Broadband's Got Nothing Left To Sell But Speed
Om Malik at Gigaom has made an interesting analysis of the effects of widespread broadband penetration into the US market. As the demand for broadband tapers off because the pool of persons that don't yet have it slowly dries up, there's really only one thing the providers have left to sell: faster speeds.
It should come as no surprise that the carriers have let go of incremental speed upgrades and have gone ahead and doubled or tripled the speeds of their offerings. Why? Because bumping speed to 2 Mbps from 1 Mbps doesn’t really feel like a big boost. A 6X speed bump, on the other hand, makes the Internet much faster — and worth paying for. Suddenly, Hulu and YouTube become much more fun to watch. If a subscriber believes that he or she can download music, stream videos and connect to their favorite social networks faster, they will pay a premium price for that speed.
Of course download speeds are king if you're talking about watching streaming video. But we really have our eye on available upload speeds as well here at HotHardware. There's always a lot of kvetching from P2P file-sharers when ISPs throttle the precious files we're stealing... I mean sharing. But the real explosive growth possibility from super fast and reliable upload and download speeds will be cloud computing and remote archival of all sorts of information. Rackspace is cheap now. I want to upload all sorts of things to rackspace I already rent but the upload times are daunting. As always: Faster, please! And cheaper. Cheaper is good, too.
It should come as no surprise that the carriers have let go of incremental speed upgrades and have gone ahead and doubled or tripled the speeds of their offerings. Why? Because bumping speed to 2 Mbps from 1 Mbps doesn’t really feel like a big boost. A 6X speed bump, on the other hand, makes the Internet much faster — and worth paying for. Suddenly, Hulu and YouTube become much more fun to watch. If a subscriber believes that he or she can download music, stream videos and connect to their favorite social networks faster, they will pay a premium price for that speed.
Of course download speeds are king if you're talking about watching streaming video. But we really have our eye on available upload speeds as well here at HotHardware. There's always a lot of kvetching from P2P file-sharers when ISPs throttle the precious files we're stealing... I mean sharing. But the real explosive growth possibility from super fast and reliable upload and download speeds will be cloud computing and remote archival of all sorts of information. Rackspace is cheap now. I want to upload all sorts of things to rackspace I already rent but the upload times are daunting. As always: Faster, please! And cheaper. Cheaper is good, too.
