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[PATV] Wednesday, May 30, 2012 - Extra Credits Season 4, Ep. 15: Spectrum Crunch
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Extra Credits Season 4, Ep. 15: Spectrum Crunch
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/spectrum-crunch
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/spectrum-crunch
This week, we discuss a major bandwidth problem we're about to run into.
Come discuss this topic in the forums!
Geth on
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Would improving the cabled broadband infrastructure so there are more short range wireless endpoints be any good?
this is the scariest thing I've ever heard! why aren't we screaming our lungs out about this?!
Screaming won't sort anything out just yet. Best to stick to brainstorming.
Time to invest in undersea cable!
Well, it's somewhat less imminent, but it's definitely still an issue - that's why traffic shaping exists. There are far more options for fixing it since it's about quality and quantity of infrastructure rather than the scarcity of a medium. But upgrading the telecommunications backbone is disruptive and expensive, so it's quite possible that the exponential demand could seriously outstrip the speed of improvement (it's been a topic of occasional news scare stories here in the UK for a few years now).
OTA gets treated like an anachronism, but cable TV is the anachronism. With OTA I get the programming for free, and it is paid for with commercials. That still makes sense. With Cable you pay a lot for accessing to the programming, and the programming itself is mostly paid for by commercials with only a few cents if anything coming from the cable company (except for ESPN which gets something like four dollars per user month). It doesn't make sense to pay for "access" to television channels when most of us are also paying for high bandwidth internet. Bits are bits and it doesn't make sense to pay $60 a month for internet bits and then another $60 for tv bits.
Partially. There is no reason to panic on the technical side at all. Growth in the actual technical bandwidth available is not stopping, and it doesn't rely on the use of new spectrum. (The easiest example you're familiar with is WiFi: 802.11b gave you 11Mbps, then g gave you 54Mbps, and they both use the same 2.4GHz channels.)
Here's where it gets tricky:
Cell phones, television, etc... either can't upgrade their use of a particular band due to legacy support (imagine if everybody with an older phone suddenly couldn't use it, even to dial 911.)
Or, they won't upgrade due to the capital costs of doing so. AT&T's poor service is not due to a lack of spectrum, it's because they like to be cheap bastards. This is further compounded by local laws regarding tower placement and urban blight in some areas of the country.
And here's why we should be screaming:
Squatters.
Fuck squatters, and fuck DC politics.
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