Bandwidth Needed Inside (And Outside?) The Home
from the when-the-fun-begins dept
It’s tough to rely very much on these various analyst firm “predictions,” since they never seem to go back and explain how (and why) they were wrong. However, it is interesting to see the realization, no matter what the actual number is, that people are going to need more bandwidth within the home. What the report is really saying is that, while wireless networking gear was originally designed just to let multiple computers share a single connection, those unintended consequences are starting to show up. If you can connect a couple of computers, why not connect your TV, your stereo, your fridge or whatever? Sure, some of those might not make sense, but the ones that do make sense are going to need an increasing amount of bandwidth. Luckily, solutions for higher speed local area wireless connections are very much on the way (assuming the standards battles ever settle down). However, what’s more interesting is that this ignores the question of bandwidth to and from the home. Yes, it’s nice to have a high speed wireless network inside the home, but people are mobile these days. They want to be able to access anything from anywhere… and, frankly, the bandwidth to and (especially!) from the home is very weak. Even worse, the service providers don’t seem to recognize this. Even the various fiber installations that people are talking about have fairly limited speeds compared to what they should be able to offer, and what would really empower people to make use of the bandwidth.
