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Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

Three things would have prevented streaming from gaining in popularity:

- Slow Internet speeds. This has changed.

- Cable bills not increasing. If cable was cheap no one would care about Netflix. But when it gets around $200/month most people start questioning why they need cable TV. I did and changed my plan to Internet only, and have not regretted it. Cable TV is garbage and it's cheaper to pay $10/month for HBO GO or STARZ rather than have to have a $75, $80, $100 specific cable package and then pay $10 to get it on your cable box. OTA TV has improved and is a lot better than it used to be, at least where I live.

- Netflix and other services not being available on practically anything with a screen and CPU. I think most people who watch Netflix on a computer are broke college students with no other choice or doing so at work, but most are using their smart TV, Roku, game console, or other similar devices.

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Slow internet speeds have not changed for all of America.

But the blame goes back to the cable companies there.

If you're in range of a 4g LTE tower, an mvno data only plan is more than sufficient. The only wired internet available to my house is dsl, and the company could only guarantee 4mb speed because I'm at the tail end of their network. I found ubifi [1] which was perfect as att are the only strong signal around here. Streaming video is no problem, though large downloads such as VM images really suck.

1 https://www.ubifi.net

Internet speeds are higher, alas the latency is still perceptibly there and for the set of games I play you cannot really beat the speed of light: It does matter.

Regardless, what bothers me and many others is streaming games becoming the industry standard due to the DRM benefits and taking away ownership from gamers. That would be really shitty.

You'll be happy to know that the current latencies are about two orders of magnitude higher than what going at the speed of light will offer. That makes me think that we will easily see a 10x improvement in latency in 15-20 years.

you think we'll able to communicate faster than light?

No, the poster is saying that latencies are about 100x the theretical minimum latency due to speed of light, and thinks that will reduce to 10x.

I don’t know if these numbers are true, but poster was not claiming faster than light.

There are several reasons why Internet latency is inflated over direct-route speed-of-light latency. Some reasons may change others may not.

1) speed of light in fibre is 2/3c - unlikely to change soon 2) fibre is laid in the ground on a circuitous route - rarely changes but does happen 3) queueing delay - that's often the main culprit, changeable, but hard (see the buffer bloat debate)

Source to that? My napkin math tells me speed of light across US is ~10ms, my experience tells me latency is ~100ms (certainly not 1s), so that's only one of of magnitude.

You are not going to stream games from the west coast to the east coast. It will be more like a data center in/near your city to your home (..say.. within a 50km radius). Currently, that pathway isn't very well optimized and I routinely see local services having a latency of 30+ ms in the bay area.

I am suggesting this will be significantly more optimized, not how fast you can communicate over long distances.

How do you get two orders of magnitude? Round trip for light is ~150 ms. Using a cable it is slower, so more like 250 ms. Current latencies are only like 2x that.

Even with free space speeds and tunnels through the earth you only get like one order of magnitude.

Why would latency be an issue with streaming recorded video - the subject of the post?

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