Powerband: Like an Elephant down a Straw

It’s been a while since I have felt that someone has tried to sell me an entire cartload of horseshit, but today, that day has come again it seems. What a way to start off 2009…

We turn, today, to self-professed “Local Nerd” Mike Pronovost who is apparently some kind of incredible genius who has concocted the most efficient compression algorithm in existence, so that he can cram massive amounts of data through a dialup connection at Ludicrous Speed. Needless to say, I am skeptical.

Though it seems that others are not so skeptical and indeed, seem to have thrown caution clear to the wind. But what do you expect from the online press these days. Facts? Hah. Facts are for losers! And those guys are, obviously, winners. Now, where was I?

Oh right, Powerband, yes. I haven’t seen such a crock of shit since, well, since the last time I went to the bathroom. As many of us have used VPN connections over a slow link know, it doesn’t matter how fast you get things to the remote server. It still has to squeeze down that tiny pipe, to YOU, at some point.

Let us use his example of getting a 10gb movie in 10 seconds. That’s 1 gbyte per second, or, 8 (and a bit) gigabites. That’s 9 Gig-E Ethernet Connections, right there. But hey. Maybe he’s got servers with fifty network cards in them or something. But the real question is, how does this movie get to you?

Well, through your shitty connection of course. Lets say you have 56K. That’s, at max, 7kbps. Lets assume he can compress that video down to 1/100th of it’s original size (A ludicrous amount. You’d never get that much. Even from the original source.) This takes us down to 100MB and that’s still a large size.

100MB x 1000 = 100,000KB.

100,000KB / 7kbps = 3 Hours, 58 Minutes. Or, without any special extra compression, that’d be.. oh yes, that’s right, 16.5 DAYS. Not hours, DAYS. Half a month of your super sexy powerband just to download that 10gb movie which you got in.. 10 seconds, was that?

Here’s why it won’t work and here is a juicy analogy for you. You go to work every day in.. in.. the City of Townsville. But you live in Little Village. As do 300,000 other people. Somehow. Now, you all want to go to work every day, taking Country Route 4, to I-17 and into the Big City. But there is always congestion and it takes you hours to get in. So the city decides to build a brand new, bigger road.. to replace the I-17. But you still have to get there, on your tiny Country Route 4. Seeing it yet?

Our wunderkind, Mr. Pronovost, has decided that to solve the problem of the straw being too small.. he’s going to give you a bigger glass. When what you really need, is a bigger straw. So I can only come to one of a few conclusions.

First conclusion is: Mike Pronovost is some kind of amazing idiot. I wanted to use retard, but, frankly, even people with mental disabilities aren’t this stupid.

Second conclusion: He’s not an idiot and instead, he plans to bilk usage fees from thousands of gullible idiots so as to pay his college bills, for giant paper bags filled with crack cocaine or some other nefarious purpose (Like hiring guerilla clowns to send Richard Stallman into an early grave. Maybe he’s coulrophobic, who knows!).

I mean, what else am I to think? This is the equivalent of those popups ads you get that say, “Make your internet 10x faster!” or “Get a bigger pen15 now!” or “YOU   HAVE A VI  RUS !!! CLICK HERE TO REPIAR”. The internet and, nay, physics itself just doesn’t work like that. You just cannot cram that much information, down that narrow a band width, in any reasonable length of time.

My suggestion is, go get yourself a seedbox, a nice fat cable connection and have a lot of fun. It’s the way to do it!

And to you, Mike Pronovost, I say this: Tell me. Are you an idiot, or a fraud? And please, if you want to prove me wrong, I am more than willing to try out your product and experience this INCREDIBLE SPEED. Just try to make me look like a liar, Mike.