Monday, November 21, 2005

A Tale of Two Broadband Speeds...

"Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second."

But I'm still getting used to this version of the web...

Anyway, Reed Hastings, chief executive of online DVD rental company Netflix made this statement at the TechNet Innovation Summit recently, according to Yahoo! News. According to Reed, we're going to be seeing homes connected to the net at whopping speeds of 10Gb/s, introducing a glorious world of unprecedented choice and freedom.


Now for the flip side.

Same day as this comes out, we hear from our old pal, Mark Cuban.

Over the past 5 years, bandwidth to the home has grown from 300k for broadband to 5mbs, and in some cases even 10mbs. But that bandwidth is not dedicated per user. That bandwidth is shared. The number of users sharing that bandwidth has increased even faster than the size of the pipe. Thats not going to change...

So in a nutshell, at the very point in time when a rapidly growing number of consumers are going to be expecting programming at the highest possible High Definition bitrate, there isnt enough bandwidth to deliver it.



So which one do we believe? More to come no doubt.

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