What's this 'we' stuff White Man?
It's somewhat lazy for you to raise this issue and not clarify really early on that's it's mostly a problem for Americans (created by Americans!) and also not mention how other nations have already solved it.
Great Britain and South Korea have already shut down analouge TV and switched to digital broadcast; freeing up a massive amount of bandwidth. Tech solutions are available in the form of phased array antenna technology, which allows you to broadcast 100x more data, as long as it's in a hundred different directions.
These solutions do however require expensive infrastructure investment, which Americans tend to loath. (Until it's built...) The real question isn't 'how do we solve this' but 'which solution do we go with' and 'how will we pay for it'.
Very interesting topic - but I'd like to know how global an issue this is. Japan has been pushing the forefront of wireless technology for some time now and I'd be curious to know how much the issue affects them as well (I am really unfamiliar with the FCC and how much international influence it has) and whether or not they've been looking for solutions already.
Anticarrot, maybe you should actually get your facts straight before coming down on the "white man." America has switched to digital broadcast. Problem is, analog or digital, the companies are still using the same frequencies. Great Britain and South Korea are one thing, but they're a lot smaller than the United States. The US covers a HUGE amount of land; that's why we're cautious to build new infrastructure, because it needs to cover a large amount of space. Similarly, any solution we would have to implement would have to handle the huge workload of however many hundreds of millions of people would be using it. Big country, bigger problems; as arrogant as that sounds it's the truth.
Yeah, I think there was a little mix up here when talking about wired vs wireless communication bandwidth. Wired bandwidth shouldn't be trivialized but there isn't really a crunch on wired communication.
I don't quite see the problem here. Like others have said, just use wired communications for the more demanding stuff like games and video streaming. God forbid we clamp down on the smartphone usage.
I just discovered Extra Credits three days ago. I already ate all four seasons. This show is fantastic, well thought, well prepared and, better of all, high quality.
Thank you for all the effort and excellent work you put in this show. It's not usual to find a show about games that is so respectful, so interesting and so thought-triggering.
My sincere admiration to you, from a guy that is more interested in the storytelling than in playing. Keep up the great work.
Greetings from Argentina!
Here in Belgium, Telenet, a ISP company seem to want to remedy the situation (probably unknowingly) by opening up a small part of their (paying customers) home networks. The deal is: When you open up 10% of your 2.6MB speed wireless home network to others sharing their home network, you can go online on any Telenet Home network (at 10% speed, but still enough for simple data transfers)! check it out: Telenet Homespot > http://telenet.be/3425/en/residential/internet//wifree
Steve Perlman, the creator of OnLive and Quicktime and a few other things has, I believe, an answer to this problem: Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output (DIDO) wireless technology
If you have a limited number of fixed width slots to assign to individual connections in a radius limited only by signal strength, you cannot just add more slots, or divide slots up further without interference. For example, the human eye can only distinguish "colors" within a range of values from the frequencies on the visible spectrum, meaning it cannot distinguish individual colors out of the millions of colors available on the typical screen today. As a result the tolerance band at each frequency requires a range of frequencies to avoid interference i.e. false recognition of one "color" that is too close in hue to another "color".
The bandwidth is not a single frequency, but rather the band - width or tolerance around the frequency. This band is necessary to avoid crosstalk, collisions and network congestion. When network specialists discuss Bandwidth, they're not usually talking about the band-width, but the throughput of data or "volume" of data carried on that band of the frequency range.
To clarify, with digital signals, packets of data from each device using a frequency band can be bundled with an ID which allows more than one device to share the same frequency band. This creates congestion and can cause dropped packets, collisions and lost connections. Having a number of frequencies available on the spectrum allows more and more devices to be connected to the host, provider or cell, reducing congestion and improving service.
