From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Thu Sep 07 2000 - 07:28:42 PDT
Eugene Leitl wrote:
> Jeff Bone writes:
>
> > That's a great question. Discontinuities like that present huge
> > opportunities. IME, though, the "apps" usually lag significantly because
> > people just can't figure out how to do anything but more-of-the-same -w-
> > discontinuous tech, often for years after it appears. A VC buddy of mine asked
>
> I have not noticed that the Net had a lot of bandwidth slack at any
> time in the past.
That's true, but never before have we seen the kind of discontinuity that
fiber-to-the-home is about to give us. DSL has only been widely available for, say, a
couple of years now; in a 2-4 year period, we're going to increase effective
consumer-priced bandwidth by 3x as much as it increased from the period circa
1980-1998. That's huge. :-)
> By the time you will have a GBps to your house, you will complain that
This makes sense from a historical perspective, but you really need to ask yourself:
what are we going to do *next year* with Gb/s? There just isn't enough content, nor
automation, to saturate that. Most of its utilization is going to be passive,
carrying 9 million more pay-per-view channels.
> If I had a GBps to my house right now, I could afford to host magnet
> content at home without fear of being /.'d, I would run a large number
> of community services, irc, freenet, remailers and IP onion routers,
> broadcast several multimedia streams,
So you're going to run a commercial-grade datacenter at home? Linux + Apache + a
single PII can saturate a T1. The reason most people don't run magnet content at home
isn't because they don't have fatter pipe, it's because they don't have the server
capacity.
> participate in real VR,
Software?
> watch TV
> and run distributed thingies, like ALife simulations and participate
> in large-scale molecular simulations,
Again, you don't need Gb for that.
> and running distributed spiking
> codes, pooling mine and my friend's machines. Believe me, if I have
> enough CPU I can fill up even a TBps pipe easily.
I dunno if you can fill a Gb/s easily, much less a TBps. (Who mentioned those? ;-)
>
>
> Btw, by the time I can have 1 GBps at least to my 100 next neighbours,
Later this year, consumer priced, in (oddly the low-rent parts of) Austin and
elsewhere.
>
> and they're willing to let me have their spare cycles for free, and
> this holds globally (so that I can net ~1 million contributors,
> provided the project is interesting enough) the number of GFlops (and
> especially MMX type multimedia OPS) in your average desktop will be
> extremely formidable.
> Foreseeable future is how much? 2-3 years?
Think about the players: we're talking media / cable folks. It'll take longer. ;-)
I'd say end-of-the-decade starts to look more interesting, even though the pipes will
become available end of this year or next. Not to mention that all this new-fangled
shit wrecks havoc with their business models, assumptions, etc. The friction in
getting change to happen is most often business tension, not technical. (Look at
Napster, etc.) (Thought experiment: assume your a cableco. You give every
subscriber, essentially, a Tivo, stationed upstream in your offices. What does that
do to you from a business perspective? It creates tons of biz problems.)
> With email, you're bottlenecked by your eyeballs. You can't need more
> than a few GBytes, unless you only read the subject: lines ;)
>
I've been caught! ;-)
jb
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