Has broadband internet access achieved it's goals?
If you think back several years, you can easily remember how broadband
internet access was touted. The basic idea was that with the increasing
rate of transmission offered by broadband access connections, people
would become far more productive creatures than they ever had before.
They would make massive leaps in research, telecommuting would become
an everyday occurence, and the home and workplace would merge forever.
Well we've had some time to review. Has this broadband vision become
our reality?
While broadband has clearly emerged as the leading product for both
home and business users, much of the promise of high speed internet has
not yet been realized by the average American consumer. Yes people use
broadband access more than ever, but its arguable that productivity has
been increased. Certainly people are surfing the internet at speeds of
unheard of a mere decade ago, but are they actually getting more done
in the final analysis? This question can be answered with a simple "not
yet". More people telecommute than ever before, but you'd be kidding
yourself if you didn't notice the huge traffic jams that occur in the
"Real world" more often than they do in CyberSpace. Most of humanity is
still in a 9 to 5 mindset because old habits die hard and people still
like to do business in person. As of 2006, telecommuting remains more
of a dream than a reality for most people.
When businesses originally pictured a popular internet, they expected
applications such as video-conferencing to be the big winners. In
reality, no one could have expected the true bandwith hogging
applications such as music downloading and file sharing would become as
millions of people found the power of peer to peer networking. As the
advent of broadband spread, more and more users became increasingly
affected with virii and spyware. With broadband and always-on
connections, the security risks are truly enormous. More resources than
ever are now spent policing the internet of the many foul actions that
can only occur because of relatively cheap broadband connections. All
forms of spam have been able to proliferate over the relatively
generous broadband connections, as tightly monitored bandwith became
less of an issue than ever in the past.
Broadband access has delivered on many of its promises. People can now
download music and video faster than ever before. Tasks that used to be
laborious on a dialup connection are now almost instantaneous on a fast
internet connection. Those of us who've been using broadband for awhile
should remember what the days of the 2400bps were like. And we should
never forget just how slow and frustrating life in the slow lane could
be.
