Broadband Speeds - US Also Suffers

An interesting article at Wired discusses the recently released report by the communication workers union. The report highlights that the US suffers from relatively low broadband speeds when compared with the rest of the world. The median US speeds sit around 1.97 megabits/second while Japan is at 61 megabits for the same price. The difference between these speeds is illustrated by the time it would take to download a movie - 2 minutes compared to 2 hours for the US!

Are we expecting too much in New Zealand if a large and highly competitive market like the US fails to have world class broadband offerings? Given the current timeframes for local loop unbundling it looks like we will be waiting a while regardless.

Internet Collapse Imminent?

It is something which has been said year after year but is the Internet finally reaching a crisis point?

The prevalence of high bandwidth websites has exponentially increased and access to a wide range of online content (such as video streaming and MP3's) is an expectation of most Internet users. Will the global infrastructure supporting the Internet be able to cope? The following article from the BBC explores this topic further and notes that just one days worth of traffic from YouTube is equivalent to 75 Billion emails. This is only one of the pressures that wasn't around a couple of years ago and with the rise of online applications such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets are things going to get much worse?

There will be many people here in New Zealand who might ask if we have already reached this point? After all, some evenings (that is being generous) it is hard to know if our broadband speeds are any better than those on dial-up. This shows how our local infrastructure fails to cope with the current demands - will we see this at a global level in the near future?