Ask HN: Imagine a world with 1Tb/s internet. What would change?
For the past ~10 years, it seems like internet speeds here in the US have stagnated. Probably 80% of places I've been to or lived have been 100Mbps-500Mbps.
I'm curious what things would look like if the internet was suddenly 1000x faster.
Would there be new apps we could build? Would it enable novel use cases?
92 comments
[ 19.1 ms ] story [ 2543 ms ] threadAt this point the main thing that would change is I'd be able to do online backups for TB of data. With 1Tb/s internet I would save a lot less on my hard drive and download ML models and more whenever I needed them. But I just know the remote server I'm downloading from would still throttle me to Mbps to guard their bandwidth.
For non-users (datacenters, companies, cluster systems etc) that might mostly help with distributed storage, but again, you'd also need all the other things, because distributing anything like that also means every piece of the puzzle needs to be able to handle it. Within a datacenter or a public cloud, even top speeds of 400Gb/s (which is less than half of the thought experiment) is at such a high tier that it isn't useful for individual applications or nodes.
Something that would actually make an impact after you get to around 2Gbps would be lower latency, lower jitter, net neutrality (including getting a full connection with no administrative limits), and more peered routes. More bandwidth doesn't really do much, especially if you can't use that bandwidth anyway if the amount of connections, the latency and the computing equipment doesn't scale with it.
When you have low enough latency combined with high enough bandwidth you can start to actually get new apps and also develop novel use cases (imagine a CPU-to-CPU interconnect that can span continents). But the speed of light (or some more exact latency-per-distance quantity) prevents that.
Beyond the likes of BitTorrent and Gnutella we're not likely to see network-based ideas that are currently impossible due to limits on the average speed. Perhaps the real problem right now is the lack of universal availability of reasonable connectivity.
I previously had 10Gbps symmetrical fiber[1], and it was simply impossible to saturate without running a speed test against another customer.
Servers were generally not fast enough to make use of that speed. XBOX downloads would sometimes peak near 1Gbps, but not sustain.
The main issue, I suppose, is that disk drives are not fast enough, or at least, not fast enough relative to their size. You can have 500MBps (40Gbps) hard drives, but your cloud provider has 50-100 customers at least accessing that drive, so your share of the straw is fairly small.
More pedestrian uses can't possibly benefit from such bandwidth either. 4k Blu-rays max out at 128Mbps. I suppose we could have 3D 8k120 streams taking 4Gbps (128*4*4*2). Maybe you can just go uncompressed, so 382Gbps (2*7680*4320*120*48), but that seems like it probably causes more trouble than compressing/decompressing, since it will be rather hard to buffer, and small hiccups will lose huge amounts of data.
In short, I think it wouldn't be substantially different than having a good 1Gbps symmetrical internet. It might allow Stadia like experiences to be really good, but those still have latency issues.
[1] https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/
Worse, my home ISP has pretty bad peerings, so for example, traffic from my home to a data center about thirty minutes drive away (well under 50km as crow flies) ends up going via Ashburn and Washington, which results in RTT in excess of 30ms.
There is so much more room for improvement in latency. Even pinging my friend's house (under 10km away) on the SAME ISP (with a total of 4 traceroute hops, including start and end) takes 3 to 4ms. At 0.6c, even assuming we're both wired to the core of downtown, only 0.4ms of our RTT is actually spent on speed of light. The other ~3ms is spent on packet switching and protocol conversions.
Admittedly, all of these latencies are sufficient for most things that I want to do on the internet, and most users don't start seeing issues for most tasks until they're up in the 100ms+ range. That said, I think there's still more to gain here than from straight up throughput improvements.
To then get to a really relevant latency we have to get to memory reference speeds, 100ns at most. That's 0.0001ms or something like that (might be off by one order of magnitude). But with a 0.6c limit, we're not going to get there.
Like the other comment, having everyone get a much better minimum speed (say 500Mbps) and low base latency (say 1ms at most to the first IX you can get to) would make a huge difference. But to reference yet another comment, you'd probably just get 4K video ads and larger frameworks with less optimisation since the bandwidth takes care of it anyway.
