December 1
What are the implications of highly asymmetric up/down consumer Internet connection speeds?
- Alan: so, I'm puzzled about something
- Alan: what do you think happens as more and more people get connected to the Internet on connections with massively asymmetric up/down speeds
- Alan: e.g. in my area
- Alan: broadstripe (cable): 6M down / 384k up
- Alan: clearwire (wimax): 2M down / 256k up
- Jeff: uploads get hosed first?
- Alan: only DSL is moderately balanced: 1.5M down / 896k up
- Alan: well, yes - but I mean more generally. it seems like UGC suffers over time
- Jeff: oh, I see
- Alan: and it slowly kills P2P
- Jeff: makes sense
- Alan: and it becomes no better than a broadcast network
- Alan: like the old satellite boxes where you had to plug into a phone line for the control channel
- Jeff: heh
- Alan: I mean, you really can't transmit anything interesting at 384k up
- Jeff: no
- Alan: a half-decent video stream is 3M
- Jeff: what's the solution?
- Alan: I don't know ... I'm just trying to sort through the implications
- Alan: it's sort of like when DSL first appeared
- Alan: everyone talked about the speed difference from 56k modems
- Alan: but the real value of DSL was never speed - it was "always on" that was the real breakthrough
- Jeff: yeah, both
- Alan: 10 years on, it seems like what's really happening isn't about faster internet connections in a real sense
- Alan: it's about a transformation to a broadcast network
- Alan: it implies that one should buy stock in akamai, for example.....
- Jeff: right. hmmm
