It's no secret that the United States very badly lags behind many other countries when it comes to the speed of Internet access. Some of the smaller, more densely populated industrialized nations have a severe advantage over us in this regard, and that doesn't bode well for our future because bandwidth will play a major role in future applications and services.
I can't complain about the quality of our Internet access; our complex shares a 70mbps leased line of some sort that reliably gets me 500Kb-2MB a second. That's megabyte, not megabit. Yet ADSL is the best that a lot of people have, and that gets a max of 3Mbps in most areas. Realistically, that is not anywhere near fast enough to provide any sort of quality experience for something as simple as downloading movies and shows off of the iTunes Music Store. Many rural areas still don't have broadband at all.
In about 10 years, I predict the disparity between rural areas and cities in the United States will reach a serious point for bandwidth. Many communities may just flat out not be able to grow because they won't have the infrastructure to attract businesses that want access to large amounts of bandwidth. While it won't be as dire as fuel costs, it'll be another economic issue of similar importance, and will no doubt see exploitation in the media by politicians and poverty pimps.
I can't complain about the quality of our Internet access; our complex shares a 70mbps leased line of some sort that reliably gets me 500Kb-2MB a second. That's megabyte, not megabit. Yet ADSL is the best that a lot of people have, and that gets a max of 3Mbps in most areas. Realistically, that is not anywhere near fast enough to provide any sort of quality experience for something as simple as downloading movies and shows off of the iTunes Music Store. Many rural areas still don't have broadband at all.
In about 10 years, I predict the disparity between rural areas and cities in the United States will reach a serious point for bandwidth. Many communities may just flat out not be able to grow because they won't have the infrastructure to attract businesses that want access to large amounts of bandwidth. While it won't be as dire as fuel costs, it'll be another economic issue of similar importance, and will no doubt see exploitation in the media by politicians and poverty pimps.
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There's also the issue of bandwidth throttling by the ISP's and whatever other things they do to rob you of the bandwidth you've paid for.
Since you know more about this stuff than me, Mike, I have a question: what are the future prospects for satellite internet? A lot of rural folks use dishes for their tv, so it would make sense for them to get their internet that way, too.
I don't know anything about the limitations of satellite broadband, but I would imagine that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an ISP to turn it into something that can come even close to competing with the new high end cable and fiber optics services. The issues are probably not unlike wireless Internet access, which frequently has issues with signal interference. That's why even though 802.11G is rated at 54Mbps, you're often more likely to get 1MB/sec rather than about 6.5MB/sec.