Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives. Even a low speed connection in a rural zone can achieve wonderful things.
But I really wonder what was your prototype that needed that speed connection and that wouldn't work with something slower. Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work?
> Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work?
We work with gis/satellite data. Nothing groundbreaking technically, but we aggregate it into products that are useful for social science researchers who aren’t comfortable with or don’t have the computing resources to use this data by themselves.
I was surprised when my parents had 1Gbit in 2009.
I was delighted when I could get 500Mbit in 2013.
I'm slightly miffed that I don't even get 1Gbit in 2022.
I literally laugh at providers attempting to convince me to get whatever with 10 or 20Mbit uplink speeds, in 2022l Yes, they exist.
Anyhow. What's insane about a 10Gbit uplink? I wired up my apartment for 1Gbit in 2001. I've been frustrated about home network speeds for 21 years. I do not understand why you consider 10Gbit insane.
At home you are free to make everything 10G-capable, have a NAS that can saturate such a link, etc.
On the wider internet, few resources are happy to dedicate such bandwidth to you, even if you can consume it. Not even every popular torrent can muster so much incoming bandwidth.
I can see how it may make sense if you run a popular public server from your home; maybe more convenient than colocation, but still is not a typical use case.
I feel the same. I am an übergeek, but I see no reason to pay for more than 100Mbit/sec, but 1Gbit and (soon'ish) 10Gbit will be available. Where I live, 100Mbit/sec is laughably cheap. I get a sales call once per month: "100Mit/sec is so slow! Would you like a upgrade?" I have no use for it. That said, I view myself as the exception to the rule. Please don't read this post as "1Gbit+ is useless" -- only that I don't have a use.
Real question: If you are an Internet gamer, I assume that latency per packet is lower for 1Gbit+ connections, so it is useful for many customers.
More: I feel the same about monitor resolutions above 4K. Anything above 4K on a 27inch monitor makes no sense for my body size / sitting height. I cannot use a vertical monitor taller than 27inch, and above 4K is too small for my aging eyesight! Again: I am sure there are many interesting applications for 4K+ and 27inch+. I hereby wish good luck to all the whippersnappers who will prove me wrong with interesting applications of 4K+ and 27inch+!
You can look at it as too much for anyone's needs, or you can see it as enabling tomorrow's applications. Looking back, or looking forward.
Back in the dialup days, nobody in their right mind would run a torrent, or play online shooters, or watch streaming HD video -- such things were utterly impractical over ultra slow links with very high latency. Once people started getting broadband, these applications started appearing.
Of course we need faster links into people's homes. Of course under-1Gbit links into homes in 2022 are ridiculous.
I have 1Gbit Virgin in the U.K. and that speed us still very rare here. Any faster and I’m going to have to be searching for a better USB NIC in order to actually utilise anything. Most consumer hardware seems to still be 1000baseT so how would you utilise anything more than a gigabit connection unless you have 10+devices all working at maximum capacity? Also I rarely max it downloading anything at all, is there some sort of special internet somewhere that you can download stuff at 10Gbps?
Finally, can your SSD even keep up with speeds like this?
**Oh and I thought I’d note, it is the positive use of “insane” like “mad good”.
> I literally laugh at providers attempting to convince me to get whatever with 10 or 20Mbit uplink speeds, in 2022l Yes, they exist.
Meanwhile here in Silicon Valley, the fastest connection I can get at home (sonic.net) is 22Mbps/1.7Mbps. In the office I have Comcast Business which is a bit faster (don't recall exactly) but certainly well below 100Mbps.
So yes 1Gbps sounds quite insane. 10Gbps is out of this universe.
I have 100up/50down (mbps, not giga) at home, and its the fastest I can afford. If money is not a concern then it can go up to 1gb, but not in my area yet. I can barely saturate my line unless I'm donwloading something big.
I can think of two things. Large time series data for large areas with a lot of attributes like temperature or other atmospheric data or a huge amount of point clouds or comparable 3D Data.
SAR and multispectral imagery. It’s not difficult to work with when you’re only dealing a small and well defined regions, but the bandwidth and storage requirement definitely increase once you start doing daily global composites.
We’ve actually moved everything into a data center with a 1gb connection. The trade of being that we have several orders of magnitude more storage and computing capacity.
It’s crazy because among friends I’m the only one working with geodata (remote sensing, too) and the last few days I keep stumbling upon people who already do some work in the same area and are probably much more advanced than I am. Good luck with your endeavour!
