DISQUS

Suezanne, as I said in my other comment, I think a lot of it is that it just the way the market is here. But another factor is that there are only a couple of links from Australia to the rest of the world, and the ISPs have to buy bandwidth off these companies that provide the links. FTTH is not going to change this.

I am lucky that I live relatively close to an exchange. When I run a speed test on my ADSL2+ connection, it gets up to around 17,000 kbps. But in normal usage, it is practically impossible to find a server that can send me data at that speed.

Wolfie, when I first got onto SL, I had a 512/128 connection. I noticed a big improvement in SL performance when I upgraded to 1,500kbps. But the difference between 1,500 and 17,000 kbps was negligible.

And fibre won't help with the "classic" definition of lag (latency). It's still going to take so many milliseconds for a photon to travel from Australia to the US and back again.

However, I think FTTH would be a great thing. The actual speeds they are mentioning at the moment are kinda irrelevant. Fibre can theoretically provide unlimited bandwidth - it all depends on the hardware at either end of the fibre. It might sound like a cliche, but I do see it as an "investment in the future".

For example, where I work, we have fibre between the main sites. If we need more bandwidth, we just buy a couple more Cisco DWDM cards, to put on either end of the fibre, and we get another 12 Gb/sec (up to 1.2 Gigabytes/second real throughput, depending on the protocol). That's a lot of bandwidth. And theoretically we can keep adding more and more.

Admittedly this hardware is in the tens of thousands of dollars at the moment. But it's technology. Soon enough, this kind of technology will probably be available in a $200 Linksys router.

As for the actual ISP plans and their download limits, well, I think that's just the state of the market here. A service is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. It will get better. My first "broadband" plan had a 1 GB / month quota. The top consumer plans had 10 GB / month, I think. Now, I actually don't know what my quota is, perhaps 40 GB / month. But I am still paying about the same as I did for that 1 GB plan only a few years ago. When there is a need for the "average user" to download 100 GB / month, the ISPs will HAVE to offer this at a reasonable cost, or... they will go out of business.

"I've always assumed that the "one sim per CPU" meant "one CPU per core", and this Linden post seems to confirm it."

That should have read .... "one SIM per core"

:/

I can understand why people would be upset about this. If, when they reduced the price of these Openspaces, they were only meant to be used as oceans and forests (as they had, generally, in the past), why did they increase the prim count? That seemed to imply that this was aimed at people who wanted a full island which could cater to one or maybe two residences, with some space around them.

It looks like that concept was more popular than they anticipated. I know that I considered it, but that was at the time my general interest in SL was beginning to wane, so I decided not to go for it.

They should offer a "mid tier" sim, at the new $125 per month price, with the increased prim allowance, and also a "low tier" sim, which is more like the original Openspace, with the lower prim count.

And yes, with the non-US currencies diving as compared to the US dollar, it is a bit of a double slug to the rest of the world. If I had been spending, say, $US100 per month on openspace about a month ago, It would have been costing me about $AUD110. Now, with a 66% cost increase, it would cost me $US176, and, with the AUD worth peanuts compared to what it was, that would actually cost me .. what ... $AUD275? .... A 275% increase. Way to go!

Aside from the Openspace issue, I'm also fascinated by what this implies about how much revenue they are getting per server. When talking about "full" non-openspace sims, I've always assumed that the "one sim per CPU" meant "one CPU per core", and this Linden post seems to confirm it.

So, on a single CPU, 4 core server, they are running 4 full sims. 4 x $US295 = $1180 per month.

I work for a corporate IT hosting provider here in Australia. Our "mid-tier" server is an IBM 3650 with 2 x quad core processors. We charge about $AUD250 per server per month (so, currently, about $US150). And we are not using commodity "white box" servers - these are quality machines. The "high-tier" box is an IBM 3850 with 4 CPUs. For that, I think we charge about $AUD400 per month, currently about $US250 - in Linden terms, that would run 16 sims, which would give them about $US4720 per month revenue.

Yes, they have their "asset servers". We do too - we call them "infrastructure servers", and the cost is bundled into that monthly cost. They have bandwidth costs - so do we - we have private fully managed links to Japan, India and the USA. We rent computer room floor-space off a rack-space provider. All those costs are bundled into the per month server charge. It's very similar to LL's model.

Admittedly the company I work for runs pretty close to the bone as far as actually making a profit (by design). But, I find it hard to believe that LL are not making a huge profit, unless they are doing something majorly wrong.

/end rant

Nice interview, guys. Keep up the great work Lowell!

Absolutely my time in SL has been affected. I can't teleport anywhere. I can't upload textures. I can't rez anything in-world.

At least chat is working.

Some people say SL is just a glorified chat system. At the moment, that's all it is.

>:(

What the ????

Time to request a roll-back of the island, perhaps.