Kenneth Porter <sh...@sewingwitch.com> writes: > On 9/3/2019 5:40 PM, Stephen Hemminger wrote: >> There was a recent Wall Street Journal article that faster Internet doesn't >> mean anything. >> https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/ >> >> I just thought "faster Internet just exposes your existing Bufferbloat" > > I hit a paywall trying to read that so I looked up the article title > and found some interesting commentary: > > https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/08/20/1450204/the-truth-about-faster-internet-its-not-worth-it > > https://stopthecap.com/2019/08/20/wall-street-journal-says-faster-internet-not-worth-it-but-they-ignore-bottlenecks-and-data-caps/ > > Most people are streamers and won't fill a fat pipe. The big winners
The market has shifted. With streaming becoming a thing (instead of bittorrent), ISPs had to ensure that there was enough bandwidth during peak hours across their entire platform to keep users from screaming. Once everybody upgraded to "enough", because the usage pattern had shifted, few want or need more. > of fast Internet are people who want to download a huge game and play > it quickly. But those are rare. (I'm a gamer but I'm patient and can Well in the cases of shared internet, more BW (and less bufferbloat) helps a lot. Small businesses such as coffee shops, etc. But they are a much smaller portion of the market than the home. It's semi-worse/semi-better than that - usage has shifted to people's LTE phones for a lot of things, and they forget to enable wifi. I think ISPs have shot themselves in the foot, perhaps permanently. * By shipping buggy gear and bad wifi * Not investing in good ipv4 and ipv6 technologies * By having bad latency, the user experience is comparable to lte apps * By not allowing services in the home, they've shifted to the cloud Growth for ISPs could come from higher upload bandwidths - and I kind of hope they start marketing "FASTER UPLOADS!" "Great Gaming!" "Killer Videoconferencing!" "Multiple security cameras!" etc - Even a mere doubling of upload speeds helps a lot. ... instead of doing that, some are trying to put on data caps and other barriers to using the oversupply of bandwidth they now have with no demand. Certainly there's a big focus on somehow delivering 4k or higher video - and that's really not very perceptible, just a bunch a bits.... cisco just pulled out of the docsis 10Gbit effort. There's no demand. The demand for (some) fiber exists simply because cablemodems are so bad - and have 5x the baseline RTT as fiber does - and hype. Gfiber and FIOS struggle. Sonic in SF, is doing well, but that's SF for you. "DOCSIS-LL - now with lower RTTs! Buy it now!" > wait a day to play so I'm happy to save money on a cheaper package > that can be used for something else.) I subsist on a really tiny amount of bandwidth, managed of course by cake. > > As you say, when people report slow Internet, it's probably bloat, not > the speed of the package. But faster packages make money for the ISPs. Nobody on the slashdot article chimed in on the bufferbloat front. But whatever. Back in 2012... I thought we'd basically hit "peak bandwidth" at ~40Mbit/user, and we just needed to optimize for RTTs to utilize that always at multiple levels - be that physical rtt on link - or via cdns - or wifi - etc. I'd argued strenously with cablelabs that their benchmarks were wrong - that web page growth was not exponential (avg web page size has only doubled in 7 years) - this is a great resource: https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-the-web#bytesTotal ... that everything was bound by RTT - that a single queue AQM was smoked by fq due to the reduced RTTs on bidirectional traffic... google published a great benchmark about why RTT was so important... https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-performance-bottleneck/ and.... they didn't fix it. Took years to rollout docsis 3.1, which is still only tiny.... better uploads rolled out first which helped on generic RTTs.... Unless usage patterns change - fixing bufferbloat, and back to things like torrent running all the time, or folk migrating services en-mass back into their homes and businesses, I don't see bandwidth related revenue growth for land-line ISPs. Sure, we'll see dsl users continue to migrate to whatever they can, and people jump off of cable as soon as they can get fiber... but that's due to the RTT more than the bandwidth. I do hope - 10 years from now - someone points at what I just said and laughs, showing their 10Gbit home fiber line saturated with brainwave to smellovision full immersion bi-dir traffic, or something like that. And I still hope people get out into the real world into more nice coffeeshops, and hang out. I remember when lan parties were a thing.... _______________________________________________ Bloat mailing list Bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat