In my "personal life" I've been growing steadily frustrated at the lack of Internet bandwidth available. At least for me, even the most elementary exchanges of media are now hampered.
Take for example photo sharing. I find with a modern DSLR it's typical to use 2 gig of memory for still images on a family day out. On returning home, it's still a pain to upload that 2 gig (for backup and sharing). Yet globally speaking and certainly in comparison to my many friends in the USA, I'm lucky having 20 meg symmetric FTTH (26 EUR/38 USD) in Ljubljana where I've been residing the past year. So if I'm struggling and that's with personal usage, I can't imagine the pain and limitations others are experiencing.
If we go from sharing/backing up photos to doing likewise with video, it's like the world has ground to a halt. The best size I can get each camcorder tape is 12 gig (1080i, HDV). It's pretty impossible to share nor backup online. Even if i upload it, I find that pretty much every potential family recipient are on much slower connections and with insane capped usage (like 1-2 gigs/month).
I'd accepted that sharing/backing up the DSLR photos was a pain, that sharing of modern camcorder footage (i.e. 1080i or 1080p) is near impossible and bought a fairly cheap "snap-and-share-life" type of device, a Canon IXUS 110 IS. It fits in your shirt-pocket, takes reasonable photos and records pretty nice looking video at 720p. But I find a typical day out with that in my pocket, I eat up around 3 gig. Again not easy to backup/share due to bandwidth.
When traveling I find the issue of bandwidth to be so bad, 80% of my activities are curtailed. Take tonight for example. The Crowne Plaza that I'm staying at has an arrangement with SwissCom to provide WiFi, as do a number of European hotels I've stayed at over the past few years. I paid the unbelievable price of 88 EUR (130 USD) for 7 days of "business class" Internet. It said unlimited data and indicated high speed. Once past the paywall it popped up a counter showing I had a 256 meg (!) upload limit which would have been a deal-breaker as the file I needed to upload tonight is 1.2 gig. Added to that the transfer speed is around 150 kbps. Far too slow and no chance I can do online backups either.
Now if I turn from personal usage to required Internet usage around eComm. Each event has generated around 260 gig of video (22-25 HDV tapes) and 24 gig of audio (WAV). There is simply no way to transfer this today over the Internet. For professional processing (colour correction, lighting etc) and then
uploading of the videos, they therefore have to be physically posted on a hard drive
to the video person (who is in the States).
After the European show in the Netherlands I posted a small 2.5" drive to him. Following the advice of TNT I never added tracking. The hard drive never arrived. So I went out last week, purchased another, filled it with t he 260 gig of event videos and reposted this time with
tracking. As you can see above, although TNT charged more than double for the postage including tracking facility and
their site makes a large fanfare of tracking, entering the code simply returns the far from helpful message "Message not found (in main memory)". Right now I'm not appreciating the "
upgraded" track and trace being advertised by TNT nor their "sure we can" service mark.
My conclusion is the debut Europe 2009 show videos will be delayed further as a result. There is certainly a degree of irony when the "Emerging Communications" conference videos can not be posted online due to lack of bandwidth and even when the postal service is used twice to carry the bits, it fails both times. It's clear to me that my personal Internet usage is very problematic due to bandwidth constraints but for "business use" I'm pretty stuck, relying on the slow and fairly unreliable postal service.
I can't be the only person feeling increasing bandwidth pains?
Take for example photo sharing. I find with a modern DSLR it's typical to use 2 gig of memory for still images on a family day out. On returning home, it's still a pain to upload that 2 gig (for backup and sharing). Yet globally speaking and certainly in comparison to my many friends in the USA, I'm lucky having 20 meg symmetric FTTH (26 EUR/38 USD) in Ljubljana where I've been residing the past year. So if I'm struggling and that's with personal usage, I can't imagine the pain and limitations others are experiencing.
If we go from sharing/backing up photos to doing likewise with video, it's like the world has ground to a halt. The best size I can get each camcorder tape is 12 gig (1080i, HDV). It's pretty impossible to share nor backup online. Even if i upload it, I find that pretty much every potential family recipient are on much slower connections and with insane capped usage (like 1-2 gigs/month).
I'd accepted that sharing/backing up the DSLR photos was a pain, that sharing of modern camcorder footage (i.e. 1080i or 1080p) is near impossible and bought a fairly cheap "snap-and-share-life" type of device, a Canon IXUS 110 IS. It fits in your shirt-pocket, takes reasonable photos and records pretty nice looking video at 720p. But I find a typical day out with that in my pocket, I eat up around 3 gig. Again not easy to backup/share due to bandwidth.
When traveling I find the issue of bandwidth to be so bad, 80% of my activities are curtailed. Take tonight for example. The Crowne Plaza that I'm staying at has an arrangement with SwissCom to provide WiFi, as do a number of European hotels I've stayed at over the past few years. I paid the unbelievable price of 88 EUR (130 USD) for 7 days of "business class" Internet. It said unlimited data and indicated high speed. Once past the paywall it popped up a counter showing I had a 256 meg (!) upload limit which would have been a deal-breaker as the file I needed to upload tonight is 1.2 gig. Added to that the transfer speed is around 150 kbps. Far too slow and no chance I can do online backups either.Now if I turn from personal usage to required Internet usage around eComm. Each event has generated around 260 gig of video (22-25 HDV tapes) and 24 gig of audio (WAV). There is simply no way to transfer this today over the Internet. For professional processing (colour correction, lighting etc) and then
uploading of the videos, they therefore have to be physically posted on a hard drive
to the video person (who is in the States).After the European show in the Netherlands I posted a small 2.5" drive to him. Following the advice of TNT I never added tracking. The hard drive never arrived. So I went out last week, purchased another, filled it with t he 260 gig of event videos and reposted this time with
tracking. As you can see above, although TNT charged more than double for the postage including tracking facility and
their site makes a large fanfare of tracking, entering the code simply returns the far from helpful message "Message not found (in main memory)". Right now I'm not appreciating the "
upgraded" track and trace being advertised by TNT nor their "sure we can" service mark.My conclusion is the debut Europe 2009 show videos will be delayed further as a result. There is certainly a degree of irony when the "Emerging Communications" conference videos can not be posted online due to lack of bandwidth and even when the postal service is used twice to carry the bits, it fails both times. It's clear to me that my personal Internet usage is very problematic due to bandwidth constraints but for "business use" I'm pretty stuck, relying on the slow and fairly unreliable postal service.
I can't be the only person feeling increasing bandwidth pains?
