World's Fastest Internet™ in Canadaland

Karl Auer kauer at biplane.com.au
Fri Jun 26 20:02:08 UTC 2015


On Fri, 2015-06-26 at 13:39 -0500, Rafael Possamai wrote:
> How does one fully utilize a gigabit link for home use? For a single person
> it is overkill.

This sentiment keeps popping up. It's a failure of vision. To suggest
that "single people" or "ordinary people" or any other set of presumably
average and uninteresting people will never be able to fully utilise the
amazing properties of X, and that they can and should be satisfied with
some limited version of X or the even more limited alternative Y, is to
completely miss the point. And to actually provide no more than that is
to build a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Look at pretty much any modern technology and you can be sure that when
it was first invented someone wearing the then equivalent of a brown
cardigan said "yes, that's all very well, but what use will ordinary
people ever have for it?".

When the first little fire sputtered into life in some Neanderthal cave
you can bet that some troglodyte said "no point make bigger, me warm
enough, more hot waste of effort", but of course he hadn't thought of
bronze, iron, steel, glass, welding or rocketry. Or the steam engine or
the internal combustion engine. What luck that his kids ignored him, eh?

As William Gibson wrote, "the street finds its uses for things".

I can't think of anything I would or could do with a terabit Internet
link - but it's not me who needs it. It's the kids now in school who
will build it, and their kids will think it commonplace. And they will
look back at you and me and think "how did our grandparents ever manage
with only a couple of gigabits? How limiting!" And while they are
thinking that, some bright young things will report that they think
they've got a primitive exabit link working...

Regards, K.

PS: There are only three real values for network speeds, just as there
are only three values for amount of personal fortune, RAM, disk space
and CPU speed. The three values are "not enough", "enough" and "I don't
know". Always aspire to "I don't know".

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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