100 vs 1000

Why Gigabit+ broadband is not really about speed


Out here in Australia there’s been a lot of talk lately about the merits of various broadband technologies. A lot of this discussion boils down to the choice of a point on a speed/cost curve.

Here, I’ll draw one for you:

You’ve probably seen graphs like this a few times. Every time there’s a nice smooth line charting from low-cost slow speeds to high-cost high speeds,

and they’re all wrong.


They’re not just wrong in fact. They’re actively harmful to the discussion, as they paper over the two really important questions:

  • At what speed do we cross the next phase transition?
  • Does the value of this transition justify the cost?

Phase Transitions

Take a brick. Heat it up. After a while, you’ll probably have a hot brick. Heat it up some more, and eventually you’ll reach a point where the liquid clay you have is not really very brick-like any more.



About 15 years ago I plugged in my first home broadband connection, and it changed my life dramatically. I was now able to download a whole song in only a few minutes!

Ok, so maybe not very dramatically, in the grand scheme of things.


There are speed thresholds where we enable fundamentally different products.


Via the Present

We now live in a world where

Napster

Youtube

“Apps” like GMail

Photo apps

How’s that “home computer” working out for you? iPads and tablets don’t work

With broadband, the “home computer” fundamentally changed

Take away your broadband, and you won’t do the same things 10x slower.

You’ll do fundamentally different things.


A


Much of the future is not predictable

…but a lot of it is


The market for hard disks is about to die.


So to conclude, I’m arguing that we need to think about broadband in terms of the phase transitions that we can cross, and that we’re about to cross a freaking big one that lies somewhere around 1Gbps. Those who don’t have access will feel like those stuck on dial-up during the broadband revolution.

Cheers,
Mike



Three takeaways:

  • There are speed thresholds where we create a fundamentally different product.
  • Such a threshold exists around 1Gbps
  • Much of this change is not predictable. Some is.