About 20 years ago, when I started publishing a list of annual technology predictions, it just made sense to look back to see how I had done the year before. Alas, I made that decision without looking to see that nobody else in my line of work actually does that. But I was stuck and have found since that by being deliberately vague and putting a fair amount of thought into this stuff I’ve been able to keep my long-term stats at about 70 percent correct. We’ll shortly see if that trend continues, but first I want to discuss how this year is so different from all those others.
Nothing seems the same, does it? Maybe it’s President Trump. Maybe it’s just time for a revolution in tech and the economy, but this year feels unlike any of those others. I don’t know if it will make my predictions more accurate or less, but I have to tell you that I believe the context matters this year more than any other. I’ll get to that in a moment but first let’s see how badly I did the last time. You can read both of last year’s prediction columns here and here.
Prediction #1 for 2017 said there was going to be a cloud arms race between Amazon, Google and Microsoft with the other cloud players falling aside. I got the one right. Cloud market share for every company except those three have fallen. At the same time, those three companies, between them, spent more than $10 billion building their cloud capabilities in 2017. We’ll cover this more in one of my new predictions, but in terms of the public cloud it’s clear that nobody else matters.
Prediction #2 was the beginning of the end for buffer bloat, a term many of you read for the first time here many years ago. I wish this prediction was true. In a sense it is true, because buffer bloat, which makes the Internet difficult to use for streaming media while simultaneously messing it up for nearly everything else, is at east firmly in the modern technical vocabulary and there are technical solutions available, most of them free. But buffer bloat remains as much of a problem as before, I think, because we won’t upgrade our home routers. If everyone would just get a new router, buffer bloat would go away. But until that happens, I’ll continue to get this one wrong.
Prediction #3 said that Over-The-Top (that is Internet) streaming video was going to grow like crazy, leading to a real decline in both broadcast and cable TV. This was correct. 2017 viewing numbers for broadcast, cable, and even satellite viewers fell in 2017 while OTT providers like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix surged. This trend will continue in 2018 but with a twist as I’ll explain below.
Prediction #4 said that Intel would spin off its semiconductor fab. I got this wrong and now I don’t even think it is likely.
Prediction #5 was that Apple would make a big acquisition to give the company more focus. That didn’t happen, either.
Prediction #6 was a Come-to-Jesus experience for IBM, whatever that means. I’ll claim this one because Big Blue is in more trouble than ever (more on this later) and lost the support of Warren Buffett. In that sense, at least, Jesus has left the building.
Prediction #7 was that Bitcoin would finally find its place in both our economy and our culture. I believe the recent cryptocurrency boom proves that is the case so I’ll claim this as correct. But as I explained in my column How to get Rich Trading Bitcoin, it’s not happening the way most investors thought (or even think) it would. More on this in a bit.
Prediction #8 was the rise of Apple Video, which did happen.
Prediction #9 was the rise of inter-cloud services to protect customers from being too exposed to one big public cloud or another. This has certainly happened though it is hard to find a big winner in it, so I won’t be claiming this as a successful prognostication. I wish I could.
Prediction #10 was that nobody in 2017 would win the Google Lunar X-Prize, which goes out of business completely this coming spring. I think it is unlikely anyone will ever win that $20 million prize. Sorry, I got that one right.
Counting on my fingers it doesn’t look especially good — 60 percent correct. I could maybe claim one of those I didn’t but that’s not how I roll. Maybe I am getting too old for this gig.
Now let’s turn to my predictions for this year. The big influences this year are the economy, the new tax law, and the rise of 5G wireless networking. The economy is booming, which oddly has allowed tech companies to NOT invest as much in new products and services as they might. A downturn increases competition which results in new stuff, but we haven’t had a downturn, so the cloud, for example, didn’t grow quite as fast in 2017 as it did in 2016. That could continue.
Another economic influence is the long time since we had a recession. It has been, in fact, the greatest gap between recessions in U.S. history. That doesn’t mean there has to be a recession in 2018 (in fact I don’t think there will be one), but I’d put money on a recession happening in 2019. That looming recession plus the recently passed tax law are going to make businesses do more financial engineering than ever in 2017.
Prediction #1 — the rise of 5G networking will lead to a crash in broadcast TV. All the mobile carriers will begin rolling-out 5G wireless networking in 2018, though only about 22 percent of the country will be covered by the end of this year. 5G is interesting because it will bring a huge increase in wireless bandwidth that we don’t really need. How much wireless bandwidth do you really need in your home or business? I don’t do anything that requires more than about five megabits-per-second (watching 4K Netflix), yet the T-Mobile unlimited 4G LTE hotspot in my RV consistently gives me up to four times more than that. And 5G will reportedly give me FORTY TIMES more.