Just as the eye is limited in it's ability to perceive the the specific frequency of each color, modern wireless technology cannot isolate a single frequency. By similarity, when you "Tune" a radio, you can some times pick up the signal at .1 or even .2 above or below the specified frequency of the broadcast. Which is partly due to the nature of frequency generation, partly due to harmonic noise always present when generating radio waves, and partly due to the ineffective capability of the receiver to actually find and lock onto the individual signal accurately.
The easiest solution to the problem is to limit the range of transceivers and add more cells, but even that will eventually fail, as it is possible to have millions of little tiny devices all competing for the air waves within a confined region as small as 1000 feet. There are wireless internet, blue tooth, cellular, wireless phones and other wireless devices all competing for the same range of frequencies at the same time, some with stronger signals, some very weak, but all trying to run on the limited spectrum at the same time.
Ultimately, we need a different model for wireless communication, which does not rely on frequency, amplitude or harmonic values in the available spectrum. Remember, without revolutionaries such as Marconi, Bell and research teams like DARPA we would only have smoke signals, flash lamps and telegraph for distance communication.
I watch this show every week, love you guys keep up the good work. this week however i felt i needed to understand why this topic deserves the fire alarm you gave it. I agree that we should all understand the physics of the situation, and get involved with community/governance to preserve public access to what is essentially a natural resource. It's just that you make it sound so apocalyptic.
by way of analogy, remember the clock speed ceiling for processors a few years back. that was never broken. 2-3 Ghz is about what you can get on the consumer market even now. Everyone said that we would not get faster computers until we solved the heat problem. well we never really solved that problem, but we have faster computers. by adding cores and being clever about threading and frequency modulation, even jumping to 64 bit helped a little. this is exactly how we should be thinking about spectrum crunch.
The truth is that although we have finite spectrum, we have sufficient bandwidth if we are smart about it. the scarcity is only a factor when in the air and at large distances. so absolutely worst case we use wire. or put up more wireless nodes with lower transmit power. we could always be more clever with how we manage the data transfer protocols and access delimitation, since depending on the carrier network overhead can be 30-50%. the FCC regulation affects commercial distribution of products made to operate on certain frequencies at or above certain output power. there is a lot of room around that to give us all plenty of juice to keep us all guzzling away until the end of time.
If your service provider cannot sustain your level of consumption the answer is not to bow your head and apologize for being a consumer. You should complain, campaign, and change providers. especially in the US where service providers intentionally avoid modernizing their infrastructure until the last possible moment to maximize profits.
We need to vote with our dollars, and choose the service providers willing to invest in the most modern approaches, hire the best minds, and encourage others to do the same.
Thank you for all the years of providing what is imho the best weekly webcast on the internet.
Well I don't have this problem as I haven't jumped on the smartphone bandwagon...well that's not true I have one I just only use it as a normal phone and Australia doesn't have any of those cloud gaming/streaming things without using you own connection and I have that with my LAN based wireless network because we in Australia don't have the wireless internet infrastructure yet I mean the government has only just started rolling out fiber optic cables.
I suspect that the value of having the bandwith for phone companies will eventually result in purchasing the licensing away from TV companies because even staggaring asking prices on the TV companies' part will be acceptable. Even then, we need a better long term solution that will inevitably come in the form of new infrastructure unless we come up with some new technology we haven't considered.
I've been on PA for a long time but this is the first time I've seen PA TV. This is some great stuff.
So much "FUD" in this.
Price is risen because the Corps want to, most of them don't want to upgrade backbone.
Cable != Wireless
Backbone is basically infinite, and short range wireless removes most of the problem.
The spectrum problem is mostly artificial, as said, "getting back spectrum from corporations just sitting on it".
as a technician for a local WISP (Wireless ISP), apparently the FCC is still licensing out frequencies in the 365 range, which is what we are now switching to (licensed 3.65 GHZ Motorola/Cambium SMs) which some people refer to as "4G", though its really WiMax. This bandwidth issue is something i havent heard come up since i began my employment, but it seems as though the FCC is keeping licenses to certain areas seperate, in order to allow for plenty of bandwidth to be available to whoever reserves the licenses. What i can say for sure is that the reserves we use and the WiMax equipment we use is lightning fast, i dont see any bandwidth issues coming up anytime soon...but i can see where we will have issues as we grow, we are already maxing out several of our backhauls, forcing us to purchase more licenses and even add new tower backhauls.
