Open Thread: Now what would you do with bandwidth, if you had it
It is not the first time I have indulged in navel gazing about what is broadband, how much bandwidth is enough, and what are you really going to do with it. Business Week is having a similar moment, wondering what will you do with all that bandwidth folks like Verizon are promising.
Will it be gaming that will put bandwidth to use? Or will it be dozens of tiny applications that will get us consuming all the bandwidth? I suspect it will be that, that and some of what we don’t know yet. (Of course, our previous threads have shown that there are some technical challenges that need to be overcome. Especially the upstream bandwidth that is so vital for many P2P-based applications, or personal sharing.)
That said, I do agree with my dear friend Cynthia Brumfield, who very succinctly says, there is no such thing as too much bandwidth. (If sold to me at the right price.) I agree with her. Between Skype, SIPphone, YouTube, and iTunes, I already experience the bandwidth paucity, mostly because Comcast doesn’t deliver on what it advertises: 6 megabits per second.
My newly acquired AppleTV is a great device, except it takes forever (to my bandwidth addicted brain) to download the latest episode of Pysch or Ronin, the movie. Now if it were a faster connection – say 20 megabits per second, it would be great. But paying $150 bucks or something ridiculous like that isn’t part of the plan – however!
I think the question is that of price – what speed at what price? In countries where bandwidth is available at affordable prices, the customers and thus the entrepreneurs are figuring out how to put that bandwidth to use. Now if you could get 24 megabits per second for $50 a month, what would you do with it?
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I agree with you and Cynthia, there is no such thing as too much bandwidth.
If I had as much bandwidth as I wanted I could:
-Compute from the cloud, just pull the resources I need when I need them. You can imagine a sort of “dumb-terminal” with enough bandwidth, even HD video could be processed and streamed to me from the cloud.
-Play massively multiplayer online games, much larger than today’s MMO’s and with the potential for unlimited user created content that gets downloaded on the fly as it is encountered in the virtual world.
-Do everything I do online now, only much, much faster. For instance, as I’m writing this I’m downloading a pre-recorded webcast on a technology I’m interested in. It’s been about 3 or 4 minutes so far and I still can’t watch it yet.
Beyond those things, I imagine that when the bandwith is available, new innovations will arise to use that bandwidth. Kind of a chicken/egg things really. If there isn’t a lot of bandwidth, your not going to see a lot scenarios that require a lot of bandwidth. But without those scenarios, people won’t necissarily push for more bandwidth.
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Question: Now if you could get 24 megabits per second for $50 a month, what would you do with it?
Answer: Rather than look at this from an individual’s viewpoint, I think the more important perspective is to have the high-speed available to the majority of users. Once a large group of people have the high speed access and reach critical mass, the system will start to generate more and more appropriate applications.
This has already started. Take a look at how the Mass Media is suffering – specifically TV news and newspapers. There are a lot of reasons, but part of their decline is because we can get the information via the internet at the time we want it. And we can customize our news, instead of being forced to sit in front of the tube for a linear view 30 minutes.
On demand HD will chew up a ton of bandwidth, especially if everyone in the neighborhood is using it (at say 9PM on a Thursday night).
Guys keep them coming. I am at a conference today, so can’t be very actively engaged till 2.30 or so – but will be back. meanwhile these short bberry based comments will have to do.
If I had enough bandwith (fiber to the home?) my dream device would be Tivo + Amazon’s S3. Unlimited storage, and that’s just the most obvious benefit. Imagine being able to log in to any tivo with your username and password and to be able to turn it into your tivo. Take a vacation, the hotel room has a tivo, you log in and watch your shows just like you would at home.
Imagine being able to have one of those Cisco Telepresence conversations with anyone, from your home. Those consumer anywhere from 3-12Mb/s of traffic.
Imagine being able to have HD-Radio streamed to multiple sources in your home (each kid gets a different “radio station”).
Imagine having an ADT security system that does live, HD monitoring of your premise, where the video is streamed back to their hosted service (note: not all apps should have to be Internet -> home)
Imagine being able to surf through live IPTV channels and getting response times like you get from your existing TV today, instead of the constant buffering icons.
Imagine the hassle of having to move your 10Gb of pictures from Flickr (also stored on your local hard-drive) to Flickr-replacement-#67, or you just want to zip them and send them to someone else.
ahem ahem,,,…
As a kind hearted person i am/shall/will donate all my bandwidth for public use.
And in the process i shall enrich my self with information that will provide pleasure/entertainment for myself and others.
This said i will also encourage my fellow citizens to join me in this endeavor.
Hail to the torrents!
While a lot of focus is on bandwidth (FiOS, Light Speed, DOCSIS 3, DirecTV’s new HD satellite) I wonder if applications/content are lagging behind. Personally, I’d like to go from having Comcast as my VOD broker to being able to buy directly from the source (HBO, Showtime, the Networks and Movie Studios, the NFL and NBA) but I can’t (especially in HD) and won’t be able to any time soon. What good is higher bandwidth if the content I want is on private networks and not the Internet?
Absolutely nothing. I have far more bandwidth than I can conceive myself actually needing. I use little to no bandwidth-intensive applications, apart from the occasional network install of an operating system via HTTP or FTP. In fact, my main reason for preferring broadband over dialup probably has as much to do with the low end-to-end latency as the bandwidth margin.
The first thing I would do is a full ONLINE backup. I have about 2TB of data… I would use my Mozy account… would be great… dream on.