So what will all this 5G bandwidth be used for? I predict it will replace legacy broadband providers like telco DSL and cable ISPs. The telcos will feel this effect first. Every DSL vendor is ultimately doomed. There’s no fighting this trend so there will be a mad rush to 5G by these companies. Look for some of them to try to dump their wireline services entirely.
But wait, there’s more! 5G is mainly about streaming video and we’ve already seen a decline in broadcast TV viewing as OTT networks like Netflix take more and more viewer mindshare. Last year also saw an FCC reverse auction as TV stations sold some of their bandwidth to wireless providers — an auction that produced less revenue than expected. In one sense you might look at this underwhelming return on the reverse auctions and predict that the TV stations might not want to do that again. But I see the situation differently. The broadcast stations are seeing viewer declines which mean the value of their franchises is falling. Broadcast will eventually go away, if not in 2018 then in some later year. Even with the lower-then-expected auction returns there’s an incentive to sell more bandwidth while it is still worth something. If the value of that bandwidth is already dropping, then there will be price pressure to sell sooner, not later. I think this will start in earnest in 2018 as more progressive broadcasters start to abandon the airwaves entirely, selling their remaining bandwidth and becoming Internet broadcasters. It won’t be a tsunami but it will be an unmistakeable trend that begins in 2018.
Prediction #2 — the end of Windows supremacy. This is NOT a prediction that MacOS or Linux will take over from Windows. It’s more complex than that. What I am seeing is that Windows is becoming less and less important to Microsoft and as Microsoft’s focus changes so will our focus as consumers of personal computing. It’s not surprising that Microsoft is changing because desktop PC sales are down and Redmond can’t get much money anymore for Windows upgrades. So they have to find new sources of revenue. Under Steve Ballmer Microsoft was all about Windows, Microsoft Office, and Windows Phone. Under Satya Nadella, Windows Phone is gone and Microsoft’s concentration is on (in this order): 1) Azure (Microsoft’s public cloud); 2) Azure services like storage and — to some extent — Office 365; 3) Microsoft Office, and: 4) Windows.
That’s Windows going from first to fourth and Microsoft Office going from second to third. That’s huge.
The other day I bought for $99.99 a family license for Office 365. I didn’t even buy it for Office: I bought it for the five terabytes of cloud storage that came with the deal. Who wouldn’t pay $100 to store pretty much anything they could ever imagine in the cloud? It’s a kick in the head to Box, Dropbox, Google and others and reflects how important it is to Microsoft to get hundreds of millions of users signed-up for Azure services. Because once we do so Satya is pretty certain we’ll NEVER go away.
More predictions tomorrow.
Come on Roger, hurry up and make a prediction about mineserver
It’d be better if Bob did.
@Gerald George – But Mark has already made predictions about his Mineserver “project”. The problem is that is all that he has done. Talk is cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil
Kurzweil Predicts!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuz7fcgSbRs
Would Microsoft’s Azure move plus the availability of 5G imply the focus on Cloud services shifting, if not heavily, at least noticeably, into cloud *storage*? So far, this has taken a distant seat to processing power, but it could finally change if the bandwidth+time cost of retrieving files finally drops down.
I seem to recall that looking back on predictions started because I emailed you sometime in July of that year (yeah, it probably was 1998) to say you’d hit about 60% by that point. You countered that that it was likely to reach 70% by the time the year was done, and followed up by actually confirming that publicly when the new year happened, thus starting the tradition. 🙂
He never predicted anything. It’s all a scam.
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5G has been in the works for years and telcos have publicly announced roll out starting this year.
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Computer and windows sales have been down for several years now. Does anyone not know that?
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This bozo needs to go back to work for a real publication, so the discipline of having editors can keep the work relevant.
“More predictions tomorrow.”
Already that’s ANOTHER LIE. What a f***ing joke this guy is.
I think you will need just a little more than 5 megs for 4k Netflix, almost 30 plus for comfortable viewing 🙂
Yeah 5 mbps is heavily compressed at 4k resolution. Can’t image that looking very good, but I don’t have Netflix so don’t know. What I do know is that each 1080p channel I’m watching or recording on Google Fiber’s TV service runs a solid 15 mbps. No buffering – it’s all broadcast packets and the TV box picks up the stream, decodes it and sends it to my TV.
