The BUSINESS QUESTION is = What could you do if bandwidth was not an issue? If bandwidth is NOT a constraining factor – what applications could you do that you cannot do now?

For example, downloading a 90-minute video would take hours on DSL but on a 1Gbps line it would take less than ten seconds. On a 10Gbps line it would take less than one second.

If you have that kind of multi-Gbps bandwidth at the subscriber level, what creative applications can you envision AND implement that you cannot do today?

These are the questions to be asked anad answered on approach to the issue of bandwidth.

One reader had it right – the more you have, the more you will fill it up. Just like when you buy a 2-car garage house, You fill up the garage with your cars and junk and say you need three car garage house. You think it is enough but you outgrow that and wish you had a 4-car garage.

Communications via quantum entanglement has the very real possibility of creating a practically latency free network, with no notable lag communicating from the us to australia, or even to other planets when we get there.

Additionally, because distance would no longer become an issue, running cables being a thing of the past, the throughput would be operating near the theoretical maximum of the technology employed to enable quantum communications… that and the speed of the backbone.

With wires and radio frequencies no longer needed, communications would become a problem easily attacked with massive parallelism.

End users might have a quantum network interface with a maximum throughput of x megabits/sec… adding a second interface would be trivial and double the bandwidth, because the infrastructure would be easier to deploy.

How would it change the network? Well, offsite redundant storage could become standard, because there is no latency to communicate with an external drive. Not only could you access your storage and computing resources remotely as easily as you would at home, but you may never even end up being in physical possession of the physical storage or computing devices themselves… the manufacturers may find it easier to give you a code to access them rather than ship them.

Parallel processing could become physically distributed, and may form large pools to be shared to eliminate processors going unused needlessly.

A latency free network with relatively unlimited bandwidth could shift our view of computers further towards being one very very large network, accessed through progressively dumber terminals.

CPUs and other discrete components may never end up being installed, just interfaced over direct quantum communications.

Thats all a bit far fetched, but the potential is developing.

Allan, as for your question, I do not use 100% of my bandwidth 100% of the time, but there are times when I do use 100% of my bandwidth, so no, I do not consider my current bandwidth to be infinite. I especially find I am limited by the upstream bandwidth. Even if I were allowed to ‘roll over’ my upstream when it isn’t being used, to be spent at a faster rate when needed, I would still find my current capacity to be limited.

Long winded. sorry.

Where in the hell are you ? Is that a regular cost for bandwidth in the US, for instance in SF, LA or NYC ?

You are welcome in France: due to competition, regular price is about $20-/month for ADSL access with 16 Mb/s downstream + 2 Mb/s upstream + unlimited volume

Within less than a year, thanks to competititve FTTH deployment, it will be about $100for FTTH access with 100 Mb/s downstream AND upstream, unlimited volume :-)

I’d love to be able to send a 1.3GB DivX rip to a friend on AIM.

If I had infinite bandwidth, I would just send the film in high definition.

The same holds true for storage. ;)

are you getting better speeds over wireless than over fiber?

Oh, that’s easy: download all the porn in the world.

Next question?

:)