Sometime around the year 2001, people will look back on this time¹ and smile at the good old days of low bandwidth and internet data latency. At least, let's hope it is that soon. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of businesses have been formed to deal with bandwidth issues. Whether that technology was to compress some media type to transfer it faster, or create a new media type that rendered something kool² with minimal code, these businesses were in existence because bandwidth was so precious.

Sooner or later, and it looks as if it will be sooner, somebody was going to feed our immense desire for bandwidth. Two main groups are poised to deliver on this need: the phone companies, and the cable companies. They are in this fortuitous position for only one reason, they had the lines in the ground. Every house and office in the U.S. is wired for phones and most are wired for cable. These two groups who had never really competed before seemingly overnight were in a race to see who could get the best bandwidth to the public in the shortest amount of time. That, combined with telecommunications deregulation, caused a firestorm of activity to start. Companies like Paradyne (a division of AT&T) brought forth Digital Subscriber Line technologies named ADSL, and HDSL³. These theoretical delivery channels were said to be very fast over short distances, but that over long lines the signal died a slow death. Cable companies had better wiring in the ground, but needed expensive upgrades to their headend equipment to deliver data to and from a user's site.

Now with all the demand, and all the research that has been done by these two, you would expect that bandwidth would be solved by now...but it ain't. I believe this is mostly due to the fact that billions of dollars must be invested to offer good coverage, and gambling with that kind of money made folks a tad nervous that this whole Internet thing might go as quickly as it had come. This caused companies to take a "wait and see" attitude, and thus, we still dial up our ISP for annoyingly slow access to this so-called Information Superhighway⁴.

Finally, this is changing. Cable modems have been in labs for a decade and they are finally starting to be offered by the large cable operations. Microsoft invested a cool $1 billion in Comcast to accelerate the process. ADSL and HDSL, along with their slower cousin ISDN are starting to appear on the rate cards of the RBOC's. When somebody like Microsoft throws around that kind of dough, and somebody starts to make a buck at this, I believe that the pace will quicken substantially.⁵ Look for ever broader coverage and ever lower prices as these things become commonplace. And finally we can all start to share something more interesting than stock quotes. My personal hope is that more bandwidth will create private film entrepreneurs shooting, digitizing, and then sharing with us (for a small fee) their independent creativity. Now that would be empowering.