With a slew of offerings from many Internet companies these days it seems to me that we need a complete re-think on what we do call broadband.
History
In the late 1990’s we all ooh’d and aah’d at speeds such as 56k, we even knew some people and business’s that had higher speed Internet access, but today these speeds are ridiculously slow compared to new offerings such as ADSL2 which reaches speeds of up to 24 megabytes per second. I can remember a 14.4k modem in the early 90’s.
The Internet was very different then with most pages just basic text and although it seems very slow compared to today’s speeds, it actually worked ok. Today just about every site is overloaded and the needs of consumers demand this in allot of instances.
With Bigpond still lagging behind offering any new technologies and always holding us back with ridiculous usage plans it is time to start taking this company to task. I know it seems I am always on their backs, but they are a company that can make a difference.
My feeling is that if they keep holding us back then they will pay with a consumer backlash, especially if they are too late with offerings such as VOIP and high speed broadband with sensible bandwidth plans.
A New Measurement
So what should be a measure of broadband? Well it should start at what is acceptable for our future. The future will bring high definition movies to our TV screens, so this would be a good starting point. From memory we need about 8 megabytes per second for high definition video to be streamed whilst we watch a movie, so really this at the least should be the starting point.
The problem I see today is that even Bigpond’s meagre offering of 1.5 megabytes per second is marketed as Super Fast Broadband, so what will the marketing be at 10, 12, 24 megabytes per second? Super Super Duper Fast?
I think it will probably be marketed as something like Hyperband or something like that, but with so many companies now offering so many different types of plans it will only get more confusing for consumers.