>> The prices look pretty insane though.
>
> what is really insane, and brace yourself:
>
> with this kind of high-speed connection you'll have HD content on the fly.
> Movies, TV or games, whenever you want from whatever device you want.  Wanna
> watch "Avatar" now?  No prob, just click away and start watching.

That's a nice /idea/... except that whoever is serving the content will 
be charging you very large fees for this service.

> Wanna play
> the latest nextgen HD game?  No need to buy the latest and most expensive
> console or GPU, or download any executable, just click away and start playing
> right away on you inexpensive android device.

How the heck would that work?

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> Our 3 Mbps DSL is $49.95/month.  In the US, ISP charges tend to be a bit 
> more expensive.

I wonder why. Here in Finland internet connections tend to be laughably
cheap. For example I have a 10/2 Mbps connection that costs me 5 euros
per month.

(Ok, it's a bit more complicated than that, but it's still laughably cheap.
You see, there's an internet connection by default in all the flats of this
housing cooperative, which is part of the rent(*), and by default 1/1 Mbps, as
part of a deal with the ISP. Increasing it to 10/2 Mbps costs just 5 euros
per month more.)


(*) Well not "rent" per se. I think the closest term I can find with google
is "condominium payment" or "condo fee". But this same housing cooperative
has rental housing with the same deal.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> The prices look pretty insane though.
> >
> > what is really insane, and brace yourself:
> >
> > with this kind of high-speed connection you'll have HD content on the fly.
> > Movies, TV or games, whenever you want from whatever device you want.  Wanna
> > watch "Avatar" now?  No prob, just click away and start watching.
>
> That's a nice /idea/... except that whoever is serving the content will
> be charging you very large fees for this service.

netflix is just an inexpensive R$ 14 here in Brazil.  Now the fast connection is
up to you, but it's not that hard.  I confortably watch SD netflix with nothing
but a 3G cellphone connection! o_0

> > Wanna play
> > the latest nextgen HD game?  No need to buy the latest and most expensive
> > console or GPU, or download any executable, just click away and start playing
> > right away on you inexpensive android device.
>
> How the heck would that work?

they send you video frames and you send them command inputs.  Continuously.

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Am 02.08.2012 21:39, schrieb Warp:
> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> Our 3 Mbps DSL is $49.95/month.  In the US, ISP charges tend to be a bit
>> more expensive.
>
> I wonder why. Here in Finland internet connections tend to be laughably
> cheap. For example I have a 10/2 Mbps connection that costs me 5 euros
> per month.

Maybe in Finland the "Damned Last Mile" is typically shorter than in the 
USA.

Post a reply to this message

>> That's a nice /idea/... except that whoever is serving the content will
>> be charging you very large fees for this service.
>
> netflix is just an inexpensive R$ 14 here in Brazil.  Now the fast connection is
> up to you, but it's not that hard.  I confortably watch SD netflix with nothing
> but a 3G cellphone connection! o_0

Presumably Netflix is only possible due to absurd levels of image 
compression though. Higher bandwidth lets you send pictures with less 
compression, but then you're putting more load on the server streaming 
the data. That isn't going to be cheap.

>>> Wanna play
>>> the latest nextgen HD game?  No need to buy the latest and most expensive
>>> console or GPU, or download any executable, just click away and start playing
>>> right away on you inexpensive android device.
>>
>> How the heck would that work?
>
> they send you video frames and you send them command inputs.  Continuously.

I severely doubt that even a gigabit link would have sufficiently low 
latency for this to be feasible.

(Hell, I have a 100 mbit *LAN* and VNC is still laggy as hell...)

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Am 02.08.2012 21:59, schrieb Orchid Win7 v1:

>>>> Wanna play
>>>> the latest nextgen HD game?  No need to buy the latest and most
>>>> expensive
>>>> console or GPU, or download any executable, just click away and
>>>> start playing
>>>> right away on you inexpensive android device.
>>>
>>> How the heck would that work?
>>
>> they send you video frames and you send them command inputs.
>> Continuously.
>
> I severely doubt that even a gigabit link would have sufficiently low
> latency for this to be feasible.
>
> (Hell, I have a 100 mbit *LAN* and VNC is still laggy as hell...)

On a typical point-to-point link between a gamer's computer and the 
internet provider, the data transfer rate has absolutely, positively 
/nothing/ to do with latency. (Typical LANs with plenty of nodes are a 
totally different story due to packet collisions.)

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Le 02/08/2012 21:59, Orchid Win7 v1 nous fit lire :

> (Hell, I have a 100 mbit *LAN* and VNC is still laggy as hell...)

VNC is an insult to any network. X11 had some clue, but VNC really lost
everything. Worst than VNC, I guess, would be running VM via VNC...

Also, default client for VNC do not have compression (tsclient nor
vinagre).

First speedup: on remote, change background for a plain colour (no fancy
pictures). Next reduce to 256 colours on the client. Or Thousands.

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On Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:34:59 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>>> Interesting. I wonder if wages are comparably higher...
>>
>> I found this:
>>
>> http://blog.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/paye/tax/comparison-of-uk-and-
usa-
>> take-home/
> 
> I made this:
> 
> http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average+income+Kansas
> 
> On current exchange rates, that looks like considerably more money than
> I will ever earn.

