GigaOM

No webpage should ever be 1MB!!! At least not for awhile.

[...] Just read Om Malik’s post on US carriers ramping up the speeds of their broadband services. He wrote: “To say that we are a nation starved of bandwidth would be an understatement. Generically speaking, The average US broadband experience is stuck somewhere between 500 Kbps to 3 Mbps.” [...]

i agree that ordinary (non-techy) can’t tell the difference in downstream speeds….try uploading a picture or a file and one will quickly find out the difference in speeds/user expereince…glut in the downstream doesn’t translate into glut in the upstream :-)

Nice analysis, Om.

I agree that the true value in these types of speed increases would only truly be realized through a disruptive innovation created to take advantage of the new levels of service. Anything that changes the scene so dramatically is begging for a creative mind to dream up a new way to take advantage of the network capabilities. However, it begs to question why consumers would pay for such speeds in the interim. I also agree that the chokehold on upload speeds is a huge limitation that needs to be remedied.

I think your point is bang on. Higher speeds, beyond a certain point, are simply a marketing tool — especially when cable operators and telcos do everything they can to make it hard for you to use all that bandwidth, such as using “traffic shaping,” preventing you from running a server, etc. They’d like you to pay for it, but they really don’t want you to use it :-)

It seems that for the most part, download speeds are mostly for bragging rights between the various parties. With the exception of downloading various Microsoft service packs where you definitely can tell the difference between 6Mbps and 3Mbps, either are fine for general net usage. The big difference is with upload speeds.

Verizon is offering services with 2Mbps upload speeds, while SBC and Comcast in my area top out at 600Kbps and 768Kbps with their high-end packages. More reasonably priced ones are at 384Kbps. I try and work from home when I can and this slow upload speed is noticeable. I am not trying to run a server of any type, but just connect to corporate network and transfer a few large documents or emails.

For me, one of the big issues isn’t the download speed, it’s the upload speed.

I recently moved from Comcast’s “6Mbps” service which often had its upstream bandwidth capped at 128Kbps (and seldom was much better even when not capped) to Verizon FIOS, with 2Mbps of upload on a 15Mbps service.

As a developer who’s often stuck waiting for slow FTP uploads, this made a big difference.

Of course, it’s not just people like me that this matters to — a lot of common consumer protocols (BitTorrent comes to mind) are often limited far more by the upstream bandwidth on an asymmetrical than they are by the download speed.

I thought many ISPs in the US already offered a pretty cheap broadband connection? Probably I’m wrong on that.

But to think about it, this faster connection is the next business enabler for the net. It drives a significant growth on what can be done via the internet and it’s exciting!

I just hope that we won’t face another burst ;-)

We need to continue increasing speeds until multiple HD programs can be viewed “real-time” in the home.

Lets not get short sighted by looking at current behavior and forget we want complete convergence - we’ve been asking about it and talking about it for a while now. Lets stay consistant.

[...] Can you have too much broadband? Om Malik asks: Sure at 30 Mbps you can download DVD quality The Bourne Identity in 11 minutes, but its still going to take you 2 hours to watch it. These are analog questions in an increasingly digital world. [...]

I am shocked this question comes from GigaOm! Will you promise that you will never upgrade beyond 6 MBPS? Me, I won’t be satisfied until everything is instant (sadly, I admit - hopefully I will get more patient as I get older) but more importantly I bleieve speed is the enabler for innovation we have not yet imagined.

While I have my doubts about the need to “stream” anything, I think Golfingguy makes a good point. What happens when I have five HDTVs watching five HD programs simultaneously?

Anybody see the HANA annoucement last week?

I agree that the difference is NOT at the web (page) level.

From my experience here in France, where most of the DSL offers are now at around 20 Mbps (ATM), the main difference is for video. There are more and more video contents (I mean legal ones. Specially video blogs, trailers. Not mentioning IPTV and VOD) and having a fast download makes it a totally different experience. You won’t spend much time on video if you don’t have a very fast connection.

Also keep in mind that most of these offers will come with TV soon. It takes about 3-4 Mbps for one tv channel feed. If you want to watch different channels on different TV, here we go, you are already running out of bandwidth :-)

With a huch faster connection, you’ll become a Skype supernode more often (and handle more data while you’re at it), further slowing down your mac.

[...] Om Malik asks whether we really need the speed of higher bandwidth connections. [...]

