is an amazing bit of analysis which demonstrates that the former cto of british telecom is a smarty. if you’d like an inside peak into how the broadband situation got to such a sorry state then read the whole thing. twice. it also points towards a vision of a future that should sound familiar:
“So how are we going to advance? I think we have been here before. Back in the 1940s USA TV companies couldn’t find an economic means of providing signals to outlying communities. So people clubbed together to build towers and antenna systems, and wired their houses to realize Community Antenna TV. This was so successful that the expanded systems became the Cable systems of today.
In a similar manner, youngsters now frustrated by the lack of bandwidth are linking homes with CAT5 LAN wiring strewn across gardens. Schools are buying 802.11 wireless-LAN cards to create their own networks at a much lower cost than building wiring schemes. There is a message here for the network companies, and a huge opportunity. If they don’t provide the bandwidth demanded by rapidly advancing terminal technologies, people will just set to and provide their own. Hotels, schools, coffee shops and places of work are starting to look like the phone boxes of the 21st Century. People are gathering there to satisfy their craving for wide-bandwidth, which isn’t a 56Kbit/s or 2Mbit/s dribble, but orders of magnitude more.”
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