| Most are missing the forest for the trees Yeah ok, lets assume we wire up the whole country for fiber and give everyone 100Mbps symmetrical service. Now the problem none of you thought about? The nationwide backbones that backhaul all this traffic would have no hope of keeping up, not to mention that no site on earth is going to have the capacity to send you content at that speed (nor will they have much incentive to buy the capacity to do it). It may be hard to believe, but there is actually something called a "big picture" out there.
At what point does speed become overkill? Practically (that's the keyword, not theoretically or dreaming), what can a 100Mbps fiber connection give the average consumer that say, a 25Mbps cable or even DSL connection can't? They have no idea the difference from CNN loading in .5 seconds or 2.5 seconds. Its kind of like inventing a TV that displays colors and resolutions the human eye can't discern, what's the point?
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| Well, Qwest's definition of next generation upstream is 896kbps. That's the fastest upstream speed they offer, or will offer, for some time unless they shift to VDSL or FTTH.
I think it's a while before we get to the part where we argue that we're getting so much speed -- we can't possibly use it. Though yeah, the 100Mbps metric is kind of just blather, and if that's your point -- I agree. |
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Lazlow
join:2006-08-07
Saint Louis, MO | reply to BillRoland
Think back to Gates quote of "who would ever need more than 640k?" Your statement will soon fall into that category.
For web browsing you are probably correct but the internet gets used of a lot of things and will (if allowed to) be used for many more things (some not even thought of yet) that will make use of those speeds. The backbones in Japan (and other countries) have not seemed to have had much difficulty in handling their customers having 100Mbps symmetrical service. Why should our backbone be unable to handle what theirs can?
As soon as a significant portion of the US has 100Mbps service, servers(or server farms) will appear that will be handle that kind of capacity. When the the Cord boat tail speedsters were first developed (first production car to do over 130mph?) there were no production tires that could handle the speed(why develop a tire that could handle speeds that no car could go?). It was not long after that tires could be purchase to handle the speed. 10GigE equipment has been around long enough that it is pretty well understood and there are faster technologies in development. As soon as there is a real need of those speeds(backbone), they will be rapidly available. |
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