While others across the industry battle it out over 10-gig claims, Google Fiber is looking to go bigger, plotting the rollout of a symmetrical 20-gig service for select residential and business cus | The service will use Nokia's 25G-PON gear and initially be available later this year as an invite-only product.
Why are people doubting this? This opens up massive possibilities for people, especially those who want to start businesses outside of city centers.
You could:
host your own home-servers and never be worried about bandwidth
get 8k streams and not stutter (a low-end 8k stream requirs 50Mb/s, a family of 4 would need minimum 200 Mb/s just for videos)
send 8k streams and not stutter
offload most of your data to a datacenter on the other side of the planet and not worry about access speeds
offload computing to the cloud (no need for a gaming PC if you can just play them online)
The biggest thing would be 8k streams. 360 8k streams would be even crazier. 360 videos are filmed using 3-6 cameras depending on how much fish-eye you want. True 360 requires at least 6. If each is filmed at 1080p that’s ~6k total resolution, but since you’re only watching one section of the video at a time, you’re really seeing 1080p.
Those “8k 360 videos” up on youtube are a lie! They aren’t 6x8k, but most likely
8k / number of cameras. True 360 8k video would be 6x8k cameras.A single 8k stream at minimum requires ~50Mb/s. Multiply that by 6 and you’re at 300Mb/s just for a single 360 8k stream. Family of 4 –> 1.2Gb/s just for everybody to watch that content - and that’s the minimum. If you have a higher bit rate and aren’t streaming a 30 fps, you can quite easily double or quadruple that. Family of 4 again means 5Gb/s if everybody’s watching that kind of content in parallel.
But this is just the beginning. Why stop at “video”. These kinds of transfer speeds upon you up to interactive technologies.
It would still not be enough to stream 8k without any compression whatsover to reach lowest latency.
8k = 7680 × 4320 = 33,177,600 pixels. Each pixel can have 3 values: Red Green Blue. Each take 256 (0-255) values, which is 1 byte, which means 3 bytes just for color.
3 * 33,177,600 = 99,532,800 bytes per frame
99,532,800 bytes / 1,024 = 97,200 kilobytes
97,200 kilobytes / 1024 = ~95 megabytes
So 95MB/frame. Let’s say you’re streaming your screen with no compression at 60Hz or about 60 fps (minimum). That’s 60*95MB/s = 5,695GB/s . Multiply that by 8 to get the bits and you’re at 45,562Gb/s which is way above 25Gb/s. Hell, you wouldn’t even be able to stream uncompressed 4k on that line. 2k would be possible though. I for one would like to see what an uncompressed 2k stream would look like. In the future, you could have your gaming PC at home hooked up to the internet, go anywhere with a 25Gb/s line, plop down a screen, connect it to the internet and control your computer at a distance with minimal lag as if you’re right at home.
In conclusion, 25Gb wouldn’t allow you to do whatever you like. You could do a lot, but there’s still room. We’re not at the end of the road yet.
20 gig networking — even just a switch — is so expensive. 10 gig is already out of reach for 99% of the population, even network nerds. We’re just now in the past couple years seeing a standard of motherboards with 2.5gbps rj45. A lot of brand new nvme ssds can’t saturate 25gbps. There are just so many bottlenecks. I’m not saying I wish dearly those didn’t exist, but I know from my experience upgrading to 10 gig just how many there are.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-switching/products/usw-pro-aggregation
Personally I am more excited for high speed networking for homelabs to come down in price. At this point in my life I don’t feel the need to access my network outside of my house at super high speeds. My 100mbps up is fine for when I’m out of the house, and 10gbps is more than I need when I’m home.
Indeed. I’m getting much less than 1/10th of my provisioned 10Gbps for being cheap like that. It’s still plenty fast, though.
10Gbps is great for feeding a building
At this point I just want affordable 2.5Gb gear
Totally. IMO 2.5gbps should be in every new switch and router without any extra price.
Gigabit came out in 1999. No other standard has moved so slow.
Wouldn’t they provide you with a 20Gb compatible router? I was curious and cat8 LAN cables support 40Gb/s. They are 3x as expensive as Cat7, but with I’m just a few meters away from the router, so about 10-15€ and that’s the cables done.
Ah… the PCI-e ethernet card is where it gets pricey 😮 250€ for 10Gb card.
Damn…
Although, I’d be future proof for sure. That kind of speed will probably be enough for 20 years or so.
FWIW 10 gig cards can be much cheaper than 250€ as long as you’re willing to use SFP+ (I got a used pair of cards with a 10m optical cable for $90 CAD) but 25gig is where it gets stupid.
Even if they do supply a capable router, you will probably want at least a switch since most ISP supplied routers only have a few ports. Plus, it’s not uncommon for an ISP router to deliver their advertised speed over only one port, even if the router has several. At the end of the day, though, if you’re paying for >gigabit you probably want to set up your own firewall with a fancy router so you can properly configure your network.
Crazy that gigabit Ethernet is 25 years old and still the de facto standard. IMO we should all be able to afford 100gig inside our homes, finding the bottleneck inside our machines, not between them. Alas, 10gig is for the enthusiasts, and anything above that is for the elites.
Yeah, man. Thank God someone is finally thinking about the family of 4 simultaneously watching 8K 120Hz 360 degree streams.
Also,
bandwidth isn’t the same as latency. This would not let you remote control “with minimal latency,” it would be exactly the same as it is with say 20Mbps download.
lossless and visually lossless compression dramatically reduces the amount of bandwidth required to stream video. Nobody will ever stream uncompressed video, it makes no sense.
If you want to know what an uncompressed 2K stream looks like, look at a 2K monitor.
Again, just because it isn’t being done yet, doesn’t mean it won’t be. Every time technology progresses, we find new and interesting ways to fill the new space created by it.
Nobody thought it would ever make sense stream games over the internet with Nvidia Go (or whatever it’s called), but it’s being done. Nobody thought it would make sense to turn a browser into a nearly full operating system, but that’s about done.
Genius, why didn’t I think of that. Thanks for pointing that out.
Wow, I had no idea! I bet a 20Gb line won’t get under 1s of ping. There’s absolutely no way.
Unless you can live very close to one of the data centers doing the computing to minimize the number of hops, that just isn’t even remotely doable with modern networking equipment
Google tried it with stadia and gifs like this show why it doesn’t work for most people
There are people on the internet with about 2-3 ms of ping. I’m not a network engineer to tell you how that’s even possible, but I’ve seen it. I’m on 15ms to most game servers right now on a copper line.
Google Stadia failed for different reasons. Nvidia Go (or whatever it’s called) still exists. Just because I have a shitty copper line doesn’t mean fibre will be as shitty.
Am thinking that in somewhat near future network boot will become a lot more dominant than it use to be. Infrastructure speeds are becoming sufficient to do somewhat longer boot but at the cost of significantly simpler administration and issue troubleshooting.
I’m just doubting Google will actually get it done. They’ve already abandoned fibre expansion once, no reason to think they’ll stick to it this time around.