A very thorough study done by McDonnell Douglas Health Systems in the ’80s showed significant improvements in individual of programmer productivity when terminal service response was decreased to sub-second levels.

While this study was done in a mainframe environment, I’d suggest that the effectiveness of sufficient bandwidth to the end user has similar value.

Obviously, the limitations imposed by the SERVER/CLOUD side of the equation will be exposed when the pipe isn’t the throttle. But, assuming web services providers (not to be confused with the network ISP) keep their bandwidth and server resources consistent with the desired consumer experience, my satisfaction will be greatly improved by larger pipes. And my productivity. Even envisioning the effect on the simplistic scenario of acquiring the hybrid Google maps image I want this moment stirs my glee. And it gives rise to optimism that Web2.0 (and beyond) services will attain real value.

Though I’m not so naive as to think that milking the cow isn’t part of the equation, I still believe capitalist market forces will drive speed/$ models down for the consumer. Especially since services like multiple streams of demand TV and uploads of video telcom. activities etc. will drive the web services providers to demand that their consumers be provided the necessary quality of service.

If the Bells, etc. don’t respond to their major clients and provide an effective cost model for the ultimate consumer, they’ll probably be bought/brushed aside by the services vendors themselves.

I agree with McNealy, the network is the computer. It just hasn’t pushed past the IBM/386 equivalent, yet.

Yea, but… sub-second responses will be important for developing web applications. A second for a page to load (or for a response from your XMLHTTPRequest) sounds like nothing, but can seriously interupt the flow of getting work done.

Wow, I remember when people used to say, “Why would I ever need more than 640KB of RAM?” or “Why would I ever need a hard-drive larger than 50MB?”

Somehow though, we figured out a way to not only take advantage of the increased capacity, but I would argue that our computing experience is even better today than it was back in 1980… :)

Seriously though, it’s the same thing with bandwidth; technology will scale to ensure that the bandwidth we have is well-utilized. And it’s not a stretch to conceive of how that might happen.

With streaming video, it’s easy to imagine bandwidth needs in the tens of Mbps; in fact, if you want to stream production-quality high-definition video, you’d need on the order of about 20Mbps downstream…and this is just a single stream. Sure, you can argue that nobody is currently streaming HD video, but it’s a chicken and egg problem, and I promise you that the content/technology won’t be generated until the bandwidth is available.

And, of course, as other have pointed out, the upstream speeds will need to improve greatly before the downstream speeds become nearly as important.

This is a surprising argument coming from you, Om. Were you just looking for something to write about today? :)

Wouldn’t you know the last comment would say what I was excited that no one else had said (so I could look smart).

We’ll use as much bandwidth as can be thrown at us, without a doubt. As soon as the majority of American households have 30Mbps connections, it’ll be time for the next bump in video resolution—up to the 4K stuff, probably.

Then those torrents will be just that much bigger.

I just wanted to point out that ISPs are (finally) starting to increase upload speeds as well. The Tampa Bay region of Brighthouse has 2 new packages that are only available with bundling services. 10 down/1 up and 15 down/2 up for residential services.

Also commercial class is seeing (unadvertised and unannouced but active at this point) speeds up to 15/2 dependin on what packages they currently have.

I want near-infinite SYMMETRICAL bandwidth infinitely cheap. And I want it now.

If the webOS/web 1.1 (oh, sorry, web 2.0) crowd wants the whole webapp thing to materialise then they want that too.

And the download/P2P and especially bittorrent crowd will want it too.

And corporations (offsite backup, no more mail limits, the list goes on).

And anyone who works with large amounts of data will want it too.

But the speeds you mention at the prices you quote: BIG YAWN (says the EuroSnob :P)

“… a $179 a month 30 Mbps plan.”

Isn’t this really expensive? Here in Sweden I got a 100 Mbps plan for about $35/month. *Only* 10 Mbps up though…

Some thoughts:

1. Users can detect 1/10 second delay as meaningful latency.
2. 640K turned out not to be enough.
3. Availability, like anything else in life, eventually changes supply and demand to the extent that new kind of applications become both possible and desriable.
4. Not too long ago the around the web was how people were restricting their RSS feeds or even thinking of abandoning them because of bandwith problems.
5. To this day video/3D/info streaming remains a major bandwith problem.
6. When setting up capacity/throughput plans at the serving side, we make assumptions about current, limited available bandwith.
7. The functionality and efficacy of P2P networks are critically impacted by limited bandwith.

