Video Sucks up Bandwidth, but Could Save Lives, Too

Unless you’re actively seeding torrent files or dream of one day having HD content streamed from the web to your TV, the debate over managing networks can seem hopelessly abstract. To help the rest of us understand why fast networks with a lot of capacity are so important, I asked networking giant Cisco for what it considers to be the top five bandwidth-hungry applications. Cisco mined the data it gathered for its visual networking index and came up with the top five in the consumer, business and mobile categories. While they don’t take up much capacity today because they’re not in widespread use, they are representative of what one could do with a fast network with a lot of capacity. Read more over at GigaOM.