Well, you keep self-selecting out of positions that might get you a 
decent salary by not applying for them.  We've had that discussion before.

>>> Just looked it up. £145/year for a TV license. (That's around
>>> £12/month.) If you use Freeview, this is the only recurring cost.
>>
>> Yeah, I knew it was about £145 (£145.50 IIRC).  But you don't get 600+
>> channels of garbage, either. ;)
>>
>> But comparatively speaking, you get off pretty cheaply.
> 
> Heh. I can still remember when I was a teenager people telling me that
> "in America, you can buy a CD for just £5!" (That's 3x cheaper than the
> UK.) I always wondered whether there was actually a shred of truth to
> such an outlandish claim...

You *could* look at amazon.com and see that it is in fact true.  In fact, 
some are even cheaper than that.  Then you wouldn't have to wonder if it 
was true.  You'd know.

Of course at that price, you're generally not talking about the 
soundtrack to a recently-released film.

Jim

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On Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:39:42 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> Our 3 Mbps DSL is $49.95/month.  In the US, ISP charges tend to be a
>> bit more expensive.
> 
> I wonder why. Here in Finland internet connections tend to be laughably
> cheap. For example I have a 10/2 Mbps connection that costs me 5 euros
> per month.

Haven't you heard?  The free market solves all problems.  Competition 
drives prices down, and deregulation is key to the success of the free 
market.

At least, that's the mantra here.  And since we're in the United States 
of America, it *must* be true, because we're the GREATEST NATION IN THE 
UNIVERSE!!!@!@!@@!@!@!@

We have better healthcare, better 'net connectivity, better teeth, and 
better food, and our students are #1 in the world at everything.  USA! 
USA! USA! USA!

Just ask anyone who lives here.

(sorry if my sarcasm wasn't coming through ;) I get tired of hearing 
"we're #1" when we're NOT - but the constant declarations of our 
superiority in everything mean that we don't actually take the time to 
improve things like infrastructure, health care, etc.)

> (Ok, it's a bit more complicated than that, but it's still laughably
> cheap. You see, there's an internet connection by default in all the
> flats of this housing cooperative, which is part of the rent(*), and by
> default 1/1 Mbps, as part of a deal with the ISP. Increasing it to 10/2
> Mbps costs just 5 euros per month more.)
> 
> 
> (*) Well not "rent" per se. I think the closest term I can find with
> google is "condominium payment" or "condo fee". But this same housing
> cooperative has rental housing with the same deal.

It'd be what is referred to here as an 'association fee' (as in a 
homeowner's association).

Jim

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Le 2012-08-02 10:24, Invisible a écrit :
> On 02/08/2012 02:49 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
>> Le 02/08/2012 12:23, Invisible a écrit :
>>
>>> Internet access is different though. You can't just suddenly say "ah,
>>> sod it, let's just increase the speed 500x". It requires completely
>>> replacing the entire infrastructure of the Internet - a presumably
>>> impossible task. So... is this really real?
>>
>> you only have to change the access part.
>> The Internet is already on fiber, excepted for the access part.
>
> Oh, well, sure. Apart from THE LARGEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE PART OF THE
> NETWORK, it's already fiber. No problem. :-)
>
>> Main issue: coverage is low. A study from March 2012 showed that only
>> 10% of home were connectable today, with 80% of them by the cable
>> operator: i.e. only 2% of the normal country is reachable so far with a
>> real fiber.
>
> The technology to access the Internet at gigabits per second already
> exists. The problem is that it will cost a fortune to dig up the entire
> country to lay hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber. Which is why
> nobody is doing this. (Or at least, not very fast.)


Nobody except everyone.  There were guys from the telephone company in 
my backyard a few weeks ago installing fibre optic cables on the 
telephost posts.  The tv cable has been fibre optics from the get go, 
when the neighborhood was built 6 years ago.

A few yearsa go, the carriers only installe dit when some cities would 
require "fibre to the home" for any new development, but now customers 
are asking for it, so they have no choice, or irsk losing those 
customers to the competition.

>
> This is what makes Google Fiber so surprising. They're not promising 3x
> more speed. They aren't offering 5x more. It even 10x more like BT
> Infinity just did to my house. (Did I mention my mother /works for/ BT?)
> They're talking about 200x more speed. That's epic, right there.
>

Yeah, moving from cat 3 copper wies to fibre optics will do that!

> It mirrors what happened with Gmail. Within weeks of Gmail going live,
> suddenly every other provider massively increased the storage they were
> offering. But that was because they had the capacity all along, they
> were just trying to charge lots of money for it. Today, any webmail
> service offering only 2MB of storage would be laughed out of the
> building. Google actually forced an entire market to change. Over night.
>
> Internet access is a little different. All Hotmail had to do was
> /literally/ press a button and everybody got a 500x storage limit
> increase. You can't do that with bandwidth.
>

Sure they can.  They've been offering HDTV signals over wire for the 
past 5 years, this means the infrastructure is there to support that 
bandwith.

The same thing happened 20 years ago when cable providers decided to 
become internet providers since they already had enough bandwidth to 
send 60 to 80 tv channels to every home... using one for data signals 
was not a problem at all.

This forced the phone companies to massively upgrade their networks to 
support faster and faster aDSL services.


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