25Gbps is not insane if you are using commodity hardware. If you are buying any sort of datacenter switch, most likely it will be 25G/100G already.
10G/40G is dead tech.
Now, 400G uplinks are still pretty reserved, but 100G (and its' breakout, 4 x 25G) is common as dirt now.
Are there any small (affordable, energy-efficient) switches with those speeds? Say, around 8-24 of the 25G lanes? You can buy a dual-port SFP28 card for 250 EUR by using the QNAP "accessory"[0] which is just a ConnectX-6 Lx EN with a fan to work in the NAS systems they market it for.
This is quite efficient due to the PCIe4 support not hogging many lanes (half of the 8 lanes can be enough depending on usage), but to use the speed one needs a 25G switch. Is the cheapest way just an Ryzen with 5 of these directly attached to the CPU, and running routing on the CPU via DPDK?
MikroTik is a market leader in barebones 10Gbit/sec routers. However, multi-port 25Gbit/sec is very expensive! This model is 2800 USD and has 12x 25Gbit/sec
and 2x 100Gbit/sec ports: https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq
I'm sure there's >10Gbits of 'gis/satellite data' available every second if you want it?
Or what if you want a bunch of historical data for some sort of analysis, and you'd like to start that now, not next week when it finishes downloading? If it's historical (i.e. sitting there available to download) then faster is always better right? If your connection is the bottleneck then all else equal why wouldn't you want it?
(I imagine 10Gbps is about the point currently where it's not necessarily going to help going faster on your end, unless you you have multiple (concurrent) sources, or know that even at that you're still still the bottleneck.)
GIS and remote sensing has you working with gargantuan TIFF files and massive amounts of other kinds of data. It's a whole thing. If you're doing data aggregation, it's possible that without an absolute unit of a pipe just to do a download of imagery, the prototype wouldn't have been feasible.
This is term is commonly misused as it originally referred to countries beyond the Cold War's NATO/USSR denominations. Today the parent likely refers to a country in the global south or a "developing" nation.
I'm from what used to be a third-world country in the strict sense of term, I'd now refer to my country as a country in the global south.
It isn't as much as a replacement term, but you make a fair point that is doesn't translate well. It is both jargon and a loaded concept, which can be confusing when taken literally and without understanding what it aims to represent.
Funnily enough until they said their country was such, I assumed they were American saying 'global' South to distinguish from meaning a South American country.
'Southern hemisphere' is fine though I think? And I assume that's what was meant.
If they meant it as a replacement for "third world" (in the contemporary sense, not explicitly about the cold war), then they didn't mean anything to do with south as a direction.
It isn't a geographical denomination, but rather socioeconomic and political.
Most of the countries in the global south denomination are actually in the northern hemisphere.
Is it south of some reference point (here in Maryland it looks like I’m south of Turkey and around the same as Beijing). Is Australia excluded? Or is it just a euphemism for developing nation.
There is not as it does not refer to a geographical designation. I wouldn't say it is a euphemism, but closer to what people actually refer to when they misuse the term "third-world".
The closest geographical designation was the Brandt line drawn in the 80s showing a north and south divide in terms of global wealth distribution [0].
Like I mentioned in my top-most comment, "developing nation" is what people typically refer to. As to your comment, I was pointing out that "global south" is not a euphemism for "developing nation". I'd say it is the other way around and in a misguided way. This is because the global south/north designation intentionally distances itself from terminology such as "developing nation".
I understand if this comes across as pedantry but the global north and south terminology does a better job at leveling the playing field when talking about wealth and progress disparities.
As per your other question, Australia is part of the global north, China is part of the global south in the global north and south groupings.
>I understand if this comes across as pedantry but the global north and south terminology does a better job at leveling the playing field when talking about wealth and progress disparities.
I mean... but how? It's just the exact same concepts with less intuitively obvious words. Arguably it frames the disparity as a more immutable part of a nation; it doesn't fit normal language patterns to talk about a country moving north/south.
> I understand if this comes across as pedantry but the global north and south terminology does a better job at leveling the playing field when talking about wealth and progress disparities.
How? South Korea, Japan, and Singapore are richer than France or Spain now. As nations develop the geographic terminology makes less and less sense. Developing nation is much more accurate.
> In other words, effectively developed = what we are, developing = trying to be what we are.
That’s the plan, yes.
> Ultimately it is forcing a finite game onto the world.
Global south sounds like a better term.
Except that it’s geographically inaccurate as well as kind of racist. Japan, Singapore, and Korea can get richer than France or Spain, but they still get lumped in with the other non-white people in “the global south.”
