The age of gigabit connectivity is dawning and will advance in
coming years. The only question is how quickly it might become widespread. A gigabit connection can deliver 1,000 megabits
of information per second (Mbps). Globally, cloud service provider Akamai
reports that the average global connection speed in quarter one of 2014 was 3.9
Mbps, with South Korea reporting the highest average connection speed, 23.6
Mbps and the US at 10.5 Mbps.1
In some respects, gigabit
connectivity is not a new development. The US scientific community has been
using hyper-fast networks for several years, changing the pace of data sharing
and enabling levels of collaboration in scientific disciplines that were
unimaginable a generation ago.
Gigabit speeds for the “average Internet user” are just arriving in select
areas of the world. In the US,
Google ran a competition in 2010 for communities to pitch themselves for the
construction of the first Google Fiber network running at 1 gigabit per
second—Internet speeds 50-100 times faster than the majority of Americans now
enjoy. Kansas City was chosen among 1,100 entrants and residents are now
signing up for the service. The firm has announced plans to build a gigabit
network in Austin, Texas, and perhaps 34 other communities. In response,
AT&T has said it expects to begin building gigabit networks in up to 100 US
cities.2 The
cities of Chattanooga, Tennessee; Lafayette, Louisiana; and Bristol, Virginia,
have super speedy networks, and pockets of gigabit connectivity are in use in
parts of Las Vegas, Omaha, Santa Monica, and several Vermont communities.3 There are also other regional efforts: Falcon
Broadband in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Brooklyn Fiber in New
York; Monkey Brains in San Francisco; MINET Fiber in Oregon;
Wicked Fiber in Lawrence, Kansas; and Sonic.net in California,
among others.4 NewWave expects to launch gigabit connections in
2015 in Poplar Bluff, Missouri Monroe, Rayville, Delhi; and Tallulah,
Louisiana, and Suddenlink Communications has launched Operation GigaSpeed.5
In 2014, Google and Verizon were
among the innovators announcing that they are testing the capabilities for
currently installed fiber networks to carry data even more efficiently—at 10
gigabits per second—to businesses that handle large amounts of Internet
traffic.
To explore the possibilities of the
next leap in connectivity we asked thousands of experts and Internet builders
to share their thoughts about likely new Internet activities and applications
that might emerge in the gigabit age. We call this a canvassing because it is
not a representative, randomized survey. Its findings emerge from an “opt in”
invitation to experts, many of whom play active roles in Internet evolution as
technology builders, researchers, managers, policymakers, marketers, and
analysts. We also invited comments from those who have made insightful
predictions to our previous queries about the future of the Internet. (For more
details, please see the section “About this Canvassing of Experts.”)
How could people benefit from a gigabit network? One expert in
this study, David
Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet
& Society, predicted, “There will be full, always-on, 360-degree environmental
awareness, a semantic overlay on the real world, and full-presence massive open
online courses. Plus Skype
won’t break up nearly as much.”
There are experiments progressing in some developing countries to
produce gigabit-or-better wireless networks that will surpass the reach and
speed of wireless connectivity in the industrially developed world.6
There are disputes about just how quickly and how broadly the move
toward gigabit networks will spread. In the US, some experts on
telecommunications policy say a lack of competition is stopping firms from
investing in the infrastructure improvements that would enable a more
widespread rollout of higher speeds.7 Some
telecommunications leaders say the current speeds are sufficient for what most
Internet users expect to be able to do online.8
There is less contention over what
expanded capabilities will mean when they evolve. Historically, every major
advance in bandwidth has facilitated innovation that has brought new services
and applications to digital life. In the Internet’s early days, slow modems facilitated
email; faster dial-up modems helped websites become useable; early broadband
rollout allowed for quicker sharing of relatively big files such as the MP3
music files that were shared on the first peer-to-peer services like Napster;
later broadband advances allowed for streaming activities that have given rise
to services like YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Netflix; and advances in wireless
speeds have enabled everything from massive adoption of social networking sites
to location-based sharing services on smartphones. The respondents to this
canvassing foresee similar changes as gigabit connectivity emerges.
Overall, 1,464 expert respondents
weighed in on the following question:
New killer apps in the gigabit age: Will there be new, distinctive, and uniquely
compelling technology applications that capitalize upon significant increases
in bandwidth in the US between now and 2025?
