stak: I think we're both trying to say the same thing, but even if we weren't, no probs.
;-)
Regardless... I don't disagree that we could use a heck of a lot more bandwidth. Personally, I have a pretty sweet hook-up, but that's not enough. For example, even though I don't watch a lot of TV, there is a show or two (science fiction) that I really like, but they aren't shown here in Denmark. That leaves me with two choices. Either I buy a satellite dish and watch it on a German channel (dubbed) or I attempt to download them from "the web". The easiest way to do that (I'd rather not get into the legalities (or lack of same) of this, I think that has been discussed more than enough on the thread recently) is by using one of the many "file sharing" clients that exist. However, it is very rare indeed that I find anyone who is able to provide even a fraction of the bandwidth I have available. So... basically... I could just as well reduce my own bandwidth by 3/4, since anyone I download from is unlikely to have more.
Cable modem and ADSL is doing some to provide high-speed internet access to the masses, but it just doesn't cut it. It only solves the (admittedly problematic) "last mile" problem. With more and more people signing up for ADSL and cable modem, the bottleneck just moves a tad closer to your ISP.
WHEN everyone has multiple-Mbit/s (min. T2) connections (and the ISP's backbone can support it, which is far from the case now), streaming movies or TV shows in "serious" quality will be possible.
That will change what we use the internet for in a drastic way.... I'm looking forward to it... impatiently.
Maybe the bandwidth needed can be reduced even further by employing even more aggressive compression algorithms. I assume so, but it seems unlikely that anything better (for high quality, high compression) than "mpeg4" will appear in the next couple of years. Heck, even "mpeg4" isn't standard yet (although it is fast becoming just that). One reason may be that decompressing requires >300MHz, meaning that many existing computers just don't cut it. Additionally, the time it takes to compress a video is extremely time consuming. Certainly, these times are coming down, but even with the latest hardware, compressing at real time frame rates isn't quite possible (at least not with the compressors I have seen).
(For reference, with the latest compression technology, it is possible to get a 2 hour movie down to ~ 700MB while retaining a fairly high sound and image quality. To stream this would require ~ 100kB/s, or roughly 1Mbit/s).
-fyo |
