when will the promise of broadband become a reality?

[draggoon01]

or has it already?

broadband was mainly publicized as a fundamentally new method of media distribution, downloadable/streaming content, etc. but that has yet to happen, and seems year and years off. currently, the primary uses of broadband from what i gather, are warez, porn (non-paid copies), and divx movies (non-paid copies). so basically illegal stuff. with narrowband dial up, the promise was connectivity with others, information, and news. basically communication; and that seems to have gone pretty far in this generation of people (and seems will mostly increase as people grow up on technology and there are less people who can't set a vcr, or navigate the internet). i would say the effect is evident and significant, in that you would find life very different if you tried living 10 years ago without email and such (would you keep in touch with certain people by mail and postcards? would you yell for pics every time a female is mentioned somewhere or ask for a link/reference every time some sort of claim is made?). broadband though seems to only make stuff on dial up faster.

so i'm wondering, what will it take? xbox live seems hopeful in that it's broadband only (although people are going to try networking their dial up, but we'll have to wait and see how msft handles that), but i doubt it'll be the killer app for broadband. other than that, i haven't heard news of anything on the horizon that will push and require broadband. if anything, increased technological power is being used to try and make narrowband more capable (higher video compression), which seems to only slow the progress towards broadband.

or are there already current uses of broadband that haven't been mentioned here?

or is broadband just never going to be big? especially since technology is being heavily developed for cell phones and their accompanying speed; that with dialup may set the norm for expected bandwidth when company x tried to make a new product/program/etc

 

[draggoon01]

i ask here because i'm more interested in the hardware apects of the issue.

 

[draggoon01]

To me, this is kind of analogous the way dvd hasn?t been utilized in computers. Companies would rather ship programs on multiple cd, and most people are happy with that (except encyclopedias). Especially since most apps now just do full installs onto hdd. And dvd writers seem to be progressing slower, as people are mostly ok with just using their cd writers.

basically cd are 'good enough' compared to dvd for computer purposes. is dialup 'good enough' for current things as well as things to come compared to broadband?



Or other ideas:

The cell. Chip for playstation3. (I think it has new name now). But there was talk of it doing real time distributed computing over networks and the internet, so that it can scale to better graphics by simply connecting it online, and then get to play games with the power of 2 cells or more.

Or larry Ellison (ceo of oracle). I remember interview of him few years ago in documentary talking about rise of windows. He was describing his vision of computing and how he hated the current model of going to the store and buying hardware, and buying software, and then trying to work out the compatibility and drivers issues (that was years ago. Now he probably hates ordering online and waiting for it to show up). Instead he proposed that computers for users should really just be basic terminals: display, keyboard/mouse, and a connection to internet. And instead all the computing and storage is handled on the server side. This would make upgrading much easier because there wouldn?t be a mess of computer component combinations to account for, as well as more cost effective, because redundant computer hardware/software wouldn?t be necessary and instead those resources would be pooled together.
I thought that vision was actually coming to fruition when websites were popping up during internet boom that offered online storage of files. He did make a good point though in my opinion about redundancy; how many copies of the exact same files exist right now? Likewise it?s questionable how many people need 6ghz computers

Also I remember bill gates describing same thing but on smaller scale when mention of pda/tablet pc. Instead of trying to jam all components into pda, make it just a terminal with wireless connection to somewhere else in office/home. That would save on heat, power, and weight, and battery life. So instead of buying traditional pc with monitor, buy pc box with tablet terminal. (that would be nice for noise as well, since you can stuff pc box in a closet or back of some room. would solve noise problem actually). But this deals more with wireless speed than, internet speed.

 

[KF]

I think you have pretty well covered it.

Broadband is the same as whatever went before, only faster. It is hype. The hype-meisters were pitching it to escalate the price of stock and reel in the suckers who bit. The little economic downturn pretty much killed that off. It will be back.

I don't want broadband because it costs $600 a year. I prefer $100 a year. I just don't need that huge a volume of warez and porn. You can get 250M a day at 28,800. Hey 28,800 is broadband compared to 1,200, where porn and warez were pioneered.