> Japan, Singapore, and Korea can get richer than France or Spain, but they still get lumped in with the other non-white people in “the global south.”
Global south/north divide lumps SK, SG and JP into the north. I have a bigger problem with it putting Russia there, but not e.g. Argentina.
Besides, note how the term "developed" sounds like it has an objective, final and fixed definition, but always invites moving goalposts. Now you use some financial metric. Tomorrow someone uses education levels or democracy.
**
The truth is that everybody should keep developing, and development can entail different things to different people. If you say "I'm developed, and that other person is developing", "we are good, but they are not good yet", all you get is resentment when in fact you want global cooperation.
"Developedness" is a vague, subjective measure that indicates duck all except hubris on the part of whoever coined the term (not coincidentally, that was developed countries).
A vague measure warrants a vague term. "Global South" is far from perfect, but it is less bad. It is obviously geographically inaccurate, which on a meta level is quite fitting.
I don't think I could ever use either term without air quotes, but at least with global south they are more or less implied.
> Global south/north divide lumps SK, SG and JP into the north.
Only if you arbitrarily make exceptions for what’s “south”—ignoring the fact that Singapore and Taiwan and Korea are south of China. The phrase itself implies a permanent association between “south” (I.e. non-white, since skin color is a function of latitude) and “under-undeveloped.”
That seems far worse to me than acknowledging that developing countries are indeed trying to become like developed countries.
Korea is hardly south of China. Regardless, the term is not supposed to be geographically correct, and to me it is a feature. It's a vague subjective term, as if it's been designed for people to think twice before using it and make their point using a more precise metric instead. That's why I think it's better than "developing nation", which is just as arbitrary but tries to hide that.
What is the measure of richer? By median income, Japan and South Korea are slightly richer than Spain but poorer than France. They are higher by GDP per Capita, but I don't think that is a very good measure as it completely ignores extreme income inequality and would list several oil rich nations very high even though only a few very wealthy at the top benefit.
Not the person you are asking, but in Eastern Europe we also call our countries "third world"; I learned in the middle school about economic development and classification by that, it was nothing to be ashamed of. Even today being in EU we are considered second class citizens, not a problem with me.
It's an outdated term. I recommend reading Hans Rosling's book Factfulness where he addresses a lot of common misconceptions. If anything, it's fun to take the tests and compare where you are against the rest of the world.
It’s colloquially used to mean economically underdeveloped/developing countries. However recently economists have begun using the term “emerging markets”.
Anything working with (downloading) massive datasets would 'work' slower, but as fast as possible (provided the supplier can keep up too) is better?
Add in a requirement/desire for it being real-time (or equivalently (you'd get further and further behind) continual) and it could be necessary if large (per second) enough.
This. In a developing country, zero internet/mobile to email/mobile SMS has a huge economic impact for farmers who want to check prices in local market. Scale up to 1Mbit via 3/4G, the economic impact is equally enormous for a variety of reasons.
> Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives.
Being from a soon north korea 2.0 to be (russia,) I can say it was my surprise to see Internet being so bad across the developed countries when I was travelling in the previous decade. Canada - ridiculously expensive traffic, Germany - no comments, UK - sometimes good, sometimes 128kbps DSL, USA - 20mbps DocSis everywhere
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, much of Africa had FTTH as the dominant way of home Internet connection for a while.
A lot of it is down to those countries being early adopters of telecom infrastructure. It meant when a lot of other countries were wiring up internet for the first time, they weren’t faced with the prospect of having to piggyback existing and aged infrastructure. eg in some cases they could leapfrog copper almost entirely and jump straight to fibre.
>in some cases they could leapfrog copper almost entirely and jump straight to fibre.
I visited Nepal several years back. They were going straight to wireless. All of the villages in the mountains had a solar panel on their roof that they used to charge their cellphones and there was a cell tower on the ridges.
It was surreal to see villagers use Facebook but have no road access to the main city.
Politicians in "old world" countries explicitly decided to stick to existing copper infrastructure instead of rolling out something better. These countries like to pretend corruption isn't an issue for them, but then you have asinine decisions like this.
In Canada it is down to our telecom oligopoly, which our government protects by (a) refusing foreign competition and (b) installing industry heads to run the consumer protection regulator, i.e. allowing the oligopoly to capture the regulatory body.
In actual fact, our telcos were heavily subsidized during their formative years, granting them a monopoly, rights of way, and helping to pay for their infrastructure. In return for a guaranteed profit margin, we had extreme control over their pricing structure and guarantees of service quality and coverage.
