Unload speed is increasingly a thing.

“Upload speed,” that should say. Apologies.

I suspect one of the next big things for superfast broadband will be virtual reality. For games, work etc. In fact I can see it becoming quite addictive.

my first CAD station cost about £30 grand

My first CAD station was a share of a VAX 11/750 with a pair of monitors that probably cost £30 grand each. When I say a share, I mean exclusive use in the early hours of the morning in order to be able to generate 3d models. A single gear wheel took 30 minutes.

I suspect one of the next big things for superfast broadband will be virtual reality. For games, work etc. In fact I can see it becoming quite addictive.

It wouldn’t take much for stuff like MS Hololens to make augmented/VR working a common reality. Star wars style hologram teams meetings here we come! 🤣

I read about someone during lockdown having team meetings around the campfire in RDR2.

A big change here is now we can run the full collaborative 3D CAD, packaging and clash detection software etc from a laptop at home. As long as you have a fastish fibre connection.
Even 4-5 years ago you’d need a dedicated workstation with a hardwired connection and a graphics card the size of a motherboard.
Yes, the laptop won’t be a basic €300 thing from Argos (more like €3000), but the increase in network speeds means it’s something that both the software company and the customers have pursued, to the point it’s now straightforward.

This, except sub in video ingest/editing.

At the office we had a 300mbps leased line for live feeds and a gigabit line for downloading files. It’ll revolutionize our workflow when we can reliably get that on location in someone’s house.

Star wars style hologram teams meetings here we come!

Star Trek TNG holodeck would be great too!

Star Trek TNG holodeck would be great too!

The porn industry would be all over that.

Which, thinking about it, is the answer to the OP’s question too.

@zilog6128

Are you talking about the Sure Connect flap btw? I have the same one, pretty sure it only needs internet to change settings via the app (will still function if offline).

Thanks, yes. TBH, I didn’t actually test it, the connection went down, the flashing ears on the controller went red and Mrs GB said “we have a problem, no internet, how will the cats get in and out”. Testing it will require a cat that does what you want it to do…

The biggest ‘local devices connecting via internet’ issue I have is my Garmin watch, and the Garmin app which needs an internet connection to download GPS tracks from it. That’s going to be a pain on a 2 week wilderness trip.

Are you talking about the Sure Connect flap btw? I have the same one, pretty sure it only needs internet to change settings via the app (will still function if offline).

Why do all these things need a remote server somewhere to work?

I quite fancy being able to individually turn on/off the radiators in my house with wifi TRV’s, but the concept that in order to do that the data has to be sent from my phone, to a server somewhere, and back again just seems bonkers. I don’t want to have to drain, spend £100’s on new valves and refill the CH system each time the manufacturer does a SONOS or NEST and obsoletes it all on a whim.

If it’s all on the same network, why can’t it just talk to the ip addresses?

Why do all these things need a remote server somewhere to work?

short answer – convenience/ease-of-use

long answer – they don’t necessarily need a remote server but they do need some kind of server. In the case of wifi TRVs, they probably don’t have any intelligence of their own so need to be told what to do. You can’t use your phone as the server because presumably, you want them to also work when you’re not around! More expensive systems e.g. Wiser have a hub which acts as a server, so you don’t need internet access even if you use the phone app rather than their controllers.

If you’re interested in locally-controlled smart tech, I run a home-server called “home assistant” which is free & open-source, and very lightweight (can run it on a Pi). I know that the Shelly brand WiFi TRVs can talk it to directly (rather than via the cloud) once everything’s set up. It can’t necessarily control every WiFi gadget locally – there either has to be a published API or similar, or someone clever has to reverse-engineer it (in the case of the cat flap) – but it does open the door to a lot more locally controlled stuff. Also, it allows you to control everything from the same app on your phone/tablet/browser window rather than needing a separate app for every different device.

If you’re interested in locally-controlled smart tech, I run a home-server called “home assistant” which is free & open-source, and very lightweight (can run it on a Pi)

I’ll look into it, ta 👍

I quite fancy being able to individually turn on/off the radiators in my house with wifi TRV’s, but the concept that in order to do that the data has to be sent from my phone, to a server somewhere, and back again just seems bonkers.

The problem is that if you want to control things in your home from outside your home, you have to start opening up ports in your router and allowing remote access to devices in your home. Cheap end point devices aren’t very hardened and are easy to crack and act as a bridge into your home LAN, so you basically end up putting everything online even if you don’t realise it!

However, your home router will allow outgoing traffic to a central server and corresponding return traffic once your LAN has established the connection in the outward direction, so using a 3rd party server in the cloud (not your LAN) means its easy for your phone to talk to it and you don’t have to start opening ports in your firewall router.

It’s much easier for the vendor to design a reasonably secure sever and to maintain it etc with patches than to harden and update millions of crappy end point devices which are about as hardened as a soggy lettuce and can normally be cracked in seconds. So it’s not perfect, but it’s a lot more secure and would take a lot more skill to turn your local endpoint into a bridge into your LAN.

If it’s all on the same network, why can’t it just talk to the ip addresses?

It can. If you buy a smart plug from Amazon, it sits on your WiFi and talks to your Echos (I think). If, however you buy a cheapo one, it talks to a server in China and you have to give them your WiFi details too. The server often goes down, in my experience too.

If you’re interested in locally-controlled smart tech, I run a home-server called “home assistant” which is free & open-source, and very lightweight (can run it on a Pi).

Yeah, i spent about a month trying to get Home Assistant/HASS.IO to work with google assistant/android. I swear it took 5 years off my life… But that was 3 years ago. I might try again at some point.

