When I heard that Google plans to deliver 1 Gb/s broardband, I just keeps wondering, what are you going to use it for? 128MB/s is certainly impressive, I fear my HDD wouldn’t be able to keep up with the speed. (I think the max writing speed for my HDD is 80MB/s, but I’m not sure…)
(To avoid confusion, all speeds from this point is given in xxxxbytes per second, and not in bits.)
The reason I keep wondering is that I’m quite satisfied with my 0.5MB/s connection. Well, of course, some downloads could become faster if I got a faster connection.
But how much will it mean to me in the end? When I download new drivers from nVdia the limitation is clearly on my end, but if I download a file from Rapidshare my download speed is normally around 80KB/s. I admit, I download as a free user, they limit the connection speed until I pay up. (But you will just end up with getting a link to yet another file sharing service in the end, so it doesn’t matter…) But I see this pattern repeat when downloading. When downloading video’s from YouTube I get a speed on about 90KB/s (but it changes quite a bit). MegaUploads normally gives me ~350KB/s, and about the same with Mediafire. (All these numbers are rather rough though!)
The point is, that even with a 0.5MB/s connection I often experience that many servers aren’t able to deliver such speeds. I have even experienced a server which I could only download with ~10KB/s most of the time. (and yes, just loading the pages was daim slow…)
I have really nothing against the speeds though, I just let it download in the background anyway. I just keep asking, if I already experience many servers that aren’t able to deliver speeds of 0.5MB/s, how many can deliver a speed that is 256 times as high?
Secondly, a normal webpage is normally under 512KB. That would take a second with my connection. A second is longer that it might sound, but it still isn’t that much. If you have a loading time on 0.25 second it probably wouldn’t be that noticeable. So a 2MB/s connection should be enough. But I suspect a lot of new factors appears now that wasn’t noticeable before. The time it takes to actually connect with the server, time to process the request, all kinds of things I don’t know anything about to be honest…
Compression?
I fear that insanely high speeds in the future might remove the focus on developing new and better forms of compressions. Because the speeds are so high, people wouldn’t pay attention on the file size of homepages and other shared contents. No one tries to do it efficiently, as long as it works it is fine…
But of course you can say, what is the point of using a lot of time on making it efficient if it isn’t going to help any in the end…
Ahh, I shouldn’t really worry that much about it anyway…
In the end I would rather just have a higher upload speed, a thing many broadband companies prefer to hide in a dark corner in the basement. I don’t upload that often (but I tend to do it more often now because of school assignments), but 64KB/s isn’t that much. It is 1/8 of my download speed, honestly why should it be that slow? It is not like it will be that expensive for the broadband company to raise it a bit, when people really isn’t using it that much?
Is it really worth it?
Of course it doesn’t hurt to have a download speed of 128MB/s, but lets face it from differently. Let’s say you pay A for you current speed B and if you want, you could get a speed of B*X if you pay A*X. In other words, we imagine you could raise you connection speed by raising you cost by the same amount.
To take an example, I pay about 170DKK each month for a speed of 0.5MB/s. If I wanted a speed of 3MB/s, I would need to pay: (3MB/s) / (0.5MB/s) * 170DKK = 1020DKK
It is a quite crude way of calculating the costs and it will probably give quite high results (which is the point). But never the less, according to that model, how fast a connection would you be willing to pay for?