Student's startup promises fast Internet speeds even with dial-up connections | Hacker News Reader

Student's startup promises fast Internet speeds even with dial-up connections

physorg.com

17 pointstoni24 comments

At best, this is poor journalism. At worst, a badly misguided company.

> "Downloading that [10 GB] movie onto a "virtual desktop," Pronovost said, would take about 10 seconds."

Really?? I can't even transfer 10 GB onto a flash drive quite that fast.

After finding the following on their website, I don't think I can take them seriously:

"Pronovost diagramed the internet structurally and found the low and high parts of the internet. He concluded by implementing the technology that he had diagramed. He hypothesized that not only would internet speeds be faster than fiber-optics but it would surpass speeds faster than 6gbps, the previous world record for the fastest internet, called “Internet 2” which was created by a network of students at Ivy league colleges."

Agreed, a bit too much chest-pounding for a technology nobody has vetted or even has a demo too.

When you "download" a video to your "virtual desktop", it still has to move bits from the video's source along ole' Internet 1.

1) Get a modem, 56k will do. Connect to the internet with it.

2) VNC a windows machine somewhere.

3) Understand in a new and wonderful way why this is a terrible idea.

Timing _is_ important. For example, even with fast DSL, it takes an hour before you can watch a torrent while stuff on Hulu or iPlayer starts right away. The files are larger, but who cares? Most people are time limited, not transfer limited.

It's not inconceivable that a high bandwidth broker that trans-codes large static files into streaming media (especially if coupled with a quality down converter) would be beneficial for some uses.

However, the bandwidth and computational power required, plus the difficulty of explaining what it did and how to use it, plus the availability of services like Megastic, Hulu and iPlayer, would probably make such a service a good candidate for the dead pool.

YouTube transmits the absolute minimum amount of data required to display a video at your client. The guy and his Microsoft friends can intercept the data all they want, but unless they are lowering the quality of the video, no win.

There are some examples where this will work - long websites with lots of content, pictures and ads - e.g. news organisations etc. The Opera browser on my cellphone runs sites through an image compressor, so I only get a colored rectangle at first, then a very low quality version once I scroll to it, and finally, I can activate a function to get the full pic. It's basically the same thing happening.

Another thing, especially older Wordpress blogs don't rescale images server-side, they do it in the IMG tag - that hurts on slow connections. Unfortunately, fixing Wordpress is already happening.

Congratulations. You've just created a giant seedbox. That's all this is.

Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to stream HD movies (or standard def movies for that matter) over a 56k connection.

So I download my files remotely and have them be searchable by anyone else on the service. Privacy much?

"What our software does is creates a 'virtual desktop,' so your Internet connection isn't used to actually download a file," Pronovost said. Instead, the file is stored "out there" on Microsoft's massive servers. So when a user logs onto his or her Powerband account, the Internet connection merely views the movie or runs the files - much faster than downloading.

wow. what? viewing a movie isn't the same as downloading it?

It almost sounds like he's talking about "lazy evaluation" of downloads. But when is it the case that you download something you don't immediately intend to use?

Much of the promise of thin clients was that the network traffic of displaying the data is less than the data itself. Unfortunately, the opposite usually turns out to be true.

the first thing I'll do is download all the movies on piratebay... then they'll have to rethink that strategy. Technically, they can't come after the user because the user doesn't own the file, it isn't on the user's machine, and the user hasn't viewed the file yet. Seems like a quick way to tank a company.

It doesn't work like that with the right Terms of Service.

You can't get a VPS account or machine on slicehost/EC2 etc., download kiddie porn and pirated movies all day, and try to hold the company giving you the access accountable. It is (or should be at least) just like your ISP agreement.

I don't mean to be rude, but I've seen horseshit that had less horseshit in it.

Anyone else reminded of "Adam's Platform"?

Fresno needs more tech editors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyxc9Pb8sog

I like his website: http://powerbandinternet.com/

I also like how without telling you what you get you just checkout via a PayPal page: http://powerbandinternet.com/products.php?id=2

The copyediting also hurts my brain: http://powerbandinternet.com/howitswork.php

Well, Fresno _is_ the center of the states brain drain.

Glad I got out of there when I did.

Is this targetted at rural users? For $40/month on top of dialup costs, wouldn't an investment in cable/DSL be a better decision... ?

Uploading a lot of data seems like a better problem to attack, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415460

physorg will publish anything (case in point they published a GaTech press release about me http://www.physorg.com/news148062997.html ) and everything so just be sure to look where it's coming from.

Some guy in comments on the site wrote this:

"Brilliant. Here's a better idea: Why download anything at all, why not just let the files be wehere they are? Then you will get an infinite download speed, in fact you dont even need an ISP! "

Hahaahah

This is absurd.

I can't believe the comparison between the Internet and tubes ala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

> This is absurd

This is what I thought as soon as I read it.

Youtube does the samething too. They store the video on their servers and let us view the video. Their flash player acts like the "virtual desktop" that lets me view the video. Still I have to download something on my comp - the steaming video :)

I would actually believe and bet on some other guy who says he going to create a better media encoding format. That would be a better investment of time and money.

Wait their site says that "Powerband is a world-wide fiber optic network." and that it only costs $24.99/month (well it also says $35.99). Are these just lies at this point or has this kid somehow laid fiber optics over the globe since press time. I guess I was out when he laid the line to my house.

http://powerbandinternet.com/howitswork.php

"Dedicated virtual desktop" hmmmm....

The biggest flaw I see in all of this is... you can't download files at 1gbps. It's not that there isn't 1gbps speeds in the world, it's the fact that most datacenters (and by most I mean 99.9%) don't have more than 100mbps uplinks. They have multiple uplinks, but these are usually spread across dozens, if not hundreds, of servers.

You can only download as fast as the server puts out.

What a crock o'shite.

sounds interesting. maybe it has legs.

This part does not: "Like Napster, this can be used extremely badly with the wrong technology," he said. "Right now we have a user agreement that holds each user accountable for copyrighted material. ... The way we have it structured, there are only certain things people will be able to share. It's like an honor system among the users."

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