 AM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Does faster broadband really matter?
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

Does faster broadband really matter?
12/26/2005 5:17:49 PM, by Jeremy Reimer

<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051226-5846.html>

Internet blogger Om Malik has written an interesting piece on the
new, faster broadband connections that are now becoming available to
US consumers. His premise is that the faster speeds are not that
important, because they don't translate into a significantly better
experience for the end user.

The gist of his argument is that most online activities, like
standard websurfing, are not significantly sped up by high-bandwidth
connections, and the few that are, such as downloading, are not
typically time-sensitive anyway:

Websurfing runs at only about a megabit per second, and nearly
everything else except downloading is effectively throttled down at
the source. Downloading turns out to have some natural limits as
well; at 100 Mbps, you can download enough music for 24 hours of
listening in only four minutes per day. The practical result,
confirmed by high speed leaders like Masayoshi Son of Yahoo BB in
Japan, is that the faster speeds yield only a extremely modest
increase in real traffic demand.

[snip]

Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>






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