Bandwidth bandwidth bandwidth

[mikecap]

These are the three most critical things for the future of personal computing. Why? Because the next thing coming down the pipe is massive, massive processing power. Which is great! We can keep bending Moore's Law over all day long, and make humongous irons available in people's living rooms and offices. We can do all kinds of great

Comments

[mikecap]

FiOS is only available to a small population currently. I don't have it, my parents don't have it, rural populations will be lucky to ever get anything at all. These speeds still don't really compare on a "per capita" basis with what's available to people in places like Europe and Southeast Asia

[narnarthinks]

Was just thinking about this -- maybe exclusivity with AT&T was the price Apple had to pay to get any network to agree to be the carrier at all. Maybe the networks see the writing on the wall and are reluctant to support internet amounts of data transfer. All this time users have been clamoring for network choice, but maybe bandwidth considerations were driving the politics of Apple's decision to contract with AT&T.

[mikecap]

It's always about money. The carriers don't want to invest in infrastructure, because that will reduce their profits. There's no incentive to build better networks, whether it's a wireless or cable provider. Our system only encourages monopolies, not competition - if it were truly a free market, companies would be competing by building bigger and better networks and innovating ways to make them cheaper; instead, we have fat and slow behemoths that only care about milking their customers and providing the minimum possible level of service at minimal effort.