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The Broadband Explosion
In my latest Enterprise
Leadership podcast, I interview Robert Austin and Stephen Bradley,
co-authors of The Broadband Explosion.
I'm particularly excited about this opportunity to interview these two men.
We covered a wide range of topics that I was interested in learning
about. My business needs more bandwidth, yet the options seem
limited because the costs for significantly more bandwidth are so high,
whether I go with DSL, ADSL or cable modem.
Did you know that the United States ranks 13th in the world with regard to broadband services? We're waiting for new, competitive market forces to bring about another wave of changes for cheaper, higher bandwidth to the home.
Austin and Bradley's book might have been better titled The Broadband Explosion - Outside the USA ...
Korea, Japan and 10 others offer significantly more bandwidth for the same price we pay. It's sad.
Let me put it like this: A cello teacher in Miami had a student in Boston. In the podcast, Austin and Bradley talk about the musicians' experiment with 12MB/sec bandwidth (that's 6-10 times faster than is typically available now) between their two studios. The detail and nuance of teaching, listening, watching, etc., between the teacher and the student were suprisingly more compelling than expected by observers, the teacher and the student. They could almost play together with only a tiny delay (due to the limits of the speed of light), so in many ways it was like being together in the same room. High-definition TV and high-definition audio change the power and sophistication of collaboration beyond what anyone can imagine right now.
Here's the issue: In a service-oriented economy, higher bandwidth makes so much more possible than merely hurling around fast email messages to each other. Think about this a while and you might start to worry about the USA falling behind in one of the most critical areas of growth for an economy.
Should the government step in and help pay for new infrastructure like the other countries have done? I don't see that happening in the USA, so we're at the mercy of commercial competition. But where will that next wave of change come from? I hope it's from broadband wireless technologies, but I worry that the big cell phone companies (Verizon, Cingular, Sprint) may hold that back due to their huge investments in proprietary technologies that do not work with each other and their desire to keep you in their walled gardens to play.
Sure, Verizon, Cingular and Sprint have plans for wireless broadband
offerings on their cell phones, but it's less than what you get with cable
and it's more expensive. And don't even ask whether you can run
VOIP call over their proprietary voice-calling technology.
Tom
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