@Murray

My first CAD station was a share of a VAX 11/750 with a pair of monitors that probably cost £30 grand each. When I say a share, I mean exclusive use in the early hours of the morning in order to be able to generate 3d models. A single gear wheel took 30 minutes.

Reckon you’ve got a few years on me then!
Mine was a SUN SPARCstation 10 IIRC. (Though i didn’t have to share it)
Then upgraded to an SGI Indigo… Then got sufficiently promoted to have someone to do the heavy CAD/CAM lifting for me!

Getting us off the creaking old copper network is the main driver for the FTTP rollout, delivering faster speeds is a nice side effect of that.

To be honest my wfh desk is at the end of a homeplug that manages about 10mbit and that’s fine for what I do including video meetings etc. It is nice to pull down ps4 games and updates quicker though, and even 4k streaming to the TV has next to no buffering at the start now.

eah, i spent about a month trying to get Home Assistant/HASS.IO to work with google assistant/android. I swear it took 5 years off my life… But that was 3 years ago.

@mert yeah, try again. I’ve been using it 2 years and the amount it’s improved in that time, especially user-friendliness, is incredible. Think it’s even an install option now from the official Raspberry Pi Imager! They made a big change recently and all the core functionality is now GUI-configurable, no coding required any more. Also I don’t think there was an Android app 3 years ago (or at least it was crippled) whereas now I believe it’s functionally equivalent to the iOS one.

It can. If you buy a smart plug from Amazon, it sits on your WiFi and talks to your Echos (I think)

even if that’s the case, without internet Alexa is extremely limited in functionality surely? I think some of the newer devices have basic offline voice control, so you could manually turn your plug on/off maybe, but it wouldn’t exactly be “smart”, i.e. scheduling/IFTTT etc

Why do all these things need a remote server somewhere to work?

With things like Alexa, the Echo devices are relatively cheap endpoints and it needs Amazon’s cloud services for the heavy lifting in natural voice recognition. This much I can get behind.

There is really little need that I can see for everything to connect via the intertubes. I have a broadband outage… great, now I can’t turn my lights on.

they don’t necessarily need a remote server but they do need some kind of server. In the case of wifi TRVs, they probably don’t have any intelligence of their own so need to be told what to do.

Why’s that such a leap though? There’s already a plethora of smart hubs like Philips’ bridge (ooh, the Zigbee!!) for different devices.

I run a home-server called “home assistant”

“Home Assistant! HOME ASSISTANT!” That was probably a mistake.

I really should revisit HA. I looked at it ages ago and it just seemed to be an exercise in complexity, XKCD “Standards” wise. That’s probably a topic for a new thread.

The problem is that if you want to control things in your home from outside your home

Absolutely. But again, why does it have to be either / or? Internal devices could talk to each other over the LAN / Wi-Fi / Bluetooth / Zigbee, Echos could talk to the Internet for external control / AI voice processing.

I really should revisit HA. I looked at it ages ago and it just seemed to be an exercise in complexity, XKCD “Standards” wise. That’s probably a topic for a new thread.

yeah… the complexity is by necessity though, the whole point really is it takes all these different incompatible systems and allows them to operate together… they’ve made huge leaps in usability/UI now though and it’s possible to hide/ignore a lot of that complexity, if you wish

Why’s that such a leap though? There’s already a plethora of smart hubs like Philips’ bridge (ooh, the Zigbee!!) for different devices.

a lot of these devices (like Hue) the hub isn’t really smart, it’s just a gateway for communicating with devices using a different protocol. They could build-in smart functionality but that would obviously increase cost/complexity and then you have situation where you’ve got loads of different smart hubs that can’t really interact with each other… the alternative is running a single server like HA and then you don’t even need the Hue hub, just a generic Zigbee USB dongle that can then talk to ALL the different Zigbee devices

HA was my winter project. It’s improved in the nine months since I started. Used mostly with smart plugs and temp/humidity sensors. One day I’ll integrate our ground source/underfloor stuff into it.

If you want to talk ‘poverty media’ until 2 years ago, we had 2xADSLs bonded delivering a massive 9 meg. For £130 a month. Now we have SIM Broadband and one day, maybe, we’ll get fibre. I’d really appreciate a consistent 30+ meg connection just for stuff I do every day. Problem with SIM (here anyway) is it’s a bit 4 meg one day, 40 the next. Generally when I need more than 4!

Back in 2000, I had the whole of Gillette corporate internet connection to myself for Y2K duties. That was internet provision for 30,000 employers, 100s of site: 1 x 2 meg connection out of Boston 🙂

@zilog6128
I’ve got a spare RPi so i might have a look at that once the weather turns, as long as i can get it to talk to my hue and smartthings hub, or replace them. (Though i’m using wifi, zigbee and z-wave devices from about 11 manufacturers, some of which aren’t officially compatible…

HA was my winter project.

yeah it’s great for that 😃 I got into it during the lockdowns, meant I never got bored!!

as long as i can get it to talk to my hue and smartthings hub, or replace them. (Though i’m using wifi, zigbee and z-wave devices from about 11 manufacturers, some of which aren’t officially compatible

Smartthings can go in the bin, you can carry on using the Hue hub (HA will auto-detect it so you can literally set it up with 1 click) or replace it with a generic Zigbee USB stick (the Sonoff one is good but the process is somewhat more involved). Enabling devices from different manufacturers/protocols to interact is kind of the whole point! 😃

Shall we split this off into a separate discussion?

Fire up the Pi & start a thread when you have questions!! 😃