IP Democracy: There's No Such Thing as Too Much Bandwidth

Business Week’s Arik Hesseldahl has this piece about just how much bandwidth consumers need, an evergreen question bandied about by broadband providers and technology observers alike. To me this has always been a relatively silly question — consumers want, and entrepreneurs will leverage, as much bandwidth as you can give them.

Remember when 56k modems came out, twice the speed of the old 28.8k modems, and everybody was overjoyed by the doubling of capacity? Now, skeptics doubt whether 100 Mbps download Internet rates would ring anybody’s bells. Arik asks whether anyone cares if an iTunes song downloads in 2 or 10 seconds.

But once you have 100Mbps or more available at home, what the heck are you going to do with all that bandwidth? For the average consumer, 6Mbps should more than suffice for today’s typical needs, whether it’s downloading music, watching the occasional video, or even running a home network that lets two or three computers do the same all at once. Does anyone really care whether that song download from iTunes (AAPL) takes 10 seconds or 2 seconds?

Well, yes, I care, and I suspect everybody else cares too. Those additional eight seconds can seem like an eternity.

As Arik points out, gaming and video services can quickly fill up whatever bandwidth is made available. And who knows what might emerge in a world where everybody has 100 Mbps service. Broadband capacity is the veritable field of dreams and there’s no such thing as too much bandwidth.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 29, 2007 9:33 AM to IP Democracy