Google's New Lyra Voice Codec + AV1 Aim For Video Chats Over 56kbps Modems In 2021

[birdie]

No Apple.

But why did you mention your distaste against apples? What other fruits do you like?

[skeevy420]

That's terrible. In US, due to its vastness its very hard do wire up to fast internet. Alternatives like Starlink will be available later this year. Where I live (UK), they will be offering 50-150 Mbps for £89 per month. Very expensive, but it should go down with time, and speed should go up too.

Myself I have fibre connection 60/20 Mbps for £26 per month.
Also in the UK it's not necessary to have "packaged" everything. I have separate mobile phone contract for £7.5 per month (with thousands of minutes, texts and 4GB of Internet) and unlimited home Internet for £26 per month. No home phone. No TV subscription, I use free broadcasted aerial TV. No TV License. No Apple.

My choices for broadband are this for cable and this for wireless, the usual ripoff satellite providers, and might as well be unusable DSL or dialup. So I have the $99/month cable plan for 100/10 MBPS with a 1TB cap. Upgrading to the better one next month to get in on the upgrade discount and because I need the 2TB cap. Their unlimited service costs $250/month. The only one from the wireless provider that would work for me would cost $167/month for 25/15 unlimited. Capitalism and competition and free markets kick ass

[piorunz]

But why did you mention your distaste against apples? What other fruits do you like?

I try to avoid big corpo, Apple, Google, or Microsoft etc. due to their cooperation with US and UK (and many others) governments. I never owned Apple device in my life.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/what-prism...-spying-476785
Go to "What is Prism?" section to have a read.

[microcode]

It looks like this is no longer an audio "codec" - it's basically the AI to recognize speech and synthesize it which is simply amazing. Perhaps future video codecs will work similarly. NVIDIA has already created a working AI powered video codec for video conferences which requires a much lower bitrate than standard codecs.

That is how nearly all lossy codecs, especially voice codecs, work, it's just that the detector and synthesizer/vocoder use deep learning rather than hand-tuned DSP.

[andyprough]

Nice, so Google is going to help themselves and Amazon and the NSA and the MI5 and MI6 and all the other 5-eyes and 14-eyes spy networks spy on those people whose speech they couldn't record previously due to a lack of bandwidth. An Alexa device for every home.

[stormcrow]

Who is on 56k modem in 2021? I was when I was a kid. 20 years ago.
Problem with audio video today is not bandwidth, but bufferbloat and latency.

Most of rural US, Africa, rural Australia, bandwidth constrained wireless connections including satellite & cell connections at the peripheries of coverage, many areas of Central and South America. Starlink won't be a silver bullet for all of these areas, especially those without the means to afford it. "My cable ISP is out for a few hours" is a distinctly urban first world problem.

[microcode]

Who is on 56k modem in 2021? I was when I was a kid. 20 years ago.
Problem with audio video today is not bandwidth, but bufferbloat and latency.

I operate a 56k link for somebody, and there are a lot of people with similar or the same situation. I take special care to make my websites accessible to these folks as well.

Satellite gives more bandwidth in most of the remote U.S./Canada, and directional radio is usually available quite far out of cities, but there comes a point where your best existing infrastructure is a standard long haul phone line.

Starlink is promising, since the satellites are operating much closer to the earth, for lower latency. It will be cheaper than the other ways to accomplish that at least.

[misGnomer]

With 56k modems being 1990s late-steampunk era tech, I really wonder how much bandwidth could be squeezed down a dialup line using 2020s near-space-age tech wizardry.

We know what happened to wireless (data) speeds in that space of time.

[Drago]

That's terrible. In US, due to its vastness its very hard do wire up fast internet. Alternatives like Starlink will be available later this year. Where I live (UK), they will be offering 50-150 Mbps for £89 per month. Very expensive, but it should go down with time, and speed should go up too.

Myself I have fibre connection 60/20 Mbps for £26 per month.
Also in the UK it's not necessary to have "packaged" everything. I have separate mobile phone contract for £7.5 per month (with thousands of minutes, texts and 4GB of Internet) and unlimited home Internet for £26 per month. No home phone. No TV subscription, I use free broadcasted aerial TV. No TV License. No Apple.

Well, not so cocky. I do have cable 70Mbps(up&down) for 7 euro.

[willmore]

Odd to see them compare it with Opus at these bit rates. I guess they're relying on the SILK codec inside of opus. At these bit rates, the real competetor is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec2