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Comment by Cyder | Hacker News Reader

There's still large areas just 35 miles from DC that don't have high speed internet. The cloud is STILL just for people who never leave the range of high speed internet.

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> people who never leave the range of high speed internet

Which is a vast majority of the US population. I agree that it is important to get broadband access for everyone, but asking companies to hold back services and features until that happens makes zero sense.

On top of that, if you want to drive companies to offer broadband everywhere -- having services people want to use everywhere that require broadband is pretty damn important.

It will have the reverse effect of drawing more people to where they can access those services and away from the areas where access to those services are limited due to inadequate internet services which will erode the motivation to provide broadband to those places.

One of the many reasons urbanisation is trending upwards.

http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/mods/theme_c/popups/mod...

I don't know about that. Here in Kazakhstan many villages gained relatively high-speed ADSL (up to 8 Mb/s, usually 4 Mb/s) in the past 4-5 years. Most of them are not exactly flourishing either: imagine something like Detroit (from what I've seen), but on a much smaller scale. At least it didn't stop them from streaming the trendy Hollywood crap everyone talks about.

First of all, offices virtually always do have high speed internet, which is the primary use case here.

But even if you're working from somewhere else, remote desktop doesn't need "high speed" anyways. It sends intercepted OS-level draw commands rather than bitmaps, so as long as you're not doing Photoshop it's closer to terminal bandwidth than YouTube bandwidth.

For the vast majority of business apps over remote desktop, whether your internet is high speed or not is a complete non-issue.

And the basic latency (e.g. for typing text or clicking a menu) is the same as terminal latency too.

RDP quit forwarding rendering commands some time ago,[1] it turns out to be faster to just send a compressed image. On very low bandwidth links effects are turned off and a limited color pallet is used.

You're still right -- the performance is good, and using normal UI controls you will typically not notice even a very poor connection. But this is because UI changes are an "eventually consistent" deal, and although the Windows terminal services implementation does send bitmaps it optimizes drawing for sending the resulting bitmap. Contrast to scrolling text on a terminal that may not update in a manner that allows you to react to it.

[1]: Somewhere on the FreeRDP mailing list. Sorry :(

Not to mention the fact that just about no program uses the old Win32 rendering commands anymore for anything relevant. They are just far too limited.

> And the basic latency (e.g. for typing text or clicking a menu) is the same as terminal latency too.

If "terminal latency" is the high watermark, it doesn't bring pleasant thoughts to mind. I find typing over ssh to be irritating. Not awful, but a clear downgrade from a local terminal.

Shit, my company is in a 8 million+ people suburb and we pay $5k/month just for guaranteed 50 mbps internet. And we are saturating it too easily as is :/ A gigabit connection was quoted at ~ $80k/month. (The line is already fiber, it's literally just throttling). Which is insane considering that's 12 peoples salary in a year.

Wow, where do you live?

There are large areas 35 miles from DC that have no public sewer or water either. (My parents’ house, for example, has neither, but does have fiber.) But what percentage of the population does that account for? Around DC, very little.

In Akamai’s 2017 report, Maryland’s %-age of connections above 10 mbps (easily enough to do Remote Desktop) was 79%, just below South Korea and above Switzerland. Virginia and the district itself were around 75%, the same as Switzerland.

And, more to the point, some people not having public water and sewerage systems doesn't stop us selling toilets or taps.

Well that analogy doesn’t hold because you still use toilets and taps in those well and septic areas near DC the author is referring to.

You can still use cloud products in areas where there's not fibre/ultra-broadband internet. You just have to put up with a little bit of shit every now and then - much like having a backyard septic!

For what it's worth I used to use remote desktop from across the world on dialup, and it was certainly usable.

I use RDP pretty heavily in low-bandwidth and high-latency scenarios. In the last couple years I've seen a lot more software and websites using "fade in/out" effects that are utterly excruciating. Aside from those the performance is great.

In many cases we've found that RDPing to a system across the country to browse the web was a significantly smoother experience than trying to browse the web locally on that same connection. RDP is astoundingly good at what it does.

This is for enterprises that typically use Citrix as the modern version of X Windows.

uh, where? The middle of the Chesapeake bay?

The area around DC, outside of the suburbs, is quite rural actually.

That’s pretty darn far. Are you trying to say Chantilly? Leesburg? Or more like Front Royal?

Anything beyond Manassas to the West and Quantico to the South, Leesburg, Warrenton, Culpeper, Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, parts of MD to the north past Germantown, etc.

There's plenty of rural on septic systems and well water just an hour's drive out of DC.

umm. not exactly for that audience or people like you and me to be honest. i'd rather gmail at home than office 365...

this is for companies. with enough employees who are building on the microsoft stack and the office suite. god knows we would rather they deal with their updates themselves. and besides, way things are going virtualization is being cheaper than buying hardware...

I live within 15 miles of the main Microsoft campus in Redmond and only have access to shitty DSL. Microsoft has always taken the bet that everyone in the future will have access to high speed internet, but without ever raising a finger to make sure that future actually happens.

Shitty DSL is fine for remote desktop.

That depends on your definition of shitty ADSL. My old ADSL wasn't just slow, it was unstable and would regularly starting lagging out / having massive pings which would then go away and come back. Three years of talking to the ISP and I got nowhere. I now live in an NBN area and get Fibre to the Curb with 80MBPS down, I can now truly work from home.

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