more on comments? Does faster broadband really matter?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Baratunde <baratunde () baratunde com>
Date: December 29, 2005 3:10:12 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] comments? Does faster broadband really matter?

Dave, it's been a while since I've written, but I'm still a fan of the
list. Keep on connecting interesting people.

Now, to the article...

I am EXTREMELY surprised, schocked, disappointed and a little
embarassed that a highly regarded technology figure such as Om Malik
(and many others who have commented) would declare that faster
broadband doesn't matter, and worse, would attempt to draw a line in
the sand at a specific Mbps above which we have no use.

I've got a couple of reasons why I think this is completely short- 
sighted

1. That statement may be true TODAY, but no one builds a business or
lives their life with the assumption that the world ends tomorrow.

Just structurally speaking, few items in life remain static,
especially with regard to technology. After all, we could ask: "who
would need to talk to a person on the other side of the world?" "why
would you want to play games on a screen when you could go outside?"
"CDs are the best audio quality and highly portable. What could EVER
replace them?"

If answered in the way Mr. Malik deals with broadband speeds, the
questions above would preclude international phone calling, video
games and mp3 players.

2. The more time we spend with a speed-sensitive computer technology,
eventually we want something faster. We are exposed to something
faster via friends, or we start to compare speeds outside of that
specific medium.

Sure, I COULD use a 1994 486DX2 PC to accomplish my spreadsheet tasks,
but I could accomplish those tasks MUCH faster and with less
frustration on my PowerMac G5. For many years, what drove my personal
PC upgrade was the fact that the computers at school and at work were
much faster. My home PC just started to feel slow.

But even outside of Keeping Up with the Joneses, we eventually start
to compare speeds across media. For example, why can't my computer
react as fast as my TV changing channels?


3. There are CLEAR indications that speed-hungry broadband apps are
not only hypothetical but in early stage deployment. It takes no great
leap of imagination to consider that these apps will grow in
popularity and demand more from our broadband access pipes

I've read many of the ARSTECHNICA comments, and several outline the
bandwidth requirements for individual apps. They argue that VoIP only
requires 64K and web-browsing maxes out at 1Mbps. But, think of
everything we do locally on the PC: productivity apps, photo storage
and editing, gaming. Now imagine ALL of those apps freed from a
specific physical PC, but located on the net, accessible from
anywhere. In order to replicate that local PC response time, we're
going to need some serious broadband pipes. I cannot for the life of
me understand how this is not obvious. Look at Gmail, Flickr, YouTube,
Basecamp, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Live, etc. Think of network-based
storage and backup like iDisk. Now add to that multiple PCs in the
home accessing the pipe simultaneously.

Many argue that websites are still pretty low-bandwidth today, but so
what. We can clearly see that high-bandwidth, rich media sites are
increasinly popular. Do I need to remind Mr. Malik of the "buffering"
of web-based video or the "loading" of Flash-based websites?

And that's just with PC-based activity. Now add communications, video
and other forms of community entertainment, healtcare, finance and
more. You get video conference calls, IPTV, telemedicine and more.
Again, all these things have started happening today. It requires ZERO
imagination to conclude that fatter pipes will be necessary.

We are clearly creating a world in which more rides over that
broadband pipe, more of what we do currently on our PCs, more overall
household activity, more devices. Add to that our penchant for
outgrowing seemingly abundant resources in the past (from 3 TV
stations to 500; 640K of RAM to 2GB; 200MB hard drives to 2TB; 15 inch
screens to 30in cinemadisplays), and how can any reasonable person
claim that the broadband pipe is useless beyond 1Mbps, 5Mbps, 10Mbps??

All that I've written above is merely what today's trends clearly
indicate and shows no extreme imagination on my part. I'm going on the
record right now to say that once we add to that the unimaginable, 10
years from now we'll be complaining about the inadequacy of 100Mbps
broadband pipes.

--

++ NEW WEBSITE: http://www.baratunde.com ++
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- baratunde
  comedian, author & vigilante pundit
  www.baratunde.com
  brought to you by Kingly Companion Media, LLC

buy the book, read the blog, catch a show, listen to the podcast!

On 12/27/05, David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: December 27, 2005 11:28:55 AM EST
> To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Does faster broadband really matter?
> Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com
>
> Does faster broadband really matter?
> 12/26/2005 5:17:49 PM, by Jeremy Reimer
>
> <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051226-5846.html>
>
> Internet blogger Om Malik has written an interesting piece on the
> new, faster broadband connections that are now becoming available to
> US consumers. His premise is that the faster speeds are not that
> important, because they don't translate into a significantly better
> experience for the end user.
>
> The gist of his argument is that most online activities, like
> standard websurfing, are not significantly sped up by high-bandwidth
> connections, and the few that are, such as downloading, are not
> typically time-sensitive anyway:
>
> Websurfing runs at only about a megabit per second, and nearly
> everything else except downloading is effectively throttled down at
> the source. Downloading turns out to have some natural limits as
> well; at 100 Mbps, you can download enough music for 24 hours of
> listening in only four minutes per day. The practical result,
> confirmed by high speed leaders like Masayoshi Son of Yahoo BB in
> Japan, is that the faster speeds yield only a extremely modest
> increase in real traffic demand.
>
> [snip]
>
> Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
>
>
>
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