Point is, if the FCC further streamlines its licensing, perhaps more untapped potential could be found?
All of that aside, another great episode, i look forward to seeing more like this
I live in Boston and I spoke to people who work for Comcast and they tell me that their DNS servers are 20 yrs old and can't handle the demands of video all the time so at least once a month people will lose internet access for a few hours. If you have FIOS you don't live in Boston because Verizon reached their goal of connecting 18 million people and they don't plan on connecting anymore. It's a shame because in Hong Kong, Chattanooga, all of South Korea and Dubai have a 100 to a 1000 times faster internet at the same price we pay.
Comcast doesn't want to upgrade because there is no money in it. Like many companies in this country, they seek to get people to pay for a service and then not provide it.
That's the reason why in germany since june 2009 there are no more terrestrial analog tv stations. So the bandwith could be auctioned to mobile carriers, it's hard to believe that germany was faster with this than the U.S.
Also from what I know one way to solve this problem is to create smaller broadcastings cells. It not important to have some view powerfull stations. You need many short distance stations. For example if everybuilding with an telephone line would have a small access point you would have a great coverage and shouldn't have the problem of overloaded cells. At the moment LTE is going into this direction, so i think the carriers could solve this, if and this is another problem they have a good enough backbone infrastructure.
In Britain the terrestrial TV service switchover to digital is currently in progress, and will hopefully help to alleviate this issue somewhat. It's a shame to hear that the US networks haven't been considering the same thing though.
Keep in mind that only 1% of the internet traffic that goes globally is via satellite uplinks. Pretty much everything else is sourced from the huge backbone that serves as the trans american/Atlantic speedway. The problems here are just for the WIRELESS services. If we suddenly had no bandwidth at all (yes I know its a property of matter) the only things that would stop working are transmitting and receiving devices (phones, wireless internet, satellite tv, bunny ears tv, etc). Onlive would still work, just only on WIRED devices. I would really like to see an emphasis put on fiber optic home use cabling, because as a canadian, 6Mbit/s internet is simply not good enough for my computer use.
PCs and MACs are still going to use landlines and on the plus side, no one's going to get stuck in line on a busy hotspot or do impulsive monetization (i.e. in-app purchases)
on regular basis. While the fledgling wireless experience will suffer, it's not bad to hit
on the brakes at some point and actually, given how dominant it's become in our lives in general, that's probably for the best anyway; we can look around and see where we we're headed.
at my hobby flying rc planes we recently had a good development in the use of our radio spectrum when before we used individual channels with a number as an example i have channel #74 then i can fly as long as noone else uses channel 74 at the same time in the area im in
but now we needed more channels and less background noise being interpreted by the plane as actual commands causing it to go crazy they made a new system using just the 2.4 ghz channel. now everyone using it doesnt have to make sure his channel is open because his/her plane is linked to the transmitter and wont interpret anything else as a signal
so its all of you RC plane guys absoulutely destroying our 2.4 GHZ Subscriber Modules signals! Hehe just joking, the only frequency we have issues with is 900MHZ
is wifi affected by this? and i'm sure cabled internet is not affected by this, so why would this be a problem for onlive? you would just need a cabled connection at home for when you want to play the really system intensive games you can't save locally. if wifi is not affected couldn't we just get phone service operators (t-mobile, o2, at&t in america etc.) to start providing more and more wifi hotspots until pretty much everywhere is covered (or at least urban areas) so most of the internet stuff on mobile devices happens through that?
I let out a literal, distinct, and a-little-too-audible "Oh ****" while watching this. I sincerely hope @ShawnManX is right, and the technology is going to work out, otherwise, there's a problem.
