[Gllug] To LLU or Not to LLU?

[Peter Corlett]

On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 12:45:55PM +0100, Richard Jones wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 01:34:47PM +0000, Peter Corlett wrote:
>> Could you explain to this bear of little brain why a residential property
>> requires gigabit Internet access,
[...]
> (1) Cut carbon emissions and pollution, and free up the roads and air, by
> allowing far more people to work at home. To do this effectively requires
> really good quality (high bandwidth, low latency) video conferencing
> services.

This seems to work just fine with Skype, even on 400kb/s uplinks.

[...]
> (2) Put the BBC archive online, free to UK households. The BBC archive
> contains vast amounts of entertainment and educational material which goes
> unseen.

The archive is mainly in SD, which requires a bitrate of a few megabits. The
main problem is that the BBC doesn't actually completely own all of the
material and can't put it online. Purchasing the content outright would be
prohibitive.

An archive of the last seven days programming is also already available via
iPlayer.

> (3) UK universities should both broadcast live and make available their
> old lectures online for free. The technology exists to do this. Why not
> let interested people study at home?

Imperial College already podcast some of their lectures. They're encoded at
about 500kb/s. Also why "should" universities make their valuable lectures
available for free, given that students pay a lot of money for that service?

> (4) The future we don't know.

> Current always-on broadband enabled Linux, Wikipedia, blogging and social
> networking, YouTube, Twitter, Skype, collaborative document editing,
> Flickr, TheyWorkForYou, online storage & backups, .. to take off.

They have *already* taken off, and they all work just fine on a bog standard
ADSL line.

> In the future, I don't know, but it will be equally dramatic. Maybe people
> will collaborate in their spare time to make films and music? Or we'll be
> able to have thousands of people meeting virtually to discuss politics
> directly with their MPs?

This already happens.

>> and how the killer app that requires this expects to cover the cost of
>> building-out all the infrastructure and ongoing maintenance?
> The UK hasn't been afraid of capital projects before: canals, railways,
> roads, airports, all cost billions (or the equivalent of "billions" at the
> time). All brought huge benefits.

So, basically, the killer app is high-definition video. Whoop-de-doo. We
already have perfectly good Internet video and are not limited on the
applications. So all a bandwidth upgrade would be is to improve the quality
of the video. But will it really make a drastic enough difference to be
worth spending billions?

And never mind the bandwidth to the edges, if you're doing anything other
than broadcast or multicast, you're going to require ISPs to massively
improve their core networks. As it is, the cheaper ISPs seem incapable of
feeding BT's last-mile 8MB/s service, so how will they manage to feed
gigabit?

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