Please elaborate on your answer: If you answered “no,” explain why you think
there will be incremental change, or hardly any change at all. If you answered
“yes,” describe what the killer apps might be as gigabit connectivity becomes
available. Explain what new tools and applications will excite people in the
next decade and envision the kinds of personal connectivity and immersive media
experiences that will seize the public imagination.
Some 86% of the respondents to this non-probability survey said “yes,”
they believe major new applications will accompany a rise of bandwidth speeds
in the US by 2025, and 14% of
the respondents said “no.” There were a number of broad themes threaded through
their answers.
Killer Apps in a Gigabit
Age: Themes
1. People’s basic interactions
and their ability to ‘be together’ and collaborate will change in the age of
vivid telepresence—enabling people to instantly ‘meet face-to-face’ in
cyberspace with no travel necessary.
2. Augmented reality will extend
people’s sense and understanding of their real-life surroundings and virtual
reality will make some spaces, such as gaming worlds and other simulated
environments, even more compelling places to hang out.
3. The connection between humans
and technology will tighten as machines gather, assess, and display real-time
personalized information in an ‘always-on’ environment. This integration will
affect many activities—including thinking, the documentation of life events
(‘life-logging’), and coordination of daily schedules.
4. Specific economic and social
sectors will be especially impacted; health/medicine and education were
mentioned often.
5. New digital divides may open
as people gain opportunities on different timelines and with different tools.
6. Who knows? ‘I have no idea
due to rapid change.’ ‘The best Internet apps are yet to emerge.’ ‘If I knew, I
wouldn’t tell you, I would invest in it!’
7. Advances will be gradual for
various reasons: Bandwidth is not the issue. The US will lag because a
widespread gigabit network is not easily achieved.
Many of the respondents expanded the
frame of the question and discussed advances that are generally tied to the
Internet of Things—the spread of connected devices, artifacts, sensors, and
wearables—and other technology trends.
Marti Hearst, a professor at the University of
California-Berkeley, wrote, “These ideas aren’t new, but they will finally work
well enough if given high enough bandwidth. Entertainment: you play sports and
music virtually, distributed, across the globe. Co-living: You have virtual
Thanksgiving dinner with the other side of the family. Work: finally, we
greatly reduce flying around for meetings because virtual conferencing feels
real. Healthcare: remote assessment, treatment, and surgery. More generally,
more interaction will be done with others remotely. For example, your golf
lesson could be done with a coach remotely, in real time, while he or she
watches your swing at the tee and has you make corrections and adjust your
grip.”
A similarly expansive summary of possible effects came from Jason Hong, an associate professor in the School of Computer
Science at Carnegie Mellon University. “Odds are high that there will be breakthroughs,”
he replied. “My best guesses would be: a) far better telepresence, in terms of
video quality, audio quality, robotic control, and time (for example: open all
the time rather than just a short time for video conferencing); b) a few people
starting to use life-logging technologies to capture everything in their lives
(with some people choosing to share those); c) higher adoption of telesurgery
and remote medical support; d) some new kind of entertainment, possibly
including new kinds of social media; e) more sensor data being continuously
captured and stored, including those embedded in the city (for bridges and
buildings), cars, smart phones, portable home medical devices, and toys; f)
better search for multimedia, especially videos; g) more cloud-based apps,
offering far richer software-as-a-service than we can do today. Examples might
include more thin-client netbooks with all of the backend stored in the cloud,
or full apps that are currently desktop apps offered as a cloud service (think
Adobe Creative Suite, games, or Microsoft Office fully in the cloud).”
Following is a selection of
respondent answers that speak to each of the themes.
Theme 1) People’s basic interactions and their ability to ‘be
together’ and collaborate will change in the age of vivid telepresence—enabling
people to instantly ‘meet face-to-face’ in cyberspace with no travel necessary.
As the boundary between being “here”
and being “there” shrinks, respondents predict that people will be able to
experience faraway places, sounds, and smells without actually being there.
Joe Kochan, the chief operating officer for US
Ignite, a company developing gigabit-ready digital experiences and applications
responded, “Widely-available gigabit broadband connections will usher in the
Internet of two-way, persistent, high-quality video to replace today’s Internet
of images, text, and recorded video. Your interactions with doctors, educators,
merchants, and others will consist not of emailed forms or pre-recorded
messages, but instead of instantaneous, life-like video interaction that
requires no setup or configuration.”
