[11216] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: How Long to a Multimedia Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Karl Denninger)
Fri Mar 25 16:07:59 1994
From: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger)
To: tenney@netcom.com (Glenn S. Tenney)
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 1994 00:38:57 -0600 (CST)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <199403240937.BAA29858@netcom9.netcom.com> from "Glenn S. Tenney" at Mar 24, 94 01:36:51 am
> At 11:42 AM 3/23/94 -0500, Walt Howe, DELPHI Internet SIG Manager wrote:
> >What I find missing from the discussions of the attractiveness of Mosaic as an
> >interface via dialups to shell accounts or SLIPs is the unattractiveness of
> >14.4K access. Once you get past the stage of marveling at the graphics, the
> >2 to 5 minute wait between graphic pages, gets old very fast. Mosaic will be
> >nothing more than a curiosity to most people who are restricted to current
> >dialup speeds. The bandwidth of the last leg to the home or office remains
> >critical.
>
> There is another way of looking at the problem for which your last sentence
> was an answer...
>
> Mosaic was not designed to be a commercial product. Mosaic was designed
> for a university lan running at Ethernet speeds. What has, and always will
> remain critical, is the well thought out experienced design that balances
> performance and features against the needs of the consumer.
What Mosaic needs is a new graphics protocol that starts out very rough and
fills in the detail as time goes on. Then you can select the detail you're
willing to wait for by either waiting or not.
In this fashion it becomes adaptive to the available bandwidth, and images
are just "coarser" as the speed of the link goes down.
However, GIFs are not suited to this kind of thing. JPEGs are somewhat,
with some modification (dynamic quality enhancement? Now there's a useful
extension to JPEG format!)
> So, instead of your answer that bandwidth is the critical need here, I
> maintain that industrial-grade well designed software (and protocols) are
> the underlying solution. I believe that Mosaic (internally especially)
> would be very different if it had been designed for 14.4kb instead of
> Ethernet speeds...
It would then suck on Ethernets.
No, what is really needed is a protocol which is adaptive yet allows the
consumer a choice of resolution (and delay) based on what is going on.
Mosaic is slow, but not useless, over a dial-up. On a V.FC (28.8) modem
its not bad at all -- that's what I run at my home, and its a very viable
option.
At 14.4kbps I think its too slow, yes. Then again, with the bandwidth
realities of the Internet (and the terminal sites) it can be nasty even on
a T1 + Ethernet link (it all depends on the <server>'s available power and
bandwidth too!)
--
--
Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.COM) | MCSNet - Full Internet Connectivity (shell,
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