Nico Macdonald

London

Consultant

I am sympathetic to Verwaayen's defence, particularly his advocacy of services. Many future services delivered over broadband may require very little bandwidth, taking advantage instead of having an always on connection with little latency. How much bandwidth do those hot communication technologies SMS and IM need? Almost none. Even delivery of TV could be facilitated by 1.5 to 2Mbps broadband, using asynchronous models. (After all TiVo delivers TV using RF, which is much lower bandwidth than any broadband BT sells.)

Sadly, in the UK we are still fixated with broadband for faster access to Web sites and email attachments, and music and software downloads. We have to get away from our PC-centric, reactive model of network use and develop services that take advantage of <em>all </em> the characteristics of broadband, and that also better fit into our lives. For all of Verwaayen's convincing talk, BT has yet to deliver in this area.

(I wrote further about the bandwidth fetish in a December 2003 journal posting '<a href="http://spy.typepad.com/technology_and_society/2003/12/enough_bandwidt.html">Enough bandwidth already</a>.)