
Student's startup promises fast Internet speeds even with dial-up connections - toni
http://www.physorg.com/news150131253.html
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aneesh
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."_

~~~
bprater
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.

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noonespecial
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.

~~~
notauser
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.

~~~
mseebach
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.

------
there
"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?

~~~
ericwaller
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?

~~~
wmf
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.

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nomoresecrets
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"?

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alaskamiller
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>

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

Glad I got out of there when I did.

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timf
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>

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PStamatiou
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.

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nickb
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

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aliasaria
This is absurd.

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

~~~
SingAlong
> _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.

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jdoliner
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.

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sil3ntmac
<http://powerbandinternet.com/howitswork.php>

"Dedicated virtual desktop" hmmmm....

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mikeyur
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.

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ajkirwin
What a crock o'shite.

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jhancock
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."