Need For Speed… How Real?

Om Malik riffs on increasing broadband speeds: After years of being stuck in the slow lane, the US consumers are finally going to get a massive speed upgrade and taste the true broadband for the first time. From a 512

[...] Om makes great points in his current post about the bogus “need for speed” in broadband. As he points out, higher bandwidth packages currently being touted by carriers is mostly about price discrimination — charging higher prices to people willing to bear it — than it is about meaningfully changing the size of the broadband pipes into peoples’ homes. [...]

Well, I’ll agree that, while surfing the web, one can’t really tell the difference between old fashioned ADSL and ADSL2+… But having spent a year in France with an ADSL2+ connection, getting about 15Mbps (compared to the 512kbps I was getting in Australia - and soon have to return to!) I see a big difference, but in different areas.

While I’m surfing the web, sure I get a slight increase, but it’s not huge - certainly not enough to pay extra for… And when I download things, I get faster downloads (though only really when I’m downloading off a local - ie French - mirror site), but because I’m not downloading huge amounts all the time it’s not a huge issue

I see two areas where bandwidth will make a significant difference:

1. connection sharing: I’m the only one using my 15meg connection, so it’s rarely running at its potential, but if I was sharing it with family we could easily have a couple downloads, a couple background email/IM, and a couple surfing the web all at once…

2. television (and other services): with my connection, I get seamless television and VOIP bundled (by seamless I mean: aside from plugging into the ISP-supplied box, an average user wouldn’t know the technology behind their tv and phone); I can watch tv while downloading and surfing the web, without hassle. My ISP has also just released a video-on-demand feature, though I’ve yet to test its performance…

What does increased Speed give? Opportunity. Average users may not know the technology, but they will be increasingly attracted to connectivity packages that bundle tv and phone options…

-p

Some folks are streaming HDTV in the house and this is why we need more bandwidth to the home as well as Ethernet over Coax in the home. We stream HDTV via WiFi today; last week we reported how it worked on 802.11g and today we reported how it worked on 802.11a. It can be done, but more pipe is what we want!

Om Malik on Broadband : Need For Speed… How Real?

People talk about broadband like it’s all we ever need and everything will be beautiful. Indeed, Om (link below, see good graphic) makes some good points to bring some reality to this thinking by pointing the other way, asking what

As Martin Geddes (telepocalypse.net) recently said: Demand easily exceeds realtime, if it is affordable. ” Darling, we are leaving in 15 minutes, did you download these 5 movies for the kids in the car? “”Oops, will start it now”.
And for anyone who has looked at the 3D-displays-wthout-funny-glasses coming up (Fraunhofer institute, Philips e.a.): 100-fold increase in demand of bandwidth compared with HD? Imagine that two-way…after all we are animals who are dying to communicate, anytime, anywhere.
The garbage belt of history is densely populated with anyone who proclaimed “There is no need for anything more/faster”. Usually thats a sign that one is growing old…..

How real is the need for speed?

How real is the need for speed? Om Malik asked the question earlier this week and has some fascinating facts which show that beyond a certain connection speed, there is no perceptible difference in the experience. Of course, with applications

[...] This isn’t the sort of thing I’d normally talk about, but I really think that this post by Om Malik is short-sighted. [...]

Yeah, and as Bill Gates said in the 80’s, no one will ever need more than 640KBytes of RAM….

You are suffereing from the innovator’s dillema. More Bandwidth is like more Memory. You can do more innovative things with 10s or 100’s of Mbps that you can’t even imagine when you are stuck in the Mbps range.

So the countries that are stuck in the 1Mbps range are stuck in the non-innovation zone.

And I don’t buy that the RBOCs and the CableCo oligopoly is going to get us higher speed broadband any time soon.

I still can not get ANY cable modem or DSL service in Saratoga California, right here in Heart of Silicon Valley.

[...] Jeremy Reimer of ArsTechnica comments on the article by Om Malik about the practical limits of ever faster broadband acess speeds service providers are offering. [...]

I think you are missing something here - you are thinking only about casual use - surfing - even downloading. I want more speed for work. Working at home will only become a reality when bandwidth allows communication both up and down at very high speeds. I want ethernet 10/100/1000 speeds to communicate with the server at work.

wads, i am not disagreeing with you or anyone. the point i am making: downlink speeds don’t mean anything because in the end uplink is the choke point. secondly, when video comes, the bandwidth will be needed. right now the 15 megs stuff is all just a way to get more money from you pocket.

