Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:
True, the ability to effectively serve content was outpaced by the ability to make harder to serve content. But not anymore! For people with good connections anyway.
Wouldn’t it be great if the FCC (or whoever) forced ISPs to only sell symmetrical service?
It’s not possible everywhere. Copper line physically can’t be for the end user, same with satellite and rural broadband. Fibre is pretty much the only thing that can be symmetrical. Unless you get some symmetrically shit ADSL.
True but we lost 20 years in the process.
The pushing/rolling out tiny upload/ big download ADSL over symmetrical dsl was a deliberate decision on the part of the Telcos. I worked in the telco network space back then.
In the late 90s/early 00s I had a 10m/10m cable connection and was able to host multiplayer game servers from my apartment.
I moved out of the cable area, and it was 20 years before I had 10m upload again. So the game servers died and these days self-hosted multiplayer games are basically nonexistent compared to corp hosted games that shut down when they want you to move to this years version.