Then we allowed them to be privatized and deregulated, in exchange for which we get fucked. Which is, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, the inevitable outcome of converting public services to private.
Govt created monopolies are bad whether they are public or private. Private is worse because money is removed as profit, not just reinvested.
Privatisation is good if competition is fostered at the same time. For example by opening existing physical infrastructure to multiple service providers.
Where I live we had (historically) one fixed lined govt provider. When mobile arrived we got 3 private providers. With fibre we got multiple hardware installers (ie multiple companies digging fibre) and then dozens of ISPs running on that.
As a German I weep and cry. 25Gbit/s seems so so far off. And I live in a major city. I only get 150Mbit VDSL at the moment. I have no cable connection so one of these to get the theoretical 1Gbit/s download is out of the question.
The maximum speed available at my London address is 35 mbps download and 5.5 mbps upload. It hasn't changed in the seven years I've been living here. The best mobile connection I get is two bars of 3G unless it rains.
My previous address was stuck at 8 mbps dowload and 0.25 mbps upload and it will not be upgraded anytime soon because every corner of that street is listed / protected. I literally moved just because of that. Not I won't rent anything without fiber.
We are still creating newbuilds in cities without fiber.
In other news, someone fucked up construction and left an entire complex of brand new apartment blocks with 7 mbps internet
Are you with hyperoptic or community fibre? I’m with the former and see speeds around what you’re saying. I think CF are rolling out 3gbps connections in my area though.
It's not typical for London. Not that extreme anyway. I think our postcode is among 2% or 3% left without a fiber connection. Many others have 100 mbps or so (I try not to look what they really get :)
Gigabit internet is quite widely available through different cable providers in Germany nowadays. Also the country side seems to be moving up, the very rural place where I grew up (and where my mom still lives) had a max of 2Mbps DSL for the last 20(!) years and now the whole area is being upgraded to fibre and will enjoy 10/1Gbps by the end of the year!
I moved into a newly build house in 2014 and was shocked to learn that all the houses only had basic copper telephone lines and Sat-TV. The whole field was empty and they had to do the groundwork for the copper cables anyway. I was shocked when the Telekom person, who connected my then 16MBit/s ADSL contract I had to move with, told me that the next TAL (connection point; Teilnehmer Anschluss Leitung, I don’t know the correct English term) was 5km out and that I will only able to receive 10MBit/s max. Netflix HD was blurry and browsing while streaming impossible.
I hear news that it gets better and that rural places finally get faster speeds but as long as I live where I live now I’m bound to VDSL or find enough neighbors who would be willing to ship in to get a Fibre connection.
Just fyi as I know you aren’t a native speaker, it’s ‘chip in’, if you were native I’d assume a typo, probably is for you too, but it’s a phrase easy to mishear and when I was learning a second language I appreciated these corrections.
The drawback is that cable it is a shared medium, so it can be quite bad when demand is high (in the evening) and the upload bandwidth usually is very low.
Lived in Germany for 5 years and cable internet was generally terrible. We had 200/20MBit. But the actual upstream would often be 1MBit. Downstream was better but at many times not great. There would also be regular outages, that would take hours to solve. The only alternative was VDSL with a maximum downstream of 50MBit.
We moved back to NL and have 1GBit fiber, and there has been a short outage once in three years. I know that there are a still a lot of addresses without fiber, but when I last checked the stats, about 50% of the addresses has the possibility to get a fiber subscription. Heck, even my parents who live in a small rural town have fiber.
Yeah the classic argument, but at some point every internet connection becomes a shared medium. It really depends on how the network is setup and where the fibre backhauls start. If the building has older wiring which can only support 1Gbps and you have a bunch of high bandwidth users, then yes it can affect your bandwidth more than using other technologies.
Interesting. In populous areas of the US they use HFC so the cable to your house only services a few buildings, with the neighborhood having a fiber optic back-haul that is shared, but much faster
We have similar situation in Poland. I live in rural area, but quite close to bigger city and enjoy 1Gbps for the last 4 or 5 years.
I wonder how the upgrade might look considering that 10Gbps hardware is quite expensive (and house cabling might need upgrading) and 2.5Gbps/5Gbps is quite new and hard to find router or laptop dock/hub supporting it.
Same as banking. Inventors and early adopters get stuck with "works well enough" old systems and all their deficiencies and limitations. Late newcomers roll out newest and greatest solutions.
But I really wonder what was your prototype that needed that speed connection and that wouldn't work with something slower. Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work?