Doc Searls raises some important questions about the current state of broadband and its implications:
In the shower this morning I was thinking about the unstarted businesses that can only thrive in online markets made possible by symmetrical broadband - markets we have never seen, because broadband to the home (and even to many businesses) has been provided in asymmetrical form from the beginning.
How many small and home office (SOHO) businesses would be made possible by services that let people produce as well as consume?…How many business-building activities are strangled before they are born by prohibitively narrow upstream bandwidths?…How fast would economies grow if every consumer had unlimited powers to produce? That was the promise of the Net in the first place, folks. It’s still not fulfilled.
In spite of the Net’s peer-to-peer, end-to-end, symmetrical, smart edge-stupid middle native architecture, bandwidth provision has carried the assumption that consumers don’t produce anything other than cash for producers and intermediaries. And we’ve bought into those assumptions, too — because most of us have never known anything else.
Responding to a comment, Doc talks about his own experience:
Today, if I want to put 200 photos in my Flickr collection, or worse, if I want to send a multi-gigabyte video file to Google Video, I can’t even do it easily over my “business” broadband connection, which costs me $109/month and provides only 300kb of upstream bandwidth. So I go down to a Starbucks, where there’s typically a T-1 in every store.
This is not a good thing. Worse, it’s a clueless thing, six years into the new millenium, for carriers who could be making a lot more money if they realized the gold mines sitting in the households they hold captive for Hollywood fare that still hasn’t come through like everybody in that business imagined, back in ‘95 or whenever.
Mitch Shapiro at 2:04 AM|Comments(0)
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