About a million years ago, I was helping a Hewlett-Packard bring its line of consumer PCs to market, the Pavilion line. I was a small part of a large team and we did some very good work. I learned something very important from HP during that experience: technology innovation usually appears first in consumer products and then ends up in enterprise products. There are countless examples of this.
I saw two articles today that have nothing and everything to do with each other. First, here's a story from the NY Times about internet usage at meetings and conventions:
As recently as a few years ago, a type of connection called a T1 line was the norm for most hotels. With speeds of 1.5 megabits a second, it was robust enough for e-mail and Web browsing. (By comparison, an average at-home cable modem offers three to five megabits a second.)
The advent of cheap, user-friendly — but bandwidth-heavy — streaming video technology changed the status quo drastically. Demand at hotels and convention centers has spiked, as businesses add videoconferencing to their meetings and guests download media. Adding to the logjam, hotel managers are moving toward Web-based tools for managing back-of-the-house departments, using more bandwidth, too.
Most business hotels now have added more T1s or a T3
(also referred to as a DS3), which accommodates 28 T1s of traffic.
Other hotels are installing fiber optics, which also offer large
bandwidth capacity. Many of these new systems are what technology
specialists term burstable, meaning they have a typical six or eight
megabit-a-second rate of transmission but are capable of sustaining
many times that amount of traffic if necessary.
Then, there's this article from the Wall Street Journal:
Among the issues are what speed Congress should define as broadband and whether government money should be funneled only to areas that have no broadband access, or if it should also subsidize upgrades to existing networks.
Policies under serious consideration are corporate tax credits to build new wireless or landline infrastructure, government-backed broadband "bonds" and grants to companies or local governments, legislative aides and lobbyists close to the process say. There also is strong agreement that low-income consumers need to be encouraged to sign up for broadband -- for example, through vouchers to purchase computers or discounts on monthly service.
Folks, this is an issue we've been discussing since the fourth issue of Wired magazine, September 1993. The United States will have a bandwidth crises Real Soon Now. It was this year that notebook computer sales surpassed desktops. What percentage of those notebooks have wireless connnections built in? And how many cellphones have WiFi connections built into them? And Cisco is making stereo equipment now? (I'll leave it to you to size that a mistake that is, but please consult some of 3Com's former employees before placing your bet in the deadpool.)
What amazes me is that, in all the time, no one found a business model that would light up the hundreds of miles of dark fiber that weaves across the country and make a buck at the same time. As of this writing, my employer pays $40 / month for me to have broadband into my home so I can work for them 24 x 7. (Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.) That's a ton of money when you start to think that I'm not the only one doing this. And then there are all those people who pay for it out of their own pocket. And how many people in the new economy will be working out of Peet's, slurping up their broadband and lattes? Here's one to think about: What's going to happen when we actually receive our Skype handset?
A tsunami of bandwidth hungry people are about to crash onto our shore. Someone has got to figure out how to monetize them without resorting to goverment subsidies. If I can't understand bailing out GM, I'm way not ready to subsidize Qwest. No hard feelings, okay? I'm just saying.
