Om Malik on Broadband : Need For Speed… How Real?

People talk about broadband like it's all we ever need and everything will be beautiful. Indeed, Om (link below, see good graphic) makes some good points to bring some reality to this thinking by pointing the other way, asking what kind of gains do we actually get when increasing bandwidth.

My take on this is that we easily expand to the bandwidth we have, maybe just working beyond what we have (sounds like how people deal with money). I remember when GPRS came and everyone was touting how mobile browsing would be so much better. Yet, what did we do with the bandwidth? Added colour and graphics and streaming and so on - we expanded to consume all that bandwidth.

Also, we think of future bandwidth with an eye to current apps, so we are ill-prepared when deploying more bandwidth. People can always use more bandwidth, we just don't know how they'll use it or if the broadband companies can afford to stick around to run the networks by the time they make money from the new uses of more bandwidth.

Yes, this leads me to mobile - 3G, as it is currently marketed, is bunk. The 3G networks were all built to serve a few use cases that are not materializing even with companies like Nokia shoving the features under folks' noses (mostly because the use cases aren't relevant to normal people). If the operators really want high level of adoption of 3G and coming 4G (HSPDA, or whatever it's called), then they need to open up their networks for experimentation. Let users decide how to take advantage of the faster networks.

Here's a reassuring thought: Stuff like Ajax, VoIP, blogging, photo sharing are technologies and services we equate with the current resurgence of the Internet. All of them are based on simple technologies that were around 5 years ago. But, all of them are very much built on the back of broadband connections - their current success is tightly linked with, now ubiquitous, open broadband connectivity.

You want to see a similar growth of data services on 'broadband' mobile networks? Then, let a thousand flower bloom, and get marketing out of the way.

Link: Om Malik on Broadband : � Need For Speed… How Real?.

What this shows is that as we increase the speed, the real impact of the speed on what we do with it is marginal. Can your eyes tell the difference between a web-page loading in one second or 0.27 seconds. I guess not. If you can download a music file in 1.08 seconds, does that really mean you will be buying music all the time. No you perhaps will be buying better quality, and perhaps marginally more music. There is the other option, but its just easier to pay! Sure at 30 Mbps you can download DVD quality The Bourne Identity in 11 minutes, but its still going to take you 2 hours to watch it. These are analog questions in an increasingly digital world.