3 ms·

That's an interesting perspective. I mean, today, it seems impossible to imagine any use case for > 100Mb/s. After all, it can stream 4k HD video! But I think

That's an interesting perspective. I mean, today, it seems impossible to imagine any use case for > 100Mb/s. After all, it can stream 4k HD video! But I think the very way we use computers is restricted by what is possible on commodity infrastructure. The fact that 100Mb/s is overkill for many customers is simply because the average speed is much lower, so nobody has bothered to develop applications that make use of that additional bandwidth. If 100Mb/s became something everyone had, I'm sure we would start to see applications that require such speeds to be useable. I don't know what those applications would be, but I'm sure they would come to exist. A 56k modem is overkill if you're browsing a text-only internet, but it would be pretty hard to use the internet of today with one :).

bsdetector 12y ago
In the 56k days people could imagine sending audio one day, and dream about video. If we can't imagine a compelling use requiring gigabit, maybe there just isn't one. I'm hoping that some experts here could clue me in, because with wired U.S. average according to Akami at 11.5 Mb/s it seems that a neighborhood wireless would be plenty fast for at least the near future, and much cheaper to build and maintain. Having fiber direct to the house would be better of course, but to me it just doesn't seem worth the cost.