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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.
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.