Bandwidth

Alongside Moore's Law, there's a matching phenomenon for bandwidth known as Nielsen's Law, which basically states that end-user connection speeds grow at 50% per year. This has held true for some time and seems to be continuing. At the moment, I have a 2Mb down/128kb up DSL service. The best I'd get based on the technology installed in NZ is around 8Mb. If/when we get to ADSL2+, I could be looking at up to 24Mb, because I'm not too far from my local DSLAM. If we ever went with Fibre ToThe Home, I could be into the hundreds of megabits and over time it will (according to the law) just keep going up. Of course whether or not I can actually reach these speeds or use them is dependent on having the bandwdith through the core network and having services that require it - which is the topic of today's blog entry.

So what do I do with this bandwidth? Today I can surf the web, download average streaming video, listen to my old favourite radio station in the UK. If I want streaming TV, which is coming in other parts of the world, I need at least 15Mb. Then there's HDTV, which will require even more. But do I want internet TV? Will it be any better than broadcast TV - or what broadcast TV becomes in response? But what else is there? I dunno - for some reason TV just doesn't seem enough. There must be other stuff coming.

But what is it?

Where's the content? I reckon that's where the money is - bandwidth is becoming a commodity.