What new things? We’ve already caught glimpses of many of them. In recent years the following new products have come about, each of them highly dependent on a solid high-bandwidth connection:
- Voice Over Internet Protocol (Voiceover IP) telephones. They’re not just cheaper, they’re better.
- Video On the Web & mobile devices
- Telemedicine, allowing the elderly & disabled to live in their own homes longer. Doctors in larger communities can examine patients in remote areas of Alaska, from hundreds of miles away.
- User-created video… YouTube quickly became one of the five largest users of bandwidth on Earth after appearing in Feb. ’05.
We have every reason to expect this kind of innovation to continue and that our bandwidth needs will be ever-increasing as a result. Only fiber to the home can deliver it. In fact, only fiber can deliver that bandwidth now, to meet current needs.
When Thomas Edison built the world’s first central-station electrical generation plants, electric lighting was “the killer app.” Though Edison himself would later invent hundreds of products that use electricity, he couldn’t have possibly anticipated electrical demands like central air conditioning for private homes… or dishwashers, refrigerators, or computers, or mobile phones or cameras. And certainly not Ipods. But all those things use electricity all the same, even though they wouldn’t be along for many years afterward.
Today the least expensive desktops come with 100 GB hard drives, because everyday users need the file space. And if they need the file space, it means they also send files of comparable size.
