this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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22Pb/s FTTH when?
in a few hundred years if ever. I doubt that the average person will ever need more than 1 Tb/s
to give you crazy numbers:
1 second of a raw 32k video with 12bit color at 60fps is around 50 GB/s
Aside from me obviously joking about home 22Pb/s. I'll tell you a story.
In the early 90s. I was gifted a modem. I used it to connect to BBS systems. It had two outgoing call speeds. 300bit/s sync and 1200/75bps. And since I'd never connected my computer to the outside world, the whole thing seemed amazing. Many BBS' had modems that couldn't cope with 1200/75, it was an odd speed. So, I had to swap to 300 for those. But it was still an amazing time. But, file sizes were pretty small. It really wasn't a huge problem.
In the mid 1990s, when I had a 28.8k modem (and later 56k) to connect to the internet (and by the way, paying for the phone calls too). The always on 64k leased line (£1k per month) seemed like a dream. The 10Mbit coax ethernet at the office seemed like light speed. Hell, it was faster than the local hard disk (caching improved that, mind you). I remember in the office where we had an ISDN modem setup, chaining them together to get 128Kbit seemed like light speed. Later we got a 256Kbit leased line in the office, and it was amazing in terms of speed. I actually ran effectively a mini ISP that some of us connected to, to get free internet. It had 4 USR Courier modems.
Then, in 1999 I was lucky enough to be enrolled on a trial. A trial for 2Mbit ADSL. It was amazing, 2Mbit down, 256Kbit up. This was groundbreaking. Web pages loaded instantly. Everything was so much faster. LANs in the office and at home was up to 100Mbit, and that seemed pretty damn fast. We'd be sure we'd not need more than that.
Then, 8Mbit DSL arrived. Again, amazing leap forward. Gigabit LAN became the norm, and again, who would have thought it would be too slow for anything? After all, we were all using hard disks, and they really weren't that fast after all. ADSL2+ arrived with speeds up to 24Mbit, and those of us unable to get the higher sync rates started to suffer the internet being just a bit too slow.
Then we got VDSL and faster cable internet. 80Mbit, 100Mbit, 150Mbit. These seemed overkill for many. But pretty soon we were downloading 4k video and 150GB games onto 5GB/s+ SSD drives. This started to feel slow to some.
Now we're at a place where FTTH 1Gbit is becoming quite common. Many ISPs here in the UK are offering packages with speeds between 2 to 5Gbit/s too. The tech they use is apparently good for up to 50Gbit/s.
Now, with this history of speed increases leading to demand increases. Why do you think it will stop at 1Tb/s? Maybe we cannot currently imagine why we'd need such speeds. But, someone will find a way to fill such connections. Don't limit yourself to just expanding what we do now.
Maybe you're right, but I honestly would never say never when it comes to computing.
I can see many future domestic uses that might need multiple terabytes per sec of speed. Especially everything around AI and machine learning. Imagine your device having instant access to multiple terabytes of a shared global library of machine learning data. Its a bit dystopic but thats another topic.
Another thing you can imagine is being able to play games directly "from the cloud" but processing them on your hardware. Imagine you have an xbox, but don't have any games stored on it. Everything you play is fetched in real time from the server but still processed and computed on your hardware. So you get crisp clear image and visuals but games can now be so realistic that they themselves need 1-2TB of storage to store the whole game. So, with enough internet speed, we wouldn't need to worry about storage space anymore and how big a game is. You just buy the game and click play and play instantly, but still computing the game locally. Or, if you still need to download and store the game, having a game be a 700GB download might be as "casual" as a 5GB game is nowadays (remember when we got shocked that games started to be more than 1-2GB? Now, 80GB is common). And you will be able to download the whole game in a few minutes. Game worlds can be huge and still be downloaded in minutes. Storage is also evolving day by day so 10TB of SSD might actually be kinda cheap in 10 years.
You can also imagine games so complex that they can now comunicate between players huge amounts of data so we could even share the same angle every leaf in a tree is moving to the wind so all players on that server would see the same exact movement of the leaves. The bandwidth is so high that you can actually start to share all of the most insignificant details between a multiplayer world.
You can also imagine Netflix being able to stream 8K 60fps HDR to your phone as easily as nowadays it streams 720p.
Virtual Reality. It needs insane amounts of bandwidth for anything. If you want to share a truly multiplayer VR experience you need all the bandwidth you can get. VR cloud gaming could be a thing since they could now transmit 2x 4K 60fps streams with minimal latency.
These are all casual domestic uses for unlimited bandwidth applications. Don't worry, we will always need more and more bandwidth, because with more bandwidth always comes new tech, and with new tech the need for more bandwidth also increases. Infinite cycle.
Now imagine all of that plus more direct peer to peer connections to get the lowest latency!
that's a good point! I guess I've never personally experienced those extremes you have (I was born in the late 90s), I think my first internet connection was ISDN or maybe the early days of ADSL, because I remember the day my family got 7Mbit and we were mesmerized by how fast it was
640KB of memory is enough for anybody.