Pfff…The Internet is Fast Enough
Thursday, April 10th, 2008The Wall Street Journal ran an article today posing the question, “Is Faster Access to the Internet Needed?”, citing a recent announcement that Comcast has released a new higher speed broadband service to the metropolitan Minneapolis area (to the tune of $150 per month). The 50Mbps downstream speed (5Mbps upstream) is more than 10 times faster than Comcast’s current offerings, and it intends to expand both the speed and coverage in the near future.
The article goes on to describe how other vendors believe that money needed to enhance the backbones of their networks to accommodate higher speeds can be better spent on other projects, which would leave Time Warner Cable and AT&T subscribers at a standstill with their current bandwidth offerings. The author believes that “aside from a few niche applications like high-end videogaming, no real applications exist to allow users to take advantage of the higher speeds.”
So what?
I’m sure in 1996, WSJ writers touted 56k as “The Fastest Thing Since 4800 Baud!!!”, but without the innovation of broadband, we wouldn’t have the Internet that we have today. Are you happy with waiting 10 minutes to download a 100MB video podcast? Waiting 30 seconds for a video clip to buffer? Watching a tiny 320×240 postage stamp with pixel blocks the size of Tic Tacs?
Let’s take a look internationally.
Japan has the world’s fastest, cheapest Internet access. Western Europe has a faster growing broadband penetration than the US. A 75 year-old woman in Sweden has 40 GIGABIT speed to her home. Yeah, you’re right, 5 Megabits is way too fast. (And I won’t even mention Comcast’s wonderful habit of throttling bandwidth if they deem fit.)
So, is faster access to the Internet needed? In a word: YES. I’m sure it is financially beneficial for ISPs to sit on their laurels and rake in the cash while their networks remain stagnant, while people are content paying a minimum fee for minimum service. But when those “few niche applications” turn into money-making machines, they will be scrambling to catch up to the rest of the world.