Slashdot Mirror
Does Faster Broadband Matter?
tsa writes "There is an interesting piece on Ars Technica discussing the implications of faster broadband services for the users, and for the internet as a whole. From the article: '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. Many service providers are starting to prioritize their own content at the expense of those from rivals. Many countries have started or are considering blocking Voice-over-IP (VOIP) traffic in order to protect the phone companies from competition.'" How does faster broadband actually impact your Net usage?
. . .don't download tv shows, run a web server from their closet, and download large ISOs of operating systems.
Huh, maybe you shouldn't ask this question on Slashdot.
Everytime new technology comes out, someone always says "Nobody needs that much memory", "What would ordinary people want to do with a computer?", etc...etc...but as we start to experince this new broadband boom, we'll see dozens of services that were just waiting to come out, Video On Demand rentals of HD Content, Full Stereo Phones, Video Phones (Instead of crappy webcam chats), and more I'm sure someone with more time will think of.
my isp (Verizon, which is the huge phone company here) is planning on converting all of the DSL lines to FIOS (fiber optic) to allow like 24mb speeds. they are doing this to offer cable TV as well as internet and phone service all through one handy dandy line. This will be great since there are no cable companies in the area so I have no cable TV but do have broadband internet. I say bring on faster speeds, they will bring me TV channels and allow my web/mail server to run alot faster.
There are three killer applications for me, in having high speed DSL.
Not in any particular order.
1. Home Office - VPN
2. Downloading my favorite linux distro in a reasonable amount of time
3. Video and Voice chat with family, especially my parents, who live out of state, so they can see the grandkids more than they normally would
In addition to this, having the "always on" connection, means it has mostly replaced the newspaper, telephone directory and a variety of other analog sources of information.
150 years ago, most people did not have running water. If you wanted to know all the benefits of running water would you ask people without or with it?
If all you want is email and browsing you can get by with a modem. All you have to do is turn off Flash and other crappy plugins and get a half decent browser that let's you block images from ad servers. I've done it and shared the line with my wife and the "normal" use worked just fine. Getting pdfs and other large files sucked life, but you could do that at night with a good download program.
GNU/Linux, with user driven development, is cutting edge and giving people exactly what they want from their computers. People want to share their pictures and dreams with family, friends and others interested. Blogging is now one of the easiest ways to do that, but it's not much harder to do your own when a Mepis CD will auto install Apache with most of the extras. It's actually much easier to make an html photo album on your spare computer than it is to carefully select and upload them to some place that will load them with adverts and go away in a few years. Getting your software off the network via ISOs or automated update tools are exactly what users want as well. Automated downloads from Debian, unlike some updating "services", are unobtrusive and can be trusted to keep your computer working well. Amazingly enough, people also want their Dick Tracy video phone.
Contrary to all of the above, the FCC is happy granting monopolies to greedy morons. By some twisted logic, they think that a cable monopoly competing with a telco monopoly will provide "enough" competition for people to get what they want and the providers to profit "enough" to provide new services. The greedy morons have been proving them wrong for five years or so. I can compare At Home and my choice of DSL to today and it's not favorable at all. Services have dried up with choice and the extra money is being put into an "intigent" network that will make competition in the future even more difficult.
Five years ago, things were much better. For less money that I currently pay for cable, I had better bandwith and fewer restrictions. Today, I have a cable modem with port blocks and a 60KB/s upload crimp. At Home provided the same without restrictions at all and the service was reliable. It was also much easier to get a DSL line, that did not suck, from someone other than the local telco. Today, we have the local telco and the cable company working to penalize each other's packets and the technology, of course, will slow everything up.
Greed, in this case, has been very bad. It's eliminated the companies that provided services people want and rewarded the assholes.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well i sitt here in sweden with a 100/10 Mb connection. Normal speed from linux distrobution sites in sweden is 1-6 MB/s so i really like it =)
I often get above 1 megabyte when downloading programs and stuff.
And all this is for ~35 usd/month
CIA Factbook 2002 (US):"Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households
This writer's conclusions make no sense.
Sure, most users don't use their broadband to full capacity. There's a huge different between a backbone internet connection and a consumer grade line. The entire consumer broadband business model is built on the concept that giving a very large number of consumers high speed access will work if only a small number of those users are generating substaintial demand at any one time.
He also misses the fact that current providers have adopted the asymmetric line speed model in an attempt to curtail peer to peer and hosted content by consumers. This artifical cap will slowly erode, as we've seen in FTTH and some cable offering already.
Also overlooked are emerging trends in smart houses, automation, video monitoring and tele-presence, all of which assume the easy availability of cheap, fast consumer bandwidth at the core of their business model. Other applications, such a remote medical diagnostics and imaging will also generate more usage and will be encouraged by employers and medical providers.
The entire premise of this article is biased from the outset. It really seems like he wrote the entire item to support a preconceived conclusion. Or perhaps it's another case of the media intentinally stirring the pot...
What would Groucho do?