@Freeman If you don’t mind me asking – how much do you pay for Google Fibers? It seems like a solid choice but I couldn’t find pricing anywhere. They currently don’t offer it in my neck of the woods but it’s on the “future expansion” list so I’m hopeful, but not if it’s going to cost me an arm and a leg. It almost sounds too good to be true compared to my current internet (Spectrum) which makes me think it will cost a considerable amount more.
5G is all about fixed wireless to the home. The Verizon and AT&T trials are all going to be putting a massive number of micro cells on telephone poles and light posts but Verizon has already said they’re getting better than anticipated results just from their existing tower infrastructure. They will finally be able to provide a “quad play” of Internet, phone, TV and wireless to the home, something cable has had trouble doing. And since they already have the backhaul network and sales channels in place it becomes an incremental service for them.
“Specifically, he said that the company has discovered it can deliver service in a non-line-of-sight environment, something that many experts have thought not possible. In addition, Ellis said that Verizon also discovered that in multi-dwelling units, or buildings that are several stories high, it can deliver service to higher than 20 floors, which is more than the company thought possible.”
https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/verizon-says-fixed-5g-trials-performing-better-expected/2017/10/
Typo Alert:
“That looming recession plus the recently passed tax law are going to make businesses do more financial engineering than ever in 2017.” I think you mean “more financial engineering than ever in 2018.”
BTW a 2019 recession this may be the most important prediction in this article.
5G may be all very well in the city but once you get into the countryside you will often be lucky to even have cell phone service.
Regardless, I think a 60% hit rate for your predictions is pretty good.
First of all, Bob is back. My one and only prevision for 2018 is right. I’ve racked a 100% result.
Now two ideas of mine (with sort of predictions for the near future).
We are paying Microsoft 100 bucks in order to gift them with 5 TB of your “digital life”. Once we’ll to the upload we’ll loose them with the illusion they’re still ours. After a while you won’t bother any more about those faulty USB disks or NAS disks. Some time later Microsoft will bait everyone with 20 TB for 150 bucks, 100 for 250, unlimited for 500 *a year*: the NAS is faulty, we already have our TBs there … it’s a good deal. We’ll all know our stuff isn’t truly ours with the first massive hacking or incident at Microsoft. Or maybe even bankruptcy. Same goes for any other online storage.
Windows is already dead. Only Microsoft seems to be unaware of this fact. Linux won, in the (then) unexpected form of Android. And maybe later also Linux will die: fuchsia will be the new green!
And thanks Bob, God is back!
Yes, if you let the cloud storage mirror some part of your hard drive then that’s insecure. But you could use the storage to keep backups in VeraCrypt/Truecrypt partitions (that look like a single big file when not in use). A weekly backup policy of 25GB encrypted dumps of your working stuff sounds like a reasonable backup plan.
But Bob’s talking about TB of storage.
And Microsoft (and fellows) is hoping you to store your movies, pictures and also disk backups there.
My work (real) stuff, mostly C/C++ and PG Sql code, is about 100MB when compressed!
My “digital life” stuff is 3+ TB, mostly MOV, MP4, JPG and TIFF files.
“The other day I bought for $99.99 a family license for Office 365. I didn’t even buy it for Office: I bought it for the five terabytes of cloud storage that came with the deal. ”
Meh. i got plenty of 1TB webdav’s for free.
I wonder if there will come a 5G capable NAS project in 2018.
[…] Why do I do this to myself? Bob’s first predictions for 2018 – I, Cringely 34 by rbanffy | 20 comments on Hacker News. […]
“broadcasting” as in 1954 will die. broadcasting will live and transform. “narrowcasting” has turned into broadcast channels on multiple media, not a fixed RF channel. remember, a broadcaster from a pioneer family, Stanley Hubbard, created DirecTV and announced it in 1981. took 10 more years and the collapse/sale of RCA to get it done, and he bet the house on it, but it worked. the same multi-channel model has moved to the internet now on stream, and user numbers are similar. but the core is the same, multipoint transmission at time X, with options to store for later use.
what’s in danger is the local news and local programming that your favorite TV station provides. this also is the feeder for national coverage and talent.