My university has fiber-optic gigabit. I can get a 700MB video file from someone on campus in, oh, a second or two. I think 7200 RPM hard drives are starting to be a speed-limiting factor at that point. The I2 Hub (internet2), when it existed, had similar results for transfers across the nation. It’s OMGwonderful when you can do things like remote desktop / FTP / grab linux ISOs nearly instantly with no snags, as I’ve found myself doing when i have 2 minutes before I have to leave for class. For people like my parents who check email and surf the web, a 3 MBPS cable connection may be fine for a while longer; Serious computer users, though, should not be happy until enormous transfers (HD video) take less than a second and game latencies are all below 100 ms.

Also, free HD movie trailers are available at http://www.apple.com/trailers/

See if your machine and bandwidth can handle it!

[...] Om Malik contends on his weblog that the average American broadband customer cannot tell the difference between 1MB and 5MB, and does not really need to pay the extra money for a faster connection. I disagree. Why? Windows itself. [...]

I think you might be looking at this the wrong way. Perhaps content is being held down by bandwidth. Eventually, as the bandwidth increases the offerings online could grow in size to match it.

Will Next Generation Broadband Do Nothing For Us?

My argument against a headlong embrace of wireless as a solution to the last mile problem is that there has always been a dialectic between wireless and wired (e.g. optical telegraph vs. wire telegraph, telephone vs. radio, coaxial cable vs. microwave, s

pffft you obviously haven’t been brainwashed enough…. all i heard was some guy winning about the internet.

[...] There is an intersting discussion that resulted from a blog [->http://gigaom.com/2005/12/20/need-for-speed/] on the relative importance of broadband to consumers as technology promises to deliver 10mbps++ transfer rates eithere now or in the near future. Currently these faster connection speeds translate to a significant premium payed by the consumer. The question is whether demand for content over broadband will drive demand of these ‘wide pipes’ such that prices drop to the levels that consumers are now seeing on 1.5-6mbps DSL and Cable connections. I am all for increased content over broadband. I would like to see on-demand delivery of movies, music, and television. According to the stats on the blog above, a connection on the order of 15-30mbps would be required to avoid a significant wait to tranfer a DVD qualty movie. Instead of hassling with NetFlix or other DVD by mail services, imagine having the entire NetFlix collection on-demand at any time of day. They could still control the number of movies you could access within a given timeframe with some sort of authentication system. The blog makes a good point that even media over broadband and other technologies like VOIP don’t really harness the bandwidth that these lines will provide. [...]

Telcos are building out their broadband infrastructure not so much to sell higher-bandwidth web-surfing, but, rather, so that they can offer TV and compete with the cable companies. Cable companies can offer the triple-play (voice, video, data) that the telcos (missing video) cannot yet match.

Nice post. One thought though, when access to any information is less than a second away, then the difference between local and on a network disapears. We are trying to provide a ‘netting’ effect with Hyperwords for example, you should be able to move in any direction you want, instantly. That will change, well, as they say, everything.

In other words, broadband changed the internet experience not just because of speed, but also because of the always on experience. Now it’s about breaking the barrier about making it feel irrelevant wether something is on the page you are viewing or in another country.

Far fetched?

Plenty of Bandwidth?

A few days ago Om Malik suggested that consumers don’t need any more bandwidth. He made a couple of interesting claims about the new round of speed upgrades being offered by networks in the US (and being mirrored by…

The snag for me is poor upload speeds. I want a minimum of of 1Mbps. And Time Warner’s description of 5Mbps as “blazing” is a joke. Some Europeans are getting speeds in the 10’s and 20’s and they are paying about $10 a month for their services.

eu queria que jogo pegasse no windows 2000

I have 1 word for everyone: UPSTREAM
It’s sooooo annoying that only Verizon’s FIOS service offers decent upload speeds (2mbps).

For those of you who think only techies require faster upload, think again.