I guess there are instances where something is just waiting for the technology in order for it to bloom. And then there are technologies in search of a use.

There never was a killer app for CD-ROM or the Internet as far as I know. Some people thought it would be encyclopedias for CD-ROM. So now you can be pick up an encyclopedia on CD-ROM for a few bucks in the bargin bin instead of taking out a loan and paying it off in installments. The Internet's attraction is mainly in access to information of types that was once were hard to obtain. It did more for porn than all the magazines and video tapes ever did. That got the Internet off to a big start, just like XXX videos got the VCR going in the early days. Later all the countless other sources that have a broader appeal developed into what we have now. I guess that Divx is fullfilling that pioneering roll in broadband now. Once the price of huge bandwidth gets low enough, people will find miscellaneous uses for it just like they found for the Internet as has become.

That Larry Ellison idea is about as hopeless and self-serving as any. I suppose he expects to be the guy that collects a fee each time you need to use the software (sort of like an immense networked database -Oracle?) It is amazing how creepy a guy can be while expounding prophetically. He dwarfs Bill Gates. The role of the Internet will be to drive the price of software down so far that no one will think of paying for it, any more than people expect to be paid for talking casually to each other.

You see software only needs to be done once. It is like the design process for a manufactured good. Only with manufactured goods the manufacturing is the vastly dominant part of the expense. For software, replication, which corresponds to manufacturing, is trivial. They write the same programs over and over again with more bloat, to acheive a different version that people hopefully wiil pay for. How far can bloat go? When they get there, what happened to encyclopedias will happen to everything. What they are trying to do is prevent replication (using law and encryption) instead of going with the flow - the reality is that it can be replicated simply- and accepting a different economic paradyme. It resembles the commies fatal delusion that the sanctified intelligencia can make an ideal society through beaurocracy and secret police.

 

[Technonut]

In my case, the cost of Adelphia Powerlink cable works out close enough to what I was paying for monthly dial-up access. I did not care to tie my primary phoneline up, and had to pay the monthly charge for a 2nd line on top of the monthly dial-up charge. When Powerlink service was made available, I quickly jumped on it, disconnected my 2nd phoneline, and have not looked back.

I love being able to DL game demos, software, MP3s, video HW reviews, drivers, etc... whenever I want at well over 300 kb/s compared to the 5 kb/s offered by dial-up. I do not DL porn, and still find cable well worth the $$ spent.

EDIT: Angry Janesville Man Barbecues Slow Modem ...... Wife Says Man Has History Of Violence With Slow Dial-Up Connections..

 

[Daovonnaex]

Broadband's primary purposes are pornography and "sharing" of copyrighted materials. Its potential already has been realized.

 

[Pauli]

I don't know what world you live in, but it is obviously not the same world I live in. In my world, broadband is for checking movie times, finding information on products that I would like to buy, downloading software updates, operating client machines remotely, and many other things, too numerous to list. It's about freedom and convenience. Sure, you could do everything from dialup if necessary, but 10MB downloads just don't cut it. Plus, I don't want to tie up my phone line -- an extra phone line would approach the cost of the broadband connection itself. So, I don't know about you, but the promise of broadband was realized for me about 3 or 4 years ago. This is already old news.

 

[rbV5]

Try AT forums without broadband, ouch, our network at work is so spread out over the entire county, no broadband..no thanks......I've managed to justify my $50/month for broadband without throwing porn or warez into the equation.

How is broadband hype? faster is better, and it aint fast enough yet.

 

[Floydian]

well, in my case I use it for gaming too but the main advantage broadband had for me was that it was not much more than dialup+extra line, might as well get the extra gaming speed/downloading speed.

There's one thing broadband doesn't have going for it, and that's competition, which I believe is why my 56k line was so much more reliable (and it was so happy) and functioned at optimal speeds.

 

[rayster]

"Broadband's primary purposes are pornography and "sharing" of copyrighted materials."
WTF?
Broadband is the next step in the evolution of computers and human communication. With broadband, the always on connection means I can obtain up to date information instantly. It means rich context multimedia. It means face to face distance learning applications. It means telepresence. It means the Net is my hard drive. It means that from my desk I can tunnel into my mother's computer and show her how to do something from 3 states away. It means less frustration, less work to find information, less lost time, and more productivity.