The nice feature of broadcast TV is that it is unidirectional. No-one is monitoring what you watch, when, how reliably, and how long your attention span is. And you KNOW that the non-targeted advertisements are not of interest 🙂
unless you volunteered to become a ratings household. or your “smart TV” is always logging and connected to the internet. or your Siri or Alexa can is feeding info to Snoop Central. or something else got hacked and is phoning home with audio and/or video. takes a lot of wire yanking and deep menu spelunking and 75% CPU usage running blockers to have any privacy nowadays. so… be as boring as you can if you’re worried. read books on paper, purchased with cash in little one-man shops on back roads.
One thing I don’t fully understand is the economics of cable broadcast. According to some of Bob’s earlier columns internet service is more profitable for Comcast than television, yet they are still willing to give me a $10 per month discount to sign up for internet + basic TV compared to just internet service. In effect they are willing to pay me $120 just so they can say they have one additional TV subscriber (not viewer, I don’t even have the television service connected, since basic is essentially the same content I already get over the air). The only way that make sense is if Comcast is getting a kickback somewhere, or has a penalty if they fall below a minimum number of subscribers. Does that have any effect on OTT transition? And where would those skewed financial incentives be coming from? Legacy contracts with the TV networks?
it is known that delivering more households lowers the charge per household to cable from service providers. they are always blocking providers like whack-a-mole as contracts come up and the programmers try to exact more cash for the same bundle of channels, until a discount comes through and/or they raise rates. it is also known that cablecos are stalking breaking the bundle to cherrypick one or two feeds from ESPN or Disney or Discover instead of taking a dozen-or-nothing flat deal. which tells me (a) they can’t hold the rate card, so (b) the profit margin is not what the business model called for, so (c) one of these days there will be a eyebrow-raise deal among cablecos that can’t be proven collusion in a court that they gang up on one or several strategic programmers and shut them off until the hated “30 channels at $4 a head, and love it” packages go away. that’s my prediction for 2018… somebody gets gutted in program-land.
… at which point, the cablecos will have fewer channels and less cable revenue. so they still have X gigabytes local capacity, so they push internet service. the backbone networks of the big 3 telcos, CenturyLink.Level3, Verizon/Worldcom, and ATT get more business, for streaming service interconnects albeit wholesale. the cable losers will try and make it up by starting or expanding stream, like Disney has already announced. the satellite companies take a hit because fewer transponders will be leased by cablecos. and we adapt out here in CustomerLand.
Cable companies make back that $10 discount by showing you ads.
Not to mention the cable box rental fee, the regional sports fee, the broadcast tv fee, the….
it’s also the Bundle Factor. if you put all your communications with Brand X, whichever it is, you’re locked in. internet, phone, TV, wireless… try to separate the Gordian knot and keep everything working all the time. it’s like making a disk array way back in VAXland… easy to do, royal pain in the ass to separate and keep your data. I peeled one back, and it took all night. logging also filled the system disk, blocking all users, but system admin creds got me in to blow off the log.
Hey Bob,
What do you think of services like Back Blaze: Unlimited storage for a per computer fee. It’s all encrypted, and they will backup any drive connected to the licensed computer. Basically you can have all your computers backing up to a local file server and have that file server syncing with BB. For $50 a year.
John
How much to get the stuff back?
Per 2017 #2 – I don’t think it’s necessarily consume routers that are the issue; mine is quite good but I still get a lot of buffer bloat from my ISP.
Per Recession – I don’t think we’ll see one for a bit. Why? Well, Obama basically oversaw and ensured that the recession continued during his entire 8 years in office. We’ve just gotten *out* of a recession. Yeah, I know – Academics don’t see it that way b/c their definition of a recession (3 consecutive quarters of falling GDP) isn’t quite accurate; by academic terms we haven’t had one in a long time, but in reality if Obama was still POTUS we’d still be in a recession. So don’t expect one until 2020 or beyond.
Per 2018 #1 (5G) – not really going to happen unless they also make the datacaps like those of wireline providers, which is unlikely.
Per 2018 #2 (Windows) – well, that happened in 2017. It’ll continue for 2018 certainly. The question is, will Microsoft ever switch out NT Kernel (NTOS) for a BSD/Linux Distro and make Windows UI simply a Desktop Environment like KDE/GNOME/CDE/Mac/etc in order to maintain desktop presence in the long term. Not sure they’re there yet; hopefully they’re starting to think about it. Evidence will be increase in their applications reaching muli-ple platforms – anything other than Windows – beyond the simple developer experience like with .NET Core now.
my DSL modem load is 74% memory with one stream running. yeah, it’s a mess, this buffering.