I was not aware of this problem until now. I knew there was a lot more of the possible airwaves being taken up, but I didn't think it had already turned into a mall parking lot.
I feel like a solution for this exists but is beyond my realm of knowledge. That is, there must be some sort of alternate source of wireless communication but requires invention of new technology to access it.
@rash92:
You're Wifi at home/work/wherever will not be affected by this, and I wish this point was stressed in the video. This problem only affects things that send data via electromagnetic waves, and since your broadband is probably from either copper wire or fibre optics, it makes no difference.
The point this video was trying to make was that services like OnLive would be great on the go because you can play full, high quality games wherever you are (or at least wherever you get a good data connection). Realistically though, I don't think this is something to worry about right now. I know in Ireland and the UK a lot of bandwidth was freed up when TV broadcasting went from analogue (i.e. rabbit ears antenna) to digital and I'm sure the American networks will do the same at some point.
The harder issues for games like that are stuff like battery life on phones (because you'll drain it pretty quickly even with most of the processing done elsewhere) and getting data fast enough and consistent enough to make this all playable (and given how spotty data can be now, that won't be possible for years yet).
@cian93:
Actually Wifi is affected by this, but in a slightly different way. If you live in a place with a lot of other Wifi-networks around, you get the same situation where each Wifi has to share its spectrum with the others. Due to the fact that Wifi-channels are overlapping there are only three un-overlapping channels (in the most-used 2.4 GHz band): 1, 6 and 11 (and in Japan 14). So Wifi works out fine as long as there are max three Wifi-networks in an overlapping area.
I live in Vienna, Austria, Europe and currently I see 11 different Wifi networks on the 2.4 GHz band. What happens here is that, as long as noone else is connected to any of the other Wifis in range, everything is fine and I get my full 32 MBit/s download speed. But as soon as someone else on a Wifi that is on the same or an overlapping channel downloads something my Wifi speed dwindles down to ~10 MBit/s or even less if there are many people using the Wifi. Also the ping goes from around 23 ms to sometimes more than a second!
During daytime hours there is no problem, but in the evening you sometimes can't even watch Youtube fluently anymore, and the lag during gaming gets realy annoying.
To make matters worse there are two things: In Austria one frequency reserved for amateur television runs straight through the 2.4-GHz-Wifi-Band, about from channel 6 to 8. So when our local amateur tv station decides to send a black-and-white slideshow with about 100 times the power of Wifi, all Wifi that overlaps to one of the affected channels is either extremely slow or even breaks down completely.
The other issue is people who use channels that overlap but are not the same channel, since they are even worse than same-channel-Wifis. Where same-channel-Wifis communicate with eachother to time their requests so they don't interefere with eachother, Wifis that only overlap can't do so and just cause interference on the other channels. This is especially bad, since e.g. someone on channel 3 not only overlaps with the Wifis on channel 1 but also with the ones on channel 6.
There is the mostly unused 5 GHz band, but sadly most of the devices do not support it.
Posts
this talk is about one of the possible solutions to the bandwidth problem
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
It's somewhat lazy for you to raise this issue and not clarify really early on that's it's mostly a problem for Americans (created by Americans!) and also not mention how other nations have already solved it.
Great Britain and South Korea have already shut down analouge TV and switched to digital broadcast; freeing up a massive amount of bandwidth. Tech solutions are available in the form of phased array antenna technology, which allows you to broadcast 100x more data, as long as it's in a hundred different directions.
These solutions do however require expensive infrastructure investment, which Americans tend to loath. (Until it's built...) The real question isn't 'how do we solve this' but 'which solution do we go with' and 'how will we pay for it'.
http://images.wikia.com/deusex/en/images/7/75/Aquinas.png
Thank you for all the effort and excellent work you put in this show. It's not usual to find a show about games that is so respectful, so interesting and so thought-triggering.
My sincere admiration to you, from a guy that is more interested in the storytelling than in playing. Keep up the great work.
