isen.blog

Om Malik asks how real is the need for speed. He observes

. . . as we increase the speed, the real impact of the speed on what we do with it is marginal. Can your eyes tell the difference between a web-page loading in one second or 0.27 seconds. I guess not. . . . Sure at 30 Mbps you can download DVD quality The Bourne Identity in 11 minutes, but its still going to take you 2 hours to watch it.

But Bill St. Arnaud (in private email, quoted here by permission) counters

Internet applications can be broadly categorized into three types :
1. Human to human communications- voice, video conferencing, etc
2. Human to computer communications- web, streaming, video on demand
3. Computer to computer communications - P2P, file transfer, etc

The telcos, given their legacy, have always seen the world in terms of human to human communications and base their network design assumptions on that model. That is why they can never understand why you need more than a 1 Mbs - and high QoS is essential -the human eyeball and ear drum are very poor network interface devices as they have no buffering capability .

[snip]

The Internet today is dominated by human to computer communications, but will that be true for the Internet of tomorrow? Many would argue that the Internet of the future will be dominated by computer to computer communications. Computer to computer communications are not constrained by having "low speed" humans in the loop . . . computer to computer applications now dominate the research network environment to such a degree that we building global terabit networks dedicated to single computer to computer applications . . . Time will only tell if these are very specialized niche applications, or an indicator of future networking trends.

This argument parallels the one that claimed that when we had affordable video-speed networks voice would be free. The implication is that when networks let machines affordably interact at machine speeds, human-machine interaction will be free. The crumbling incumbents are still fighting the former battle.

Myself, I await the day when the net is as fast as my computer's backplane, so there is no distinction between my computer and all the other computers out there on the 'net.

Technorati Tags: Broadband, F2C