I think the slowdown in cloud uptake more likely reflects that all the easy loads have gone, rather than a lack of competition
You’re wrong about broadcasters. You can get dozens of channels on free tv now. Most of them are reruns and old movies. But they’re not pulling back. It would take some type of shift in the way spectrum is given. Congress needs to do that do it so that would be very slow.
As for IBM they could benefit from changes in h1b. Their Indian rivals will never make the new requirements, like 20 percent visas max. On the other hand those Indian companies could become aquisitions for new rivals.
A company like Walmart could get into outsourcing and use their large numbers of American employees to meet the quota. What if Infosys bought Sears? They might be too far gone. JCPenney is cheap and not losing money. There’s others, like the owners of bud beer and Burger King.
As messed up as IBM is they do it better than Walmart.
broadcasters have gladly sold their spectrum several times, and crowded up into UHF. now those freqs are in demand for wireless. we’re up against the wall, and the wall is military and government services. there are assignment maps out there. get one and be surprised.
Broadcast networks are not going away. Close to a hundred million people can view this content for free, no monthly service charges. You can actually get close to a hundred channels through your antenna, many in HD. Meanwhile, Comcast will charge you an extra $10 a month just for the HD.
There are even antennas that will connect to a DVR.
Broadcast TV is only as good as the advertising revenue it gets. That is dropping fast. One of the big Australian networks could not get loan guarantees any more as it was losing money so fast
, went into administration and is now owned by CBS ( the US broadcaster ) through a holding company in the Netherlands.
5G is about taking over the world. It can be used to see through clothing, walls, etc. and the millimeter waves are harmful at “low” levels, just like the rest of the microwaves that have been slowly cooking us for years. The health of our species is in peril. The health of all real living things is in peril. The environment, the planet, everything is being adversely effected by this horrible technology. The FCC should be ashamed of itself. Already the FCC is in partnership with industry (at the expense of human rights of the people, financially, healthwise, etc.) covering up the fact that there is decades of research and science proving biological harm from these 1G 2G 3G 4G 5G microwave frequencies at “low” levels. Our country’s health is in peril, and now our assets and our future are being further severely devalued. What can we do? Run to the government health care system and get multiple prescriptions for multiple symptoms of multiple health effects? Maybe we will all succumb to autism, alzheimer’s, cancer diabetes, neurological disorders, insanities, etc. (the list is endless). This is a deliberate disabling of the people as well as destruction of the environment. it violates building codes, too. There will be a judgment day for those who are allowing, imposing, and assaulting with this horrible technology deployed against the people. When did we lose the USA? And to who or what? God knows.
Sent from hardwired computers and hardwired internet connections with all wireless functions turned OFF or all wireless hardware removed for our health and safety.
@ Rebecca.>;
My aging parents will hate seeing broadcast TV die, but I’m already a YouTube junkie and only watch a few NFL playoffs & the Super Bowl on broadcast TV. It will be interesting to watch TV networks implode.
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Also it seems we’re long past Windows supremacy since smartphones & tablets have taken over most people’s spare time. If Google, Amazon and Microsoft are the cloud’s future, then what of Apple? Can they survive as a client-only company? Technology seems so yesterday — maybe I’m just getting old.
Prediction #9 is pretty much true with former co-lo players winning market share, now as the “gateway to the cloud.” Look at Equinix for an example.
What do you see as the impact of 5G on community-based FTTH network projects? So far they seem to offer better prices, services, and net neutrality than the big for-profit telecom companies? Are they a waste of time and money? What about communities that refuse to allow cellular antennas for reasons similar to Rebecca’s above? Will coverage be ubiquitous and robust enough for emergency alert systems like the ones that failed in Santa Rosa? Marin, next door, is looking at these issues right now.
Glad your surgery went well and sorry about the fire burning you out. Really happy to have you back online. Thankful your son was willing to be so helpful. Best wishes to you all.
How many people are there like Rebecca that really matter/will make any difference? She comes across REALLY strong and offers no evidence to back anything up so just sounds like the ravings of a lunatic. Are there truly enough of them within a confined space to make any impact or [more likely] will the future just steam roll over them and their beliefs?
Sounds like you answered your own question: “She comes across REALLY strong and offers no evidence to back anything up so just sounds like the ravings of a lunatic.”
One of the issues Bob didn’t discuss is the growing understanding by the general public that the location of the data storage does matter. A quick look at the laws in the Euro zone plus a quick look at the powers that border security have on entry to the US will, I think, mean that cloud storage will have to deal with international borders sooner rather than later. Already many legal firms in Canada maintain their own servers in Canada and when their lawyers cross the border they do so with an, essentially, empty PC that does not contain any data but does allow access to the Canadian servers. They do this to protect the data and the client confidentiality.
