The future of internet

[marko]

When will the internet be truly unlimited? I know some time in the future people will look back and laugh at us trying to squeeze speeds out of unreliable connections and putting up with providers charging for a service they cannot really fulfil.

At the moment most users pay for a service they cannot fully use, peak time restrictions, offers of up to 24meg when even before the line reaches their property its not capable of offering more than 8meg to that customer.

We've all said something along the lines of,

It's like paying for a full tank of petrol but only receiving 3 quoter of a tank at the pumps.

Paying for the full sky tv package but only receiving  the basic package between 6 and 12.

With more and more of today's media available on line, HD, games and movies (and I mean legal content). Providers can no longer hide behind illegal down loaders as an excuse to slowing down the service.

So, back to my question. When will the average user be able to connect at say....1Tbps and receive 1Tbps speeds 24/7 with no download limit?

5 years? 10 years? Longer?

[hullnet]

My crystal balls says 2022 will be the year! but by then we wont have any real friends, we will spend 12 hours a day glued to our PC's and be intravenously fed, with a colostomy bag being the "in thing" to buy

Its not pretty... lol

[marko]

we will spend 12 hours a day glued to our PC's

God that's nearly me now....If It wasn't for work, I'd hardly ever come off the thing...And I've cut down my usage 

[Hígh Treason]

It'll be a long time, realistically things used to be OK before, back in the early 1990's we had AOL Dial-Up and many other providers and the lines were capable of the speeds you would expect, I even knew one guy that had an ISDN line. ALL of this was with unlimited bandwidth. In Sweeden they have a system known as "The Grid" - a computer network that was capable of shifting several hundred Petabytes a second. I used to work in a building, Tivoli house, we had a sattelite on the roof that had a 10Gbps connection to the internet and was not KC - look where it is, that used to make us laugh a hell of a lot - Here

Edit: Thinking about it more, there were also appropriate services, look at Wikipedia... this should not be on the world wide web and would not have been back in the day, it would have used Gopher as it is mostly textual information, I run a gopher server (gopher://treason.dyndns.org) and there are many more out there - there used to be a hell of a lot more.

All downloads use HTTP now, this protocol is not efficient enough to move large files, originally you would have used a protocol like FTP or TFTP, using HTTP may seem like a small overhead, but when you have thousands of people on it all the time, it will all add up. A lot of Web Sites now rely on PHP when they don't need to (This forum is a fine example) - PHP is a very CPU and bandwidth heavy language, previously CGI (eBay uses CGI) was more common along with various other languages that are not as heavy.

So, what I am saying is that it is not solely the connection that is at fault, it's the whole damn internet for running things the wrong way - and it's not like it saves money either, it's just because "Web 2.0" is for stupid people - I'm not calling people here stupid BTW, especially given as you were the ones that questioned the internet.

[dylan]

I'm not sure I entirely agree. In terms of programming languages, you have to take into account other factors rather than just speed. For instance ease-of-use, support, available applications, security, development turnaround etc... It's horses for courses 

With regard to bandwidth used. Surely that depends entirely on the pages your server-side language is generating rather than which language you are using?

[Hígh Treason]

Oh, I understand full well, HTTP has wider support these days, but I don't know how it got that way, the same goes for PHP, I suppose that would be because a lot of servers uses a Unix-like OS and it seems much easier to integrate PHP on there (it was a nightmare getting IIS to run it and it still doesn't work properly for me) - as for the protocols/services, no idea why they disappeared.

I could be wrong on bandwidth, it's just for my own experience, being a Java/ASP man, I used to have some Java-based forums that used little bandwidth, as did the ASP ones I used, but they were getting a little old and I decided to use some new PHP forums, these have no more graphics but use about three times as much bandwidth, also if more than three users visit at once my poor Intel Atom 330 goes 100% load and freezes the internet connection, this never happened on the ASP and Java forums I used to run on the Am386 and they used to load a lot faster. All the PHP pages I have load slow even over my LAN - I had to abandon them (though I haven't uninstalled them yet as that seems to break the PHP system entirely).