Bob Briscoe, chief researcher in networking and
infrastructure for British Telecom, wrote, “Telepresence will be available in
business environments. By 2025 it is unlikely to be realistic and natural,
although sufficiently realistic to be usable. It will also be becoming
available in personal and residential settings. It may become possible for an
individual to project into more than one presence at once, given that young people
have learned to cope with partial attention on multiple threads of
interaction.”
Jim Hendler, a professor of Computer Science at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Semantic Web engineer, wrote, “I believe
‘telepresence’ will be a driving application in the workforce, and thus the
ability to have multi-person meetings without travel will be enhanced
significantly.”
Peter Janca, the managed
services development lead at MCNC, the nonprofit regional network operator
serving North Carolina, wrote, “Increased bandwidth will enable true
‘you-are-there’ feelings in human-to-human interactions—maybe a holographic
representation of the other parties sitting in the room with me. This becomes a
‘killer app’ for human interaction, but bad news for the travel and transportation
industry. One application of the above will be in education: We use video
conferencing today, but there are still impediments to it being an equivalent
to the physical in-class experience. Higher bandwidth, coupled with
higher-horsepower computing, will make today’s virtual classroom work as if it
were a real classroom.”
Alex Halavais, an associate professor of social
and behavioral sciences at Arizona State University, predicted, “Yahoo aside,
we’ll see increased use of telepresence in workspaces and in family life. I
suspect this will include a lot of ‘always-on,’ very-high-resolution video. I
imagine a lot of offices doing something akin to what Thomas Keller does for
his restaurants in New York and Napa, and installing video walls in the hall.
Much of this may be in game space.”
Kathryn Campbell, a partner with Primitive Spark,
Inc., an interactive marketing firm based in Los Angeles, responded, “No
question, bandwidth will play the same kind of transformational role in
reshaping society that railroads and freeways played in our past. I am most
excited about the potential for truly immersive entertainment and
communications as bandwidth continues to explode. On the entertainment front,
something like the Holodeck concept first shown in the old Star Trek series is
actually within our grasp by 2025. Games, films, shopping for cars and
vacations, and (of course) porn will all become immersive 3D experiences. So
will the 2025 version of that primitive tool that we call Skype today. Catching
up with my sister in Papua, New Guinea, will be almost like being there in a
decade (or at least I earnestly hope so!).”
Theme 2) Augmented reality will extend people’s sense and
understanding of their real-life surroundings and virtual reality will make
some spaces, such as gaming worlds and other simulated environments, even more
compelling places to hang out.
David P. Collier-Brown, a system programmer and author,
predicted, “Avatars to go to meetings for me in Texas, rather than me flying
down. Bus tours of Istanbul on Saturday afternoon from the comfort of my living
room. Playing a game of football with my cousin in Ulan Bator from the gym
downtown.”
David J. Wierz, a strategic analytics professional
for OCI, commented, “Virtual reality becomes the reality. The current ‘fad’
emulates effects such as that with [the 2013 movie] ‘Her.’ More
practical applications come in creating fully interactive, personalized touring
as well as visitation with family and friends. There is further the means to
engage in ‘live’ sports and ‘play’ the game with a team set in one location or
composed across multiple geographies. I’ll also note the potential with medical
care, personal engagement for care management, and the means to create a fully
interactive ‘environment’ in the home or group area for individuals support
health, wellness, mental participation, and care.”
Tim Bray, an active participant in the IETF and
technology industry veteran, wrote, “I have particular hope for advances in
locative augmented-reality applications, for art, entertainment, tourism, and
other surprising things.”
Alison Alexander, a professor at the Grady College
of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, wrote, “One
killer app that could take off is a virtual reality environment. Forget
reality, live in your selected world. Visit wherever and whenever. Also, this
is not a killer app, but the global nature of connectivity could foster an
integrated world economy, breaking down the importance of nations and
governments. Foolish optimism, but perhaps we will even be able to make
bureaucracy operate more effectively. I am very excited about the power of
connectivity to solve research problems. It is happening already, but how
wonderful when barriers of time and place no longer hinder collaboration.”
