Net Neutrality...

Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu
Thu Jul 17 21:15:24 UTC 2014


On Tue, 15 Jul 2014 13:08:58 -0600, Brett Glass said:

> Estimates of the maximum bandwidths of all the human senses, combined,
> range between the capacity of a T1 line (at the low end) and
> about 4 Mbps (at the high end). A human being simply is not wired to
> accept more input. (Yes, machines could digest more... which means that
> additional bandwidth to and from the home might be useful for the purpose
> of spying on us.) What does this imply about the FCC's proposal to
> redefine "broadband" as a symmetrical 10 Mbps?

Actually, vision is higher bandwidth than that - most VR people estimate that
approaching human vision requires a gigapixel/second (at 24 bits or more per
pixel) - and even that needs to play lots of eye-tracking games to concentrate
the rendering on where the eye is focused.  Consider how fast even high-end
NVidia cards can pump out pixels and you can *still* see it's CGI.  Well-shot
4K video of real objects displayed on a good monitor is *just* reaching the "it
actually looks real" level - and that's a hell of a lot more than 4Mbps.

And remember that bits are consumed by more than just one human per dwelling -
you can have multiple people watching different things, and silicon-based
consumers burning lots of bandwidth on behalf of their carbon-based masters.
There's about a half-zillion ways a gaming console can burn bandwidth, for
example.  Heck, the Raspberry Pi under my TV can soak up more than 4Mbits/sec
just doing a software update.

/me makes popcorn and waits for 4K displays to drop under US$1K and watch the
network providers completely lose their shit....
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