Like I said, just my personal experiences and I could be wrong, especially given my limited knowlege of PHP, but I still think the protocols/services argument is somewhat valid as they were designed for a set purpose and nowadays, everyone is online, and it would be much easier to have support for all of them in one browser. I think some people still use Usenet though.

You know what I forgot to mention? Flash, good lord that stuff is CPU intensive, more to the client though.

[dylan]

Sounds like you might be experiencing the 'PHP is crap on Windows' problem!  

Why not grab yourself a copy of Ubuntu server. Install it on your Atom and then follow this guide: http://tuxtweaks.com/2010/04/installing-lamp-on-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx/

Installing Apache, MySQL & PHP is as simple as running:

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

You should get plenty of performance then

[Hígh Treason]

Lol, "php is crap on windows problem" - I'm guessing that's in the official php documentation

I tried it on SUSE Linux when it was first built (because I like KDE) - I soon ran into problems with that, such as my ADSL modem having no drivers at all (As a result, there was no internet) and even if it did, DynDNS doesn't seem to like Linux (Even tried it in Kubuntu) and there was no support for ASP (Or not in any working form - and I can't really port to any other language). Also, for unknown reasons, I got the "Ip0 Printer on fire" a few times.

Furthermore, that ASUS motherboard was hard enough to get running under Windows 2003, never mind with Linux which seems to upset the ExpressGate (That can't be disabled) and the flawed bios that is impossible to update due to the board having no floppy connector and refusing to boot DOS from USB due to said flawed BIOS (Now you can immagine how hard it was to install any OS) - yeah, CD drives don't work, damn SATA. This server will have to go soon anyway, given that I will need a second LAN port for the new ISPs and there is no expansion ports in this one - looking back, I really didn't build a good system at all.

I don't like linux as a server OS anyway, I've never had any reliability from a Linux server and I've never got my VPN working on one (not to mention a bunch of other stuff) - I may be in a minority, but I'm a Windows server guy and I will just carry on with Java and ASP, just means I'll have to put a bit more effort into things. At least I'm not running DOS 5.0/LanTastic with a Coax network any more - which I was all the way to 2006.

Still, I appreciate the advice.

[hullnet]

You think its slow now wait till everything is on the cloud and were back to mainframe style technology! "waiting for server to respond"

[dylan]

Lol, "php is crap on windows problem" - I'm guessing that's in the official php documentation

LOL, no not really I don't believe that PHP on Win is fully compatible with the full range of PHP extensions & libraries however. That said, apparently MS have been helping on out PHP 5.3 to ensure that this revision of PHP works better with Windows (so if you want to run PHP on Windows that may be the version to go for).

I tried it on SUSE Linux when it was first built (because I like KDE) - I soon ran into problems with that, such as my ADSL modem having no drivers at all (As a result, there was no internet) and even if it did, DynDNS doesn't seem to like Linux (Even tried it in Kubuntu) and there was no support for ASP (Or not in any working form - and I can't really port to any other language). Also, for unknown reasons, I got the "Ip0 Printer on fire" a few times.

To be fair, things have come a looooooooong way since then 

Furthermore, that ASUS motherboard was hard enough to get running under Windows 2003, never mind with Linux

In later revisions of Ubuntu, my personal experience has been that it has really good hardware support. I tend to find myself downloading drivers for Windows while Linux 'Just Works'. Recent netbooks/nettops seem to be largely supported.

I don't like linux as a server OS anyway, I've never had any reliability from a Linux server and I've never got my VPN working on one (not to mention a bunch of other stuff) - I may be in a minority, but I'm a Windows server guy and I will just carry on with Java and ASP

There's always something to be said for following what you know I guess. I've done Win & Linux server administration and tend to find that it's horses for courses again. I'd never use Linux for LDAP (why bother when AD is so good?) but on the other hand, I'd only ever use Windows for .ASP based web hosting (because I've tended to find Linux more reliable). I'm put in mind of one severely overloaded Ubuntu Dapper server which I removed recently which had an uptime approaching 2 years. Unfortunately patch Tuesday usually sees Server 2003 needing a reboot or two 

However I'm also aware that Win vs Linux discussion is a bit like Politics or Religion. All I'd suggest is that when you get your new server and migrate your websites to it, take the old one and spend a night playing with Ubuntu Server. You might like it