But in that same time, where bandwidth available to me has gone from <100 kbps to >1 gbps, ping has only gone from ~100ms to ~10ms.
The legacy telephone system was actually pretty good at latency, as long as you didn't end up on a crappy GEO satellite link, which dial up never would. After all, voice is actually a pretty latency sensitive application.
That said, our older ancestors would indeed be amazed at sub-second communications. Heck, even airmail latencies would seem insane to someone from before the first world war.
When adding people to a family, food is probably the biggest non-negotiable cost going up.
I’d also expect to see a strong correlation between family size and the percent of meals eaten at home. Going out to eat quickly becomes unaffordable as family size grows.
I would also disagree with the thesis that internet speeds in the US have stagnated. In 2014 I had about 80Mbps. Today I have about 1500Mbps. On west coast cities I see high end condos with access to speeds up to 7000Mbps. Even my friends in pretty rural locations in 'fly over' states have access to hundreds of mbps with the latest federal grants to build fiber in rural areas. In one case I know someone that skipped from 52k to 200mbps fiber, with cable internet never offered to his house.
We have PeerTube now, which does that. Works fine. Nobody uses it, because there's little "discovery". The centralization of YouTube allows people to find your cat video.
However there is also the downside of making high fidelity omnipresent surveillance easier.
I wish I was joking but take the current usage of the internet, and scale up each part. 1TB/s might enable new things, but it's more likely to enable more of old things.
So if you want to max out a 1tbit connection, you would need something closer to 900k resolution.
Probably software wouldn't get better, probably we wouldn't solve the real big problems of our time either.
I also believe we hit a practical wall on this that's observable by the success, or lack thereof, of game streaming.
In a world where there was a lot of savings to be unlocked, things like Stadia and Nvidia's GeForce Now, and Xbox's service, are notable big wins.
They didn't, which has me firmly believing incremental speed past "everyone in my household can stream video at 4K when desired" is an expected end state. That's tantamount to saying "once people can see whatever they want, at a resolution indistinguishable from reality, without delay, there won't be mass desire for increased Internet speeds", which seems intuitive.
Anything requiring greater streaming bandwidth (ex. VR) is highly sensitive to latency, which may have also affected the game streaming use case.
If latency approaches ~0 ms (which requires colocation with peering providers), I could see this sort of bandwidth opening up AR a bit more by effectively reducing compute requirements in such a small form factor, but that's kinda it.
In addition we could send more raw data to the cloud for processing, rather than having it done locally. For example a cheap VR headset with no GPU could simply send raw position and control data to a cloud server, which would stream back stereo video back to the headset with little compression or latency. Or say a large surveilance system could send the footage from thousands of cameras and sensors directly to the cloud without requiring any initial processing on the edge. You could make devices smaller, lighter, and consume less power at the cost of having all the compute done off site.
Now, we share complete video files and music files, whereas before we shared vector-like files such as Flash and MIDI.
What are we doing locally today that could not be sent over our current bandwidth? Is it something that will affect telepresence, like all the 3D data needed to recreate a realistic environment in real time? Is it about more accurate control of remote objects, like drones and robotic vehicles? Maybe it will enable remotely connected computers to be more efficient clusters, taking advantage of unused cycles during off-peak hours.
I think the biggest impact isn't going to be what happens at the faster speeds that happen in best-case scenarios. It's what will happen when mobile devices in areas with poor reception can achieve 1Gbps reliably and consistently.
It mirror current situation with RAM and electron apps. websites would be bloated and unoptimized, there will be GBs of JS/CSS for a single url.
Realistically thinking, I mostly want to better connectivity across the globe(current ISPs speeds are mostly for a given metro or country) and non throttling connections that I fully utilize.
Now, maybe there'd be some novel use case that would come up if everyone (or let's say 80%+) had 2gbps internet, but it's hard to imagine that that's the big constraint for much. Maybe something like virtual/augmented reality could do more heavy processing in the cloud in that case (assuming low enough latency)?
> 6. Ask HN: Imagine a world with 1Tb/s internet. What would change?
> 7. OpenSSH Backdoors (isosceles.com)