Make high speed access universal, make it wireless, and create the tools to attach to it from anywhere, and then you'll see the reality.

 

[GoSharks]

Originally posted by: draggoon01
currently, the primary uses of broadband from what i gather, are warez, porn (non-paid copies), and divx movies (non-paid copies). so basically illegal stuff.

you are seriously forgetting stuff like streaming hi-quality audio/radio/video, gaming, photo sharing, etc. and the always on part of it..

 

[kgraeme]

My cable modem connection went out for a week. It was hell.

 

[CrazySaint]

I decided to get a broadband connection because I was already paying for two phone lines so I could surf the net without tying up the phone and the additional cost for a high speed connection (ADSL, in my case) was minimal. For that minimal increase in cost, I got a huge increase in bandwidth. I do not use that bandwidth for porn or warez. I use it so I can do a fresh install of Windows and download all the critical up dates in about 20-30 minutes (counting all the restarts) instead of several hours, so I can download game demos that run 100-300 MBS in 30 minutes to 1 1/2 hours (instead of days), so I can play multiplayer games (have you tried playing MP games on a dialup?), so I can download nearly 2GB of Mandrake Linux 9.0 ISOs in about 2 days instead of a few weeks, so I can surf the net without having to wait a minute or more for all the bloated images to load, and the list goes on. As somebody else stated, I have ADSL so I can do all the things I did on my dialup only ~30x faster at about the same cost.

 

[KF]

>Make high speed access universal, make it wireless, and create the tools to attach
> to it from anywhere, and then you'll see the reality.

Make it less than $10 a month like narrow band. It appears that some people have so much money they can't find enough things to fritter it away on, and figure everone is the same.

>Sure, you could do everything from dialup if necessary...
True. And it takes about the same amount of time.

>Try AT forums without broadband, ouch ...
If you can read over 2,800 characters per second, you are fabulous. 100 characters per second would be remarkable. No wonder you require broadband.

I have an external modem and I can only get a maximum of 28800bps over these lines. When Anandtech is slow, I can see by the modem lights that nothing is coming over the telephone line. The receive light is off. In other words, it has nothing to do with 28,800; Anandtech is not sending anything.

How do I get around waiting for page downloads? I have two (or many) windows open. I read the page I have while another is loading. I can't read that fast that I could have to wait.

I'm not that big on porn and warez myself, but I can see that it obviously has more appeal than the pathetic drivel and insipid tripe that passes for "multimedia" content on Internet sites. For multimedia to have real appeal, it needs creativity, and there is not that large a supply of genuine creativity at the low fees paid for internet content (or CD content.) There is no great need for creativity either; just give me the info without the BS.

10-100M downloads? I can't stare at the computer 24 hours a day anyway. I normally sleep a night. I schedule the downloads for convenient times, or download in the background. You can do this with those free utilities that resume downloads. You can "pause" any time you want. Over 1G is a pain. But this is mainly because the sites that have the ISOs are jammed and won't let you on, or will only give you 1000bps. Bandwidth costs them money, and you are not paying them.

 

[GTaudiophile]

My dad won't jump onto it until it's at least $20-$25/month. Everyone here in Atlanta offers it at $45-50/month. While I may pay that when I'm out on my own, it's simply too expensive for him to justify.

 

[WyteWatt]

Some areas and Calf. and Wash. state have high speed internet at 10 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speed for $25 to $50 a month. I guess it just depends. Some of the people who have it in Calf. get speed of 8000 Kbps something download and upload on a speed tests. Someone else who was in calf that posted a speed test got 9000 Kbps something download and upload. In some parts of NY,NJ, and CT they have OOL cable modem isp at 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload. But high speed internet isps are starting to put per a day and per a month upload & download caps. Cox.net has already and it said the same thing in Terms of Agreement as OOL's Term of Agreement said. Then they added like the next day the download and upload limit per a day/month on their website. So i guess OOL could do it to if they think its a good idea but i don't think they will. But people could always go DSL if their cable isp tries to pull that. Some areas like Utah has 100 Mbps download and upload speed i believe and its around $40 to $60 a month but i think it may have a download and upload limit per a day/month.

