You can teach a monkey how to do what you do, but not think how you think. Good programmers are a combination of creative and obsessive, two uncommon traits.

Many programmers have an issue of using the wrong tool because they don't understand the minor differences between two tools. All they know is doubles and ints are both numbers, so they don't care which ever they use, and their decision may not make a huge difference 80% of the time.

Unless you're working on a complex problem that other programmers can't understand in the first place, and the most minute detail is important. Then you find yourself trying to explain to the other programmers that by not doing something, they're now using an extra cacheline and causing a 10% hit in performance on their quad core and a 35% performance hit on a dual socket server.

Kind of like saying North Korean may be a bad place to live, but at least it's not driven by money, like the USA.

Forgot to include the 20/20 for $40/month connection which is good for "HD Video Conferences" or the 70/70 for $70. Nothing special about the 70Mb package, I guess they don't quite recommend it for Web hosting, like they do the 100Mb package.

Ha! My ISP clearly advertises that I have a dedicated connection where "speeds never go down or change". They even recommend that I can Web Host with my 100/100 connection at home. Should I take them up on that?

This is why we need more competition in the USA. I'm lucky here in the midwest in a rural area where Charter doesn't care.

Laws, regulations, and policies are written around "broadband".

Yes, it's like the Raspberry Pi of bandwidth.

Connections typically don't work well past 80% utilization for one reason or another, so you need a 25% buffer, so 12.5Mb for a sustained 10Mb/s. 5Mb/s average is what's required, you still need to wait for buffering. At this point, your Internet connection is at 100% usage with only two video streams, what about other stuff that's going on? People do like to multi-task. I can't remember the last time I sat and just watched a movie. I usually just stream them in the background and watch them on another monitor between.

The main issue I have with low bandwidth is it has a mental cost that you have to think about what's going on, all the time. What if water was so scare that I had to worry if I'll have enough to drink, if I wash my hands? I hate worrying. Internet is a critical communication tool that is nearly a requirement for anyone working in modern society. It's nearly important as electricity. Whole businesses can shutdown without it, people's ability to work can come to a halt. The internet should work like a light switch, it should just work and I shouldn't have to micromanage who is using it, when they're using it, or how much they're using it. It's not just a personal cost, it's a huge social opportunity cost.

Don't like living in North Korea, then leave. It's so simple! Who would have thought?!

What's it like living in Africa? Getting by with little to no Internet, they're doing just fine, by some definition of "fine".

Says the person with no children.

Fiber 10Gb to the home is rolling out in the USA, but $400/month for now. NG2-PON is 10Gb. Each port is 320Gb, WDM'd in 32 lambdas of 10Gb each for 32 customers. Google Fiber is NG-PON, which is 40Gb WDM'd into 32 lambdas of 1.25Gb each.

They need to define it as what will be useful for the next 5 years. Changing the definition doesn't happen every year. With more an more remote services, even healthcare, is starting to happen over the Internet, what kind of connection does one need?

My insurance just started to offer free 24/7 doctor consultations over video. This way you can skirt paying a co-pay for an office visit if all you want is a doctor to look at a mole to tell you if you should go in to get it further looked at. But guess what, you need to be able to stream 720p+ if you want that remote doctor to be able to clearly see your issue. You can still talk to the doctor for free, but describing the issue is not the same as the doctor getting a high def video.

QoS in IPv6 is not meant to be used on the backbone, it is meant to be used on an internal network and gets stripped at network borders. The values in the QoS field has no established convention. Strict QoS is bad. Traffic shaping is much better. Categorize your traffic, then place each category in their own queue. Set how much bandwidth each queue has.

Congestion itself really isn't that bad. The problem is congestion and buffer bloat go hand-in-hand most of the time. Codel is a great active queue management that helps fight buffer bloat by having a target latency and punishes heavy users by statistically dropping their packets more often than others, causing heavy data streams to back off. It does so in a way that keeps TCP streams from synchronizing and allows very good link utilization.

Getting codel deployed into more network queues is the first step to making the Internet more responsive. The next step is to figure out a better way for TCP to handle congestion control.

"guaranteed service with a 5 sigma" and "getting service with a 5 sigma" are two different things. Bad things eventually happen, but it shouldn't happen that often. "lose connection from time to time" should be something like no more than 3 unscheduled events per year.

In the past 8 years of having broadband and living outside of my parents house, I've had maybe 6 times where the Internet went down while I was using it. Since getting fiber several years ago, I've had the Internet go down twice, one was when they were completely rearchitecting their internet network with a new core router, and something went wrong and their 4am change over turned into 6am. The other time was when their legacy DSL network took a direct lightning strike, which required them to restart their DHCP servers, causing all established IP addresses to become invalid.

A car analogy is the average user should not have to worry about their brand new car not working, on average. We need lemon laws. A robust communications network is vital for any society or economy to thrive.