The advent and spread of broadband technologies through businesses, schools, and homes have provided a launching point for sites like Youtube and Hulu as well as technologies like peer-to-peer sharing (Napster, Bittorrent) to develop and grow. I feel this is incredibly crucial for promoting innovations, improving communications, and ultimately leveraging the full capabilities of such an intricate and robust network of humans and technology.
I remember being surprised when I first saw the figure below; although the US has pioneered the internet and its adoption it has lagged behind with promoting accessibility.
(larger picture can be found here)The notion of cloud computing takes on greater gravity and significance with increased access and speed. Concerns with transferring large files, which admittedly tend to fall on the piracy side of the file sharing spectrum, may no longer be relevant.
What good is a service if one can only use a fraction of its potential?
Very interesting blog post. I will try to add some international view to it. In Germany rural areas have not been provided with broadband internet access by the major internet service providers, most probably due to lack of profitability. This has lead to a lot of community driven efforts and innovation about how to achieve broadband internet at reasonable cost to areas where the ISPs simply have no interest. Unfortunately all articles regarding this are in German language, but I am more than happy to provide more details if wished.
ReplyDeleteIn addition the German government is about to modify the so called "law of telecommunications" and will add a minimum speed an ISP has to guarantee for a certain technology. This is a topic that in my opinion has been neglected largely due to marketing language, where only the theoretical maximum speed is mentioned.