Here are a few MAJOR users:

1. Email file attachments.
2. Video conferencing (both for business and personal use) Now that download speeds are fast enough the bottleneck (which no one seems to understand) is still the upload speed. It doesn’t matter how fast of a computer or how fast of an internet connection “grandma” has if you can only SEND video at a max speed of 768kbps! -Here that comcast?
3. Remote connectivity. Yes, this has become a VERY populare way to work with more and more people telecommuting. If your internet connection at home can only send data at a max of 768kbps then it still won’t feel right unless you do things like scale down the colors.
4. Uploading images, movies, music (any multimedia for that matter) all requires faster upload speeds.

The list goes on and on. But the next time you have a video conference with someone, don’t assume that just because the video of yourself looks great to you that the person on the other end feels the same way. If they do, then they haven’t seen the alternative or it’s being buffered and is not in realtime which would explain the delay in conversation. Try testing out video conferencing while only using the video and calling someone from a regular phone and asking them to tell you the exact moment you perform an action on the screen. I bet you that their response will come a few minutes AFTER you perform the action which is why people involved in video conferencing conversations often talk while the other person is talking because the other person’s speech data has not been transmitted yet. So you end up thinking they have finished speaking or not yet started, therefore you start to talk and they are thinking the same thing and you end up with a “quirky” conversation.

Just my 2 cents. I would rather have 4mbps instead of 8, but have my upload speed go from 768kbps to 2mbps.

I don’t think that much speed is needed by an “average” user.

I think that in general we are in need of all rou8nd faster speeds, faster uploads are important as previously mentioned and of course as we move into the home cinema live stream age we will un-doubtedly need faster download speeds. I currently have a connection speed of 50Mbps and an upload rate of about 5Mbps althought this is great for fast file transfer with other users of fast connections it makes no differene when streaming or uploadingto a slow intake server. As a tele communications and networking computer engineer and consultant i know what the technology is all about and trust me when i say that we already have capabilities for much fatser connections, we do, its just chosen to not be used as the telecom companies realise its not econimcaly sustanable at the moment when the demand is low. People have got to buy the faster speeds in order for any new development!. One thing we all-ways need to remember is that we need not worry about what speed we have but more like what speed the server were communicating with is running at!

what

I think the real issue is, “Are consumers being sold a bill of goods?” not “will we one day need more speed?” Of course we will. But right now, how many home users with 1-3 machines ever go above 2mbps d/l? or 250 kbps u/l? i would say virtually none. How many servers will feed information faster than a t-1 can handle? I don’t know of any accessable to the public.

So why in god’s green earth are people paying for 10 mbps? I guess its the same reason I see jackasses driving around in 100 000 dollar sports cars in the city. And if people knew how little of the max speed they actually use…

advance loan payday…

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love

Jeremy Reimer was exposed as a fraud faking it as some sort of computer expert in the field of computer science here at this url:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=41095&cpage=187

An interesting read where Reimer gets his behind handed to him, and started up trouble with his arstechnica buddies, and 1 single person ran the lot of them off.

I would suggest you find someone else to cite as an authority in this field. Somebody with eductional credentials in the field of computers and professional experience.

Jeremy Reimer clearly has neither.

Hi! cool site.
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Faster broadband access for consumers is inevitable, and needed, but all the broadband in the world won’t dramatically increase the user’s quality of service unless they are able to leverage their pipe to its fullest capabilities - thus starving them for more and more. What’s exciting about a 30Mbps or 100Mbps connection to the home if you’re video download maxes out at 10Mbps?

RocketStream is designed to provide acceleration for file transfers over high-speed links, allowing people to benefit from this new tier of broadband. http://www.rocketstream.com

I\’m love this great website. Many thanks guye

[...] GigaOM, December 20, 2005 “Can a consumer tell any difference between 1.5 megabit per second and four megabit per second service?” asks Bruce Leichtman, president of Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “The answer is no. [...]

Uploading videos to motiono is pretty quick also, infact compared to other video sharing sites, it takes 1/10th of the time to upload a video and share it,

Jeremy Reimer has no degree or certifications in computers and no professional hands on years to decades of experience in them either.

Jeremy Reimer was caught email harassing, impersonating, & bother others online which ended up having his website have portions removed and his friends that helped him in it (a Mr. Jay Little of Atlanta Ga. USA) had their websites removed in their entirety. See here for that:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=41095&cpage=212#feedbackAnchor

Also, others from educational institutions where actual professional journalism & writing are taught, are questioning Jeremy Reimer’s validity & credibility as a writer, period, here:

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/node/933

All Reimer does is spit back what others wrote already anyhow. He is an ambulance chaser at best.