 

[murphy55d]

When cable was available here, it was the same for me as it was Technonut. The price I was paying for *gasp* AOHell and the 2nd phone line, it was practically the same price for a much faster cable connection. It's had it's share of outages and stuff but so did AOHell.

Well worth the change.

 

[WyteWatt]

OOL at 10 Mbps download speed and 1 Mbps upload speed is cheaper than 2 phone lines or about the same. Most OOL users get 8 to 9 Mbps download speed and 800 to 900 Kbps upload speed. Some of the high speed internet isps of 10 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload are cheaper than two phone lines too. Heck both OOL and the high speed internet isps of 10 Mbps download and upload are like the same price or only a few dollars more than what everyone pays for dsl or other cable modem isps but at a whole lot less speed. The best thing about OOL now is that i know it does not have any download or upload limits which i don't know about the 10 Mbps download and upload high speed internet isps in calf. and wash. I rather have no download or upload limits rather than have faster upload speed but who knows the others may not either which would be really good.

 

[CrazySaint]

Originally posted by: KF


10-100M downloads? I can't stare at the computer 24 hours a day anyway. I normally sleep a night. I schedule the downloads for convenient times, or download in the background. You can do this with those free utilities that resume downloads. You can "pause" any time you want. Over 1G is a pain. But this is mainly because the sites that have the ISOs are jammed and won't let you on, or will only give you 1000bps. Bandwidth costs them money, and you are not paying them.

I dunno about you, but when I download a file, I like to have it in a few minutes instead of sometime the next day...or week.

Also, you may think that having broadband doesn't have that much affect on regular surfing, but I can tell you that when I have to use a dialup connection, it feels slooow.

And again, there's the issue of online games...

 

[WyteWatt]

I downloaded a 640MB linux iso in 39 to 45 mins. People on OOL downloaded a linux iso in 15 mins. Plus the other two took me the same amount time for me. So three linux isos took me maximum about 2 hours and 15 mins. Where the OOL users who downloaded 3 linux isos took 45 mins maximum. Its very easy to find fast download severs!

 

[smp]

What I want to see is wireless broadband. Forget about all these cables and stuff. I want to be able to go to a park and sit in the sun and surf the web and download stuff out in the sun.

 

[draggoon01]

Text

Gates also showed off portable, cordless monitors that could be used in the wireless networks that are increasingly popping up in homes.

Smart Displays, which would start at $999, are flat-panel monitors that detach from a desktop and can be moved across the room. Like the Tablet PCs released earlier this month, their screens can be used as a writing surface.

But unlike the tablets, Smart Displays would not be stand-alone computers. They would store data on and use the computing power of a regular desktop computer running Windows XP Professional.

maybe larry ellison was onto something. first monitor/keyboard/input terminals on local scale, then on wider scale through wireless broadband. wouldn't something like that fit into msft .net strategy? then in future, you just buy a smart display, subscription to wireless broadband, and subscription to msft os/apps.

anyhow smart displays would be nice for noise reduction (since you can put a noisy system in closet somewhere) in future at reasonable price.

 

[WyteWatt]

Smp why would you want to download stuff out in the Sun for so long? The Sun can give you skin cancer.

 

[gf4200isdabest]

From a technology standpoint, broadband has been realized. Furthermore, it has nowehere to go but up.

From an availability standpoint, it leaves a lot to be desired. There are plenty of areas that either can't get DSL or Cable or can get slow bogged down Cable.

My bet is on the future being wireless. They already have wireless connections that can go as fast as 48GB/sec. The economy sucks now so the new technology isn't being developed but when it recovers we should see a lot of exciting wireless broadband technology that isn't Satelite (ewww...56k uploads....)

 

[SithSolo1]

I got it for multiplayer games a.k.a. Counter-Strike, nuff said. It was only $10 more a month and its atleast 20 times faster than dial-up so why not?