Re: Yup; the Internet is screwed up.

[Seth Mattinen <sethm () rollernet us>]

On 6/22/11 3:07 PM, Joe Greco wrote:
> Your average person cares a whole lot less about what's crossing their
> Internet connection than they care about whether or not "this works" 
> than I do.
>
> I continue to be amazed at the quality of Netflix video coming across
> the wire.  Our local cable company just recently upped their old 7M/512K
> normal tier to 10M/1M, and is now offering much higher speed tiers as
> well, which isn't going to be discouraging to anyone wanting to do this
> sort of thing.

What still dismays me is the pitiful low upstream speeds that are still
common. Not because most people want to run servers or host content at
home (they don't), but because they want to share content with friends
and the user experience can be greatly enhanced with symmetric speeds.
Sharing those HD videos or 1,000 pictures during party weekend is less
painful if it takes 10 minutes to upload rather than 10 hours.

Also, things like GoToMyPC and "back to my Mac" are end user experience
things that are best served by not using horribly low upstream speeds. I
can understand that a decade ago most people were still sharing content
offline, but dare I say now sharing online is becoming more common than
offline.


> I guess the most telling bit of all this was when I found myself needing
> an ethernet switch behind the TV, AND WAS ABLE TO FILL ALL THE PORTS, for
>
> Internet-capable TV set
> Internet-capable Blu-Ray player
> Networkable TiVo
> AppleTV
> Video Game Console
> Networked AV Receiver
> UPS
> and an uplink of course.  8 ports.  Geez.
>
> That keeps striking me as such a paradigm shift.

I was talking to one of my friends about when we wired his house a while
back. When he moved in we wired the crap out of it - we put Ethernet
ports in the kitchen, behind the sofa, everywhere. The one place we
didn't put anything though was behind the entertainment center. We put
it lots of coax and wiring for surround sound, but at the time it never
occurred to us to put Ethernet there. Of course, now there has to be
without question.

~Seth