[opendtv] Re: Report: Desktops slump, mobile systems rise

  • From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 07:59:25 -0400

At 1:59 PM -0400 4/12/11, John Shutt wrote:
Craig,

Little hurdle? You continue to ignore how absurdly lopsided home internet service is. Most home internet service is purposely crippled in upload speed to make more bandwidth in the pipe available for lightning fast download speeds.

Your household network can *receive* HD video streams, but your household network cannot *send* HD video streams. Go to www.speedtest.net and find out what your upload vs. download speeds really are. At Michigan State Univesity, I get 30 Mbps download and 14 Mbps upload. At home with AT&T DSL I get 1.4 Mbps download and 256Kbps upload.

Why would you need to upload HD streams? The only answer is to put them in the locker where they can be shared. And there is no requirement that such an upload take place in real time. This kind of data can be moved in the background over long periods of time.

It's one thing to upload a few chosen images to Flickr or Facebook, but it's quite another to store years and years of high res digital photos "in the cloud." Streaming an MP3 from a vendor's site is not the same as attempting to upload a 2 GB memory card full of stills and videos even at a blistering 768 Kbps (or less!) upload speed. (At my home speed of 256 Kbps, it would take over 17 hours to upload a 2 GB memory card.)

SO?

This is just a persistent background task. It is NO DIFFERENT than any of the online backup services that are being sold today. It may take a while to set up the locker, but once it is set-up, only incremental changes need to be stored. And the whole point with cloud based media services is that you will download new media files to the locker, then stream different versions that are appropriate for each device. If you buy or rent a movie from Apple or Amazon, moving the bits to your locker is either a local server transaction at the data center, or at worst, a high speed backbone transfer to a different data center.


A household server can accept the files as fast as the household network allows, and can still serve images one at a time to family devices anywhere there is internet access, without having to deal with a third party "cloud storage" company. Will you be able to stream a movie from home? Maybe, if it is compressed enough (ala Slingbox.)

All true, and it is highly likely that people who already have home servers or a desktop machine that they use as a central repository, will continue to keep those files on that machine. But they may also back them up in the cloud.

And by your own argument, streaming files from your home server to devices over the Internet will run into the upstream bandwidth bottleneck.


Cloud based backup services such as Carbonite have an advantage in that it doesn't really matter how long the initial backup takes, because it happens in the background, even at 256K upload speeds.

And exactly the same is true for any media centric files you may own. This is one of the main promotional arguments used by Carbonite - gotta protect all of those digital stills!

Regards
Craig


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