Greetings from Argentina!
http://telenet.be/3425/en/residential/internet//wifree
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/perlman-holy-grail-wireless
http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf
The bandwidth is not a single frequency, but rather the band - width or tolerance around the frequency. This band is necessary to avoid crosstalk, collisions and network congestion. When network specialists discuss Bandwidth, they're not usually talking about the band-width, but the throughput of data or "volume" of data carried on that band of the frequency range.
To clarify, with digital signals, packets of data from each device using a frequency band can be bundled with an ID which allows more than one device to share the same frequency band. This creates congestion and can cause dropped packets, collisions and lost connections. Having a number of frequencies available on the spectrum allows more and more devices to be connected to the host, provider or cell, reducing congestion and improving service.
Just as the eye is limited in it's ability to perceive the the specific frequency of each color, modern wireless technology cannot isolate a single frequency. By similarity, when you "Tune" a radio, you can some times pick up the signal at .1 or even .2 above or below the specified frequency of the broadcast. Which is partly due to the nature of frequency generation, partly due to harmonic noise always present when generating radio waves, and partly due to the ineffective capability of the receiver to actually find and lock onto the individual signal accurately.
The easiest solution to the problem is to limit the range of transceivers and add more cells, but even that will eventually fail, as it is possible to have millions of little tiny devices all competing for the air waves within a confined region as small as 1000 feet. There are wireless internet, blue tooth, cellular, wireless phones and other wireless devices all competing for the same range of frequencies at the same time, some with stronger signals, some very weak, but all trying to run on the limited spectrum at the same time.
Ultimately, we need a different model for wireless communication, which does not rely on frequency, amplitude or harmonic values in the available spectrum. Remember, without revolutionaries such as Marconi, Bell and research teams like DARPA we would only have smoke signals, flash lamps and telegraph for distance communication.
I hate feeling like there's nothing I can do.
by way of analogy, remember the clock speed ceiling for processors a few years back. that was never broken. 2-3 Ghz is about what you can get on the consumer market even now. Everyone said that we would not get faster computers until we solved the heat problem. well we never really solved that problem, but we have faster computers. by adding cores and being clever about threading and frequency modulation, even jumping to 64 bit helped a little. this is exactly how we should be thinking about spectrum crunch.
The truth is that although we have finite spectrum, we have sufficient bandwidth if we are smart about it. the scarcity is only a factor when in the air and at large distances. so absolutely worst case we use wire. or put up more wireless nodes with lower transmit power. we could always be more clever with how we manage the data transfer protocols and access delimitation, since depending on the carrier network overhead can be 30-50%. the FCC regulation affects commercial distribution of products made to operate on certain frequencies at or above certain output power. there is a lot of room around that to give us all plenty of juice to keep us all guzzling away until the end of time.
If your service provider cannot sustain your level of consumption the answer is not to bow your head and apologize for being a consumer. You should complain, campaign, and change providers. especially in the US where service providers intentionally avoid modernizing their infrastructure until the last possible moment to maximize profits.
We need to vote with our dollars, and choose the service providers willing to invest in the most modern approaches, hire the best minds, and encourage others to do the same.
Thank you for all the years of providing what is imho the best weekly webcast on the internet.
Cheers
I've been on PA for a long time but this is the first time I've seen PA TV. This is some great stuff.
Price is risen because the Corps want to, most of them don't want to upgrade backbone.
Cable != Wireless
Backbone is basically infinite, and short range wireless removes most of the problem.
The spectrum problem is mostly artificial, as said, "getting back spectrum from corporations just sitting on it".
Point is, if the FCC further streamlines its licensing, perhaps more untapped potential could be found?
All of that aside, another great episode, i look forward to seeing more like this
Comcast doesn't want to upgrade because there is no money in it. Like many companies in this country, they seek to get people to pay for a service and then not provide it.
