Japan's Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I think the result of the US lagging behind is that the rest of the world has to wait too. Because US-based innovators don't have the connections they don't create the new applications. Japanese users don't have much use for their awesome connections now. I know, I have one.
nicovideo, maybe :-)
I think that the web is a better interactive application than bandwidth-intensive video alternatives. It (even MySpace) inherently stimulates our higher brain functions, whereas video seems to universally produce a trance-like state. (Although, I suspect this may be a prime opportunity for impression based advertising.) However good a business that may be, I won't be a drug pusher.
More bandwidth doesn't make the internet a new medium; it just makes room for more of what we already have. If I had to guess what The New New Thing will be on the coming high bandwidth internet (and of course all of us here need to), I would say that it will be the old old things that people have been trying from the start. I think it will be nationwide video on demand; I think it will be bit torrent with a toll. I don't think it is an interesting problem for hackers or entrepreneurs. It is too messy. It is for suits in the media companies to clean up.
edit: I may have spoken too quickly. A moment after I posted this, I began to wonder how much bandwidth is necessary to eliminate the need for a local computer. That would make one hell of an internet application. I'm sure there are plenty more. But, I still trust that the web is here to stay.
I disagree that "more bandwidth...will be more of the same." The reason is when I look at other aspects of computing that have gotten better in the past, and what they've enabled, it seems like that's not true.
a couple decades ago, 1MB RAM was unfathomable. What would you possibly do with all that space? We can write programs in 64kb! Well, looks like we added layers and layers of abstractions to make it easier for programmers at the expense of more work for computers.
The miniaturization of hard drives and the increase in their capacity has changed the game a quite a bit. iPods would not be possible without small hard drives. While it's not the only reason, without it or other similar technology, we wouldn't have had a change in consumer music and culture.
Like your edit says, with huge bandwidth, your computer here is just as good as a computer "there" Imagine if your internet connection is as fat of a pipe as the one going from your hard drive to your motherboard. SCSI, ATA100, whatever. Remote desktop applications will be just as fast as locally running one nowadays.
If that's the case, 3D gaming can be completely remote, and subscription based gaming can become the norm, rather than purchasing boxes and CDs.
If video and TV really do make it on the internet, I imagine it can change the way we watch it. No longer do we see disjointed segments of content, nor will we have 'channels' where we have to wait to watch something. We will be able to pick and choose what we watch, even entire archives of past shows at our whim. On demand won't just be for movies anymore. (Well, that's given that the noose of big media doesn't strangle innovation)
My guess is more bandwidth won't be much more of the same. We'll see more "wasted" bandwidth according to our present defn, but they'll be used in entirely different ways.
Huge investments such as the $200B from American tax payers in the 1990's that resulted in nothing?
Besides, it's not only speed what matters, there is latency issue as well. With HTTP I cannot tell much difference (visually) when going from 3mbps to 12mbps unless I'm downloading an ISO file or something like that. Browser will not open more than 2 connections at a time anyway.
They got real performance gains when they decoupled the service provider from the infrastructure provider. Of course, this was implemented through regulation, but I wonder what you could do on an open market. Would it be feasible for consumers to buy into a local fiber network so that they "own" the last mile? That would give them leverage when selecting a provider for TV, Internet, and voice service.