How Much Bandwidth Do You Want?

According to Business Week online, Verizon is offering some Massachusetts residents new FiOS broadband Service. FiOS delivers a super-fast connection by replacing the old copper phone line to each home with a fiber-optic cable, offering Internet downloads as fast as 30 megabits per second, vs. the 1Mbps to 6Mbps of the typical cable or DSL. technologically at least: Verizon’s fiber cables can easily carry hundreds of megabits per second of data, though cost is always an issue.

Rest assured the cable companies are not going to roll over and play dead. Comcast Cable recently demonstrated a new technology called DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) that promises to give cable modem users speeds as high as 150Mbps. As of yet, no plans have been announced for actual market trials of the new cable technology. All this without having to lay new cable. This, says Comcast Chief Technology Officer Tony Werner, will give cable operators a cost advantage over Verizon and any other company that decides to pull up its wires: “We’ll be able to launch overnight or area-by-area without any digging.”

Verizon will have spent over 23 billion dollars, to do the network upgrade, between 2004 and 2010, and then will only be able to service a bit more than half of its territory.

How much bandwidth will you need? Not long ago people couldn’t imagine using the bandwidth we are using today. What will be invented once we have the ability to have that kind of bandwidth? The possibilities are staggering!