Also from what I know one way to solve this problem is to create smaller broadcastings cells. It not important to have some view powerfull stations. You need many short distance stations. For example if everybuilding with an telephone line would have a small access point you would have a great coverage and shouldn't have the problem of overloaded cells. At the moment LTE is going into this direction, so i think the carriers could solve this, if and this is another problem they have a good enough backbone infrastructure.
on regular basis. While the fledgling wireless experience will suffer, it's not bad to hit
on the brakes at some point and actually, given how dominant it's become in our lives in general, that's probably for the best anyway; we can look around and see where we we're headed.
but now we needed more channels and less background noise being interpreted by the plane as actual commands causing it to go crazy they made a new system using just the 2.4 ghz channel. now everyone using it doesnt have to make sure his channel is open because his/her plane is linked to the transmitter and wont interpret anything else as a signal
i dont know how it is usable in this because i dont know what way internet travels through the air but if you guys would like more info on this here are 2 websites about the ways our 2.4 ghz channel works
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spectrum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-sequence_spread_spectrum
The theory (March 25th 2012)
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/120803-vortex-radio-waves-could-boost-wireless-capacity-infinitely
In practice (June 25th 2012)
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/131640-infinite-capacity-wireless-vortex-beams-carry-2-5-terabits-per-second
I feel like a solution for this exists but is beyond my realm of knowledge. That is, there must be some sort of alternate source of wireless communication but requires invention of new technology to access it.
You're Wifi at home/work/wherever will not be affected by this, and I wish this point was stressed in the video. This problem only affects things that send data via electromagnetic waves, and since your broadband is probably from either copper wire or fibre optics, it makes no difference.
The point this video was trying to make was that services like OnLive would be great on the go because you can play full, high quality games wherever you are (or at least wherever you get a good data connection). Realistically though, I don't think this is something to worry about right now. I know in Ireland and the UK a lot of bandwidth was freed up when TV broadcasting went from analogue (i.e. rabbit ears antenna) to digital and I'm sure the American networks will do the same at some point.
The harder issues for games like that are stuff like battery life on phones (because you'll drain it pretty quickly even with most of the processing done elsewhere) and getting data fast enough and consistent enough to make this all playable (and given how spotty data can be now, that won't be possible for years yet).
Actually Wifi is affected by this, but in a slightly different way. If you live in a place with a lot of other Wifi-networks around, you get the same situation where each Wifi has to share its spectrum with the others. Due to the fact that Wifi-channels are overlapping there are only three un-overlapping channels (in the most-used 2.4 GHz band): 1, 6 and 11 (and in Japan 14). So Wifi works out fine as long as there are max three Wifi-networks in an overlapping area.
I live in Vienna, Austria, Europe and currently I see 11 different Wifi networks on the 2.4 GHz band. What happens here is that, as long as noone else is connected to any of the other Wifis in range, everything is fine and I get my full 32 MBit/s download speed. But as soon as someone else on a Wifi that is on the same or an overlapping channel downloads something my Wifi speed dwindles down to ~10 MBit/s or even less if there are many people using the Wifi. Also the ping goes from around 23 ms to sometimes more than a second!
During daytime hours there is no problem, but in the evening you sometimes can't even watch Youtube fluently anymore, and the lag during gaming gets realy annoying.
To make matters worse there are two things: In Austria one frequency reserved for amateur television runs straight through the 2.4-GHz-Wifi-Band, about from channel 6 to 8. So when our local amateur tv station decides to send a black-and-white slideshow with about 100 times the power of Wifi, all Wifi that overlaps to one of the affected channels is either extremely slow or even breaks down completely.
The other issue is people who use channels that overlap but are not the same channel, since they are even worse than same-channel-Wifis. Where same-channel-Wifis communicate with eachother to time their requests so they don't interefere with eachother, Wifis that only overlap can't do so and just cause interference on the other channels. This is especially bad, since e.g. someone on channel 3 not only overlaps with the Wifis on channel 1 but also with the ones on channel 6.
There is the mostly unused 5 GHz band, but sadly most of the devices do not support it.