From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Fri Sep 27 2002 - 19:52:14 MDT
I believe one of the main problems is that the last mile of the Internet
was left to rot. Ok, not to rot, but certainly its capabilities were
unable for one reason or another to keep up with anywhere near the rate
of doubling of bandwidth capabilities of the Internet core. I believe
the demand is there if the last mile would be "opened up" properly. One
interesting statistic is that right now services like Netflix that use
sneakernet to send DVD data around the country are transferring
significantly more data daily than the Internet. If 100mbit connections
were widely available for $40/month then you would see huge huge demand.
Of course there are corporate/legal issues there too... Hollywood has to
"allow" it, and provide it in a format with at least the same quality
and at least the same price.
Another interesting thing to think about is that even with the end
demand constricted as it is, the Internet backbone capacity was forced
to expand so rapidly that if we /hadn't/ had the rapid increase in
technical capabilities it would have been prohibitively expensive to
even have enough capacity to carry the current traffic.
P.S. I disagree with Eugene on end-user innovation. I think one of the
main pluses about the Net is that it is a dumb network that lets a wide
range of end-user designed applications run on it. A similar phenomenon
was seen with BBSs and modems before the Net. Generally when the end
user is given the chance to self-finance their tech instead of being
forced to wait on some central authority (phone company for instance) to
build it out you will see more rapid takeoff and a much wider range of
uses. Unfortunately no phone or cable companies around here want to
install any kind of dumb cable or fiber to my house and allow me to
choose to buy my own terminating gear. So instead of the innovation we
saw with 2400->9600-14.4->28.8->56k modems we are stuck with a few (slow
and overpriced and artificially limited) standardized choices for
"broadband" and little hope of seeing much of an improvement anytime soon.
-- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/
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