[vardump]

When you have connectivity at home you can keep all of your data at your fingertips at all time. Even if it's more than you can feasibly store in consumer cloud services.

You can VPN home and use remote desktop at near local performance.

You don't need to plan your data usage. Worry whether you have the files with you.

At least that's what it means for me.

[sliverstorm]

We've already got plenty of bandwidth for remote desktop, latency is usually the remaining problem.

[vardump]

Yeah, latency is the issue.

I have fiber at home. About 50/50 Mbps goodput and 15 ms latency to home VPN using 4G. Remote desktop is pretty fluid. While I can notice the extra latency, it's not a problem in any way. For example Bluetooth mouse latency is worse.

Even full screen WebGL/CSS3/whatever web apps and full screen web video work well.

Some tips: Don't use any TCP based tunneling or VPN solution, like ssh or OpenVPN over TCP. They're bad for interactive use.

Measure, mobile devices have different 4G performance profiles, and that includes latency. You can have up to about 5 ms latency difference between a new flagship model and some low end 4G phone.

Desktop applications other than the browser tend to be less demanding.

Although games are not my thing, playing PS4 games remotely works also very nicely on a Macbook over 4G. Just need to have a PS4 controller and a USB cable. It just works. Very near to local performance. There's some kind of NAT traversal, so you don't necessarily even need to use VPN.

[snuxoll]

Which fiber only helps considering the speed of light. WiFi in my house is acting up right now, but even considering that I "only" have 1ms latency to my pfSense VM after traversing my layer 3 switch in my office, but from there it takes 2.5ms (up to 4ms) minimum to travel over copper to the head node with my cable company - from there it takes 1.5ms to reach zayo's fiber backbone, and then 5ms to reach all the way to Seattle from Boise, ID. Let that sink it, it takes as much time to hop from Boise, ID to Seattle, WA as it does for me to even get a packet to that link.

5ms shaved down to 1ms (one-way) with decent fiber could take my ping to Google DNS from 23ms to 15ms, that's going from Boise, ID through Seattle, WA all the way down to CA where the Google DNS server I am hitting is located - a rather considerable savings.

[cwe]

That's a good point: does the bandwidth reach the native performance of another computer? Can a commodity phone/tablet stream much better performance?

[vardump]

The current crop of mobile devices do have very nice performance.

However ergonomics is a different matter... Touch screen is pretty bad for desktop usage.

Android devices let you connect a USB or a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. You get even a mouse pointer last I tried. Although not using it like that in everyday life. It's more convenient to just use a small laptop.

With iOS Apple's Bluetooth keyboard works. Other input devices didn't work, or at least I couldn't figure out how.