Windows Supremacy? That’s not a prediction, it’s a comment on something that’s already happened. The “consumers of personal computing” have been pushing Windows to the background for most of this decade. The change in Microsoft’s focus was obvious when they gave away Windows 10.
“…If everyone would just get a new router, buffer bloat would go away….”
How new is new? How can one find out whether a particular model has firmware that does TCP “right”? I suspect that this kind of diligence is extremely difficult across the board, and I more-than-suspect that the downmarket manufacturers are dragging their feet on shipping units with improved firmware, because there’s no way to use the absence of bufferbloat as a competitive differentiator (except to the small audience who know what it is and why it happens). My gateway “router” is a Windows box running ICS and nothing else. I cannot think that their TCP is much less hinky than their DHCP, which is to say, hinky as Hell. (Subjectively, my experience today is that bufferbloat is a problem with certain sites, but not others. Does that imply that my chain is all good and the remaining problems are all on the server side?)
I predict that this will be another year of false promises.
Read the last line? “More predictions tomorrow.”
Seen the posting date? January 16th, 2018
Checked the current date?
@Jean-Paul Time doesn’t work the same for Bob. We all know he lives on another planet near a black hole where time moves slower for him (but yes, Bob has the worst time management and constantly makes empty promises. He really should stop making them if he doesn’t intend to keep them).
> Who wouldn’t pay $100 to store pretty much anything they could ever imagine in the cloud?
Only a fool would pay $100 a year for 5Tb of storage on someone else’s computer when Costco is selling 6Tb drives for $149 (and they are!).
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/22/google-will-not-extend-lunar-xprize-deadline.html
Aiui, 5g is two things: faster radios and a modern(ish) hierarchical network design. The 5g radios are 2x faster than regular lte (I.e. not that fast). The upgrade in network design will make some difference. But regular lte aggregate bandwidth for 100x100m placement is 156mbps so there’s a long way to go without increasing cell density and increasing radio density makes cell switching intolerably expensive for the control plane. (See softbanks network meltdowns trying this in Tokyo)
So, net/net fixed 5g might do something interesting but cellular 5g looks like it’ll be a huge over hype. And I’m betting there’s no relationship between the two other than branding.
I think 5G is a non-starter for 2018. Bob, you will get this one wrong. It will be 2019 or 2020. The effect of cord cutting will be 10x more impact to broadcast TV than 5G. In addition, I’m in a coverage hole for 4G/LTE and suspect I’ll also be for 5G. So 5G is just a joke to me. With Roku and PSVue, we cut the cord early last year. Roku has thing called “Local-On” that provides our local ABC affiliate newscast and we can either chose “live” or we can watch the news from 6pm at 7pm as they rebroadcast the whole day’s newscast “On Demand”. So, I think the local news station lives on, it’s just over a streaming media device. Wireless or wired, I don’t really care. With my ASUS wireless router, I get 100mb/sec and that’s good enough that I don’t even plug in my laptop to Ethernet.
Roku and Sony need to advertise that DirecTV (even Now) is still effectively cable, and PSVue is truly the better choice for SO many reasons! And while you’re at it, take the Playstation out of it, and just call it Vue!
So is OTT. If you cut all the cords, all you’re left with is the very limited choices with over the air. The Internet itself requires an expensive cord going to you’re cable modem.
Typo correction: Bob, I’m pretty sure you meant to say “twenty-five” (or possibly “fifteen”) not “five” in the following sentence.
“I don’t do anything that requires more than about five megabits-per-second (watching 4K Netflix), yet the T-Mobile unlimited 4G LTE hotspot in my RV consistently gives me up to four times more than that. And 5G will reportedly give me FORTY TIMES more.”
Bob said “4G LTE hotspot in my RV”. I have a similar device that, in my location, hovers around 5 – 20 mbps. I have no problem watching HD Netflix, but have never tried 4K Netflix, simply because I didn’t expect it to work well, based on Netflix recommendations. If Bob consistently gets 20 mbps, and watches 4K Netflix, I don’t see how he can make any statements about 4K Netflix other than that it works at 20 mbps. Perhaps he really meant to say that nothing he does (except 4K Netflix) requires more than 5 mbps. That would be very consistent with my own experience, having lived with 1.5 mbps for years.