The Increased Importance of Broadband
ByIn today?s multimedia, multi-communication world, the need is increasing to have a broadband connection. More and more people are surfing the Net, living and breathing on emails, receiving and sending faxes through this virtual network, managing their family?s memories on digital albums, listening to and streaming music, and even downloading their favorite TV shows for their daily pleasure.
Many of us are interfacing through websites like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace, and rely so much on Internet connectivity that having a fast and reliable ?gateway? to the World Wide Web is a necessity. Ten years ago, there was no such thing as a blog, but these days, more people read blogs than they read the local paper!
Just think of the time when you had only slow dialup services to connect to the Internet. Booting up the computer would take five minutes; another fifteen minutes would have to be spent, depending on the time of the day, to get an access number to connect to the Internet.
As more varied content gets added to the Internet every day, the ‘connected’ users are appreciating the need for more bandwidth. Most of us who connect to the Internet comprehend that broadband (includes technology such as Cable) delivers a superior experience over dial-up modems.
Nowadays broadband speeds range upwards of 30 Mbps. Please note that such high connection speeds would not be attainable uniformly across the country. This is the only drawback of the FIOS service.
Some forthcoming improvements will boost the connection speeds of the existing Internet infrastructure. Once these technologies are introduced commercially, the cable providers can offer superior services to their broadband customers.
Broadband Internet has become a necessity in the metro regions; but it is yet to gain popularity in the other parts of the country. This is because people require some time before they take to new technologies like the broadband. Another fact is that a great part of rural America does not have an extensive Internet infrastructure.
People hesitate to be the first movers, they usually wait for a reduction in prices, or for others like their neighbors to buy a connection, or for the government to make these standards mandatory (similar to the FCC requiring all signals to be digitized). It is expected that a vast majority of us will use broadband Internet like we took to the inventions of the telephone and television.
