[1st-mile-nm] Bandwidth - How Much is Enough?

[Christopher Mitchell]

Though I think it is great to talk about how much bandwidth some of us 
will need in 5,10,x years I wanted to note a problem that some of us 
have been developing.

I was at a discussion recently and a person from the MN Dept Commerce 
was saying that not everyone needs that much more bandwidth.  That many 
people are happy with 2mbps.

While I think that most of us recognize 2mbps will not be sufficient for 
what we want to do, there are millions of people on dialup right now who 
think they are doing alright.

So I think we need to avoid talking about what everyone will *need* and 
talk about what should be available for those who *need* it.  I think 
people are more receptive if it is clear that we need to move to a world 
where they will have a choice between their slow 2Mbps if they want for 
rather cheap even though much faster is necessary for others in the 
community, especially schools, businesses and whatever.

My point is that if we are not nuanced and we talk about what everyone 
will *need* in x years, we will enable those who oppose us to drag the 
discussion in whether some grandparent will need to download HD movies 
in minutes.  Though it is an argument I believe we can win, we need to 
avoid getting sidetracked into that and focus on the real goal, which is 
giving everyone an actual choice of whether they want fast broadband or 
the DSL crap they are used to.

Christopher Mitchell
Director, Telecommunications as Commons Initiative
Institute for Local Self-Reliance
http://www.newrules.org/info/
612-379-3815 x209

Steve Ross wrote:
> Great link. Haven't found the UK one, but here's one of ours 
> from 2006, predicting 30 Gbps to the home by 2030.
> 
> www.broadbandproperties.com/2006issues/sep06issues/george_sep.pdf
> 
> It comes from John George at OFS.
> 
> Steven S. Ross
> Editor-in-Chief
> Broadband Properties
> steve at broadbandproperties.com
> www.bbpmag.com
> SKYPE: editorsteve
> +1 781-284-8810
> +1 646-216-8030 fax
> +1 201-456-5933 mobile
> 
> Dale Carstensen wrote:
>> I'm looking for a URL about a speech given in England sometime since
>> last October, about how traffic at a single home will exceed all
>> current backbone internet traffic by some date in the near future.
>> The speaker was a manager at a US telecom company.  Maybe AT&T,
>> maybe Verizon, maybe Qwest.  I guess those are the only three,
>> and how long will it be before there's just one again??
>>
>> I haven't found that yet, but I did find an amazing review, which
>> appears to have been written around 1999 (the web page is dated
>> Oct 18, 2002), about a paper written at Bell Labs in 1961 predicting
>> telecom traffic demands for the year 2012.  The title is "Through a
>> Glass Darkly".
>>
>>  <http://www.boblucky.com/Papers/green.htm>
>>
>> In addition to that entertaining digression, I'll mention that I
>> think it's pretty silly to keep installing copper when fiber is
>> cheaper.  And with fiber, the question is not on the order of
>> kilobytes, it's on the order of gigabytes and tens of gigabytes,
>> and it won't be long before it's terabytes.  Per second.
>>
>> Now, I think it is also silly to ship hundreds of copies of the
>> same huge file (a movie, for instance, or updates to Microsoft
>> Windows or Apple Mac OS or Linux) to the same small city from a
>> centralized data center several states away.  But maybe if "the
>> phone company" began thinking it's in the communications carrier
>> business instead of something it did decades ago.  That is, the
>> advertising, billing, satellite TV, "bundling" or other marketing
>> schemes and string between tin cans business seems to be what they
>> think they do.
>>
>> Maybe if they concentrated on being communications carriers,
>> the incredible bandwidth of fiber, that wouldn't cost as much as
>> the copper they're still installing, would handle the delivery of
>> those duplicative huge files, and the demise of theaters and
>> television could proceed, the same way cell phones have just
>> about eliminated pay phones.
>>
>> Or, the remnants of the Bell system can just disappear when some
>> other company does what they should have done.
>>
>> If I find that URL about the coming exaflood, I'll pass it along, too.
>> Oh, searching for exaflood on google will yield some related reading,
>> too, I'm sure.
>>
>>   Mr. Dale
>>
>>
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