Bryan Alexander, a technology consultant and senior
fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education,
responded, “Gaming has become a planetary culture industry, and it often relies
on Internet connections for downloads, socialization, P2P gaming, security,
etc. Game designers constantly push the resolution and display envelope; more
bandwidth encourages this. We should expect new forms of gaming to emerge, such
as ones integrating daily life with games (think Kinect or Alternate Reality
Games) or more-immersive forms (play with that video wall).”
An optimistic but more measured response came from Paul M.A. Baker, associate
director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute
of Technology, who predicted, “There will be steady, incremental change. It
will be more related to interface design and enhanced AI [artificial
intelligence] and information processing applications than to bandwidth
increase, per se.”
Theme 3) The connection between humans and technology will tighten
as machines gather, assess, and display real-time personalized information in
an ‘always-on’ environment. This integration will affect many
activities—including thinking, the documentation of life events
(‘life-logging’), and coordination of daily schedules.
Laurel Papworth, a social media educator,
responded, “We are looking at full video lifestreaming in the near future. The
Lost Generation had to manually document their lives. The Eternity Generations
(from now on) face a future where the tapestry of life has ceased to unravel.
Lifestreaming from ultrasound to final illness (and beyond if we add
intelligent bots to the life data) will be the killer app. The challenge going
forward is to live a full life. No one will be able to sit around in their
underwear watching TV if their lives are being streamed for current and future
generations. There is a small possibility that by 2025 behavior will have
normalized (back to passive, not caring of opinion of watchers) but more likely
that will take more time.”
Robert Cannon, Internet law and policy expert,
wrote, “We are moving into an era anticipated by [Internet pioneers] [J.C.R.]
Licklider and Doug Engelbart where the smart device becomes the assistant to
the knowledge worker and to, frankly, everyone doing everything. But, as the
Internet of Things anticipates, we move beyond network humans to networked
devices, where sensors and monitors and databases constantly interact creating
information … Will there be a killer app in the future that changes everything?
Maybe—but certainly what will change is that everything will be networked and
everything will be providing information and interacting.”
Fred Baker, Internet pioneer, longtime leader
in the IETF, and Cisco Systems Fellow, responded, “The current exponential
growth of the network seems to show that connectivity is its own reward, and is
more valuable than any individual application such as mail or the World-Wide
Web. Today we use massive bandwidth for Map/Reduce and related applications, as
well as communication at a distance. Obvious uses for communication capability
at a distance include high-resolution hologram-like displays. But the biggest
growth will be in machine-to-machine communications.”
David Orban, the CEO of Dotsub, wrote,
“High-bandwidth and high-definition communication will allow the emergence of
what we’ll call emotional computing. Remote group collaboration will gain a
fundamental new dimension in being able to record, transmit, analyze, and
understand the full gamut of human emotions. Facial expressions, subtle changes
in voice stresses, gestures, will all be part of how we will communicate among
each other for work and fun across any distance, with computers and software
platforms understanding these components and being able to adapt to them,
facilitating the efficient reaching of goals and objectives.”
K.G. Schneider, a university librarian, wrote, “I
see amazing potential of wearable computing to contribute a near-harmonious
information-seeking environment where the analog world is enhanced and opened
by the digital world. There are probably implications for sexual environments,
but I’d prefer not to dwell on that. Instead, I’ll make a haimish comment about
how useful it would be to ‘see’ my recipes in a wearable heads-up display while
I’m cooking, rather than interact manually with a paper book or worse, a tablet
or other device.”
Marina Gorbis, executive director at the
Institute for the Future, a nonprofit research organization, commented, “We
will make significant advances in delivering context-aware applications of all
kinds, i.e., providing information and resources that are relevant to the needs
and context of the situation. These applications will automatically read the
environment (location, mood, social and physical settings, intentions, etc.)
and provide highly customized information that is relevant to a particular
context.”
Hal Varian, chief economist for Google,
commented, “The Internet of Things is real. Internet-enabled devices that
interact with the physical world will be the norm. They will learn on their
own, with some verbal instruction by their users. The big story here is
continuous health monitoring… It will be much cheaper and more convenient to
have that monitoring take place outside the hospital. You will be able to
purchase health-monitoring systems just like you purchase home-security
systems. Indeed, the home-security system will include health monitoring as a
matter of course. Robotic and remote surgery will become commonplace. Lasik is
just the beginning