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Yea, certainly wasn't trying to call you out or anything :)

And yes, I remember when there was only one or two TVs in the house. Then there was 56k, where only one person could be online, and it took up the phone line. That's not to say we shouldn't strive to greatness, but it's amazing how far we've come.

Which leads to another line of thinking: If a family does only have a 5mbps connection, and is thus forced to share their streaming, maybe by forcing them to all watch the same thing in a room together like we once watched TV, is this so much of a bad thing? Are there other ways to mitigate a low mbps so that you can still experience a 2018 Internet?

This makes me sound like a telco shill, but the 1gbps/100mbps/Xmbps-or-bust arguments, I think, are sometimes utopian in nature and often discount how much people can do without such high-powered Internet. Yes, of course more speed is good, but are those with only 15 or 10mbps really in the stone age?

However, I say this while living in Seattle, where we both have amazing choices and speed, so I am definitely one of the fortunate ones.




I think streaming VR and peer-to-peer HD video are probably the big bandwidth hogs on the horizon.

Looking back at history, I'd say we've lived in alternating periods of bandwidth < content (1990s dialup), and content < bandwidth (2010+?).

But the definer has always been content. Jpegs to gifs to digital photographs to music to video to high-def streaming video.

If there's no content, there's no need for more bandwidth. If the content exists, people will want the bandwidth.




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