I remember when I went from dial-up to DSL. I was simply amazed. Then I upgraded from DSL to cable. Once again I was amazed. Now I get to play with customer networks connected to fiber and T-1. Very cool stuff. Now it's all about streaming media and downloading songs. I can download a song in seconds and an entire album in minutes. Who could need more speed? I had gone from Kbps (thousands of bits per second) to Mbps (millions of bits per second).
Well, I read an article in the paper a couple of weeks ago about Internet2. It's being developed by academics for academics (and government and big businesses). At least for now. It has a theoretical limit of 10 Gbps (that's 10 billion bits per second). You could download a full-length movie in about 30 seconds. This Internet 2 parallels the existing Internet and was largely completed this past August.
But wait, there's more. There is now a 100 Gbps backbone. Downloading The Matrix just went from a butt-dragging 30 seconds to about three seconds. It's all done with fiber optics. Multiple strands using multiple colors allowing much more data to be sent simultaneously over the same cable.
With more and more content on the Internet, more applications becoming Internet-based, the need for consumer bandwidth is going to keep growing. With TVoIP (high-quality streaming video over the Internet) just over the horizon, I don't think it will be too long before average folks like you and me are going to start looking back at Mega bit speeds as quaint. Where do you see the Internet going as the speeds increase expopnentially?
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1 comment:
Dear Sven,
Would you do a technoloy blog on how to:
Downloading teleseminars' audio versions on a CD so we could listen to the CD in our cars.
Listening to a 60 minute recording while working on other computer projects just doesn't work for me. Also who wants to spend 60 minutes in front of their computer doing nothing but listening to last night's teleseminar?
Thanks Sven,
Jean Tracy
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