AlanBarber.Org
Monday, June 30, 2003
Bandwidth Drought?
Robert Cringely, the man the legend, posts an interesting problem. He believes there's a bandwidth drought coming and no one is prepared for it. According to Cringe we're about to reach a dead end wall with current infrastructure that will prevent us from every reaching the so called communication utopia we've been told is just around the next bend. To summarize Roberts point, the future of home communication; tv on demand, video conferencing, virtual meetings, etc will need massive amounts of bandwidth. DSL and Cable, the princesses of broadband, are already being pushed to their limits with current network uses like watching small low quality streaming video and downloading software. The worse part is that these systems are already at their limits of a few megabits per second. There is no way hdtv on demand, video conferencing, etc can every exist with this limited bandwidth. Yet, development of faster connections is not being done.
I’d have to agree with the Cringmister on this one. I live just a few miles outside of town. Unfortunately, I’m just a mile or so too far for DSL and Cable is no where near me. As a result I can’t even participate in the average network uses of today. The phone companies say they might get DSL out to me someday, probably in another 5-10 years. I fear that by then new, faster network will be created to provide these new communication services of the future but I’ll just be getting my DSL that will be too slow to use.
Relying on the private sector to provide services just doesn’t work anymore. The large conglomerates have become so preoccupied with pleasing stock holders. They cannot and would not ever think about doing massive infrastructure replacement projects to bring everyone the needed bandwidth that we’ll need in the future.
I really believe it’s time for the government to step in and do something about it. Perhaps it’s time to start doing public works projects on the same scale as done during the Great Depression. Building massive public networks maintained by the government to link everyone, everywhere with cheap, high quality networks may be the only way to save us from technological stagnation.
on 06/30/2003 at 07:29 PM