Broadband has changed the way the world works. The internet has come on a million miles from the bad old days when we used to use ‘Dial-up’ to find out what was going on in the world. Can you just imagine what it would be like to use a modem today? Nowadays we moan when we cannot get the internet on our mobile phones!!!
I felt really old the other day when I was talking about this to my nephew. I had to explain to him how dial up modems work and how long we had to wait to see a single web page. Quite simply they didn’t believe me. I burst out laughing when they tried to Google it, I just said to them ‘you would have waited 5 minutes for that search result 10 years ago’. The irony…..
I also told them that online gaming the way they know it would be a complete no go. OK we used to play SOME first person games but the connection used to be damn unreliable.
So where would we be now without Broadband and cable? Well for starters we would still be waiting on average 2 minutes for a web page to load up (bet you forgot about that didn’t you!) There would be none of those annoying go to my pc adverts on the radio because remote support would be nigh on impossible, putting thousands of remote IT Support engineers out of work at the same time. You DEFINETLY would not be watching You Tube videos because You Tube wouldn’t exist and you certainly wouldn’t be ‘face booking’ as much, simply because you would get fed up with how long it would take to upload the smallest of comments. Web cams wouldn’t be required because no one could use things such as skype because again, the bandwidth wouldn’t be there to accommodate such a service.
Video Conferencing would be a no go unless you used ISDN (now I am feeling old) the cloud (or cloud computing) simply wouldn’t exist because there wouldn’t be the bandwidth to cope with such a service. It’s amazing to think what the world would be like with slow bandwidth, so imagine what I would be like with NO internet? The mind boggles….
Are we better off with faster broadband connectivity? Definitely so. Long distance learning for example wouldn’t be possible, important medical results wouldn’t be able to be viewed at the touch of a button, there are probably a lot better examples than this but you get the idea.
The future is already here in some ways. Soon renting movies from the store will be a thing of the past because everything will be streamed. Games will be streamed as we have already seen with onlive but the quality and resolution will improve. Communication will become almost instantaneous no matter where you are located in the world and ecommerce will take over the high street.
Resources
IT Support London based company which provides high speed site to site internet connectivity for business.