The biggest consumption of bandwidth will clearly be entertainment industry related - streaming video, audio, multimedia, etc, but I suspect that there is a very long list of people who do NOT want general purpose bandwidth in the hands of the average consumer, including the FBI/CIA/NSA/AOL/RIAA/Hollywood/Gates/Murdock, etc, etc, etc.
If these people could find some way of deploying special purpose, tightly controlled, dumbed down, proprietary bandwidth they MIGHT go for it, but only after taking their sweet time and totally milking what exists today in media (DVD, audio CD, video by satellite...)
So, yes we're doomed to limp along with the bandwidth equivalent of 8 bit microprocessors in home computers. There is just no way in hell Hollywood wants anyone freely able to ship around a DVD worth of HDTV video on the net using general purpose bandwidth, it simply is never going to happen. The audio recording industry has been burned by the Napster thing, not to mention dirt cheap dual well CD recorders.
Business, above all big business, will have all the gp bandwidth they need, but not the consumer. It is going to be far more difficult and costly to reach a bandwidth comfort level comparable to the processor speeds, memory, and disk space enjoyed on a typical home computer today.
And to cap the lot Nasdaq has the delivery of such bandwidth largely priced in...
I wish I could bring myself to believe that I'm wrong. |
