On 6/22/11 3:07 PM, Joe Greco wrote:
Your average person cares a whole lot less about what's crossing their Internet connection than they care about whether or not "this works" than I do.
I continue to be amazed at the quality of Netflix video coming across the wire. Our local cable company just recently upped their old 7M/512K normal tier to 10M/1M, and is now offering much higher speed tiers as well, which isn't going to be discouraging to anyone wanting to do this sort of thing.
What still dismays me is the pitiful low upstream speeds that are still common. Not because most people want to run servers or host content at home (they don't), but because they want to share content with friends and the user experience can be greatly enhanced with symmetric speeds. Sharing those HD videos or 1,000 pictures during party weekend is less painful if it takes 10 minutes to upload rather than 10 hours. Also, things like GoToMyPC and "back to my Mac" are end user experience things that are best served by not using horribly low upstream speeds. I can understand that a decade ago most people were still sharing content offline, but dare I say now sharing online is becoming more common than offline.
I guess the most telling bit of all this was when I found myself needing an ethernet switch behind the TV, AND WAS ABLE TO FILL ALL THE PORTS, for
Internet-capable TV set Internet-capable Blu-Ray player Networkable TiVo AppleTV Video Game Console Networked AV Receiver UPS and an uplink of course. 8 ports. Geez.
That keeps striking me as such a paradigm shift.
I was talking to one of my friends about when we wired his house a while back. When he moved in we wired the crap out of it - we put Ethernet ports in the kitchen, behind the sofa, everywhere. The one place we didn't put anything though was behind the entertainment center. We put it lots of coax and wiring for surround sound, but at the time it never occurred to us to put Ethernet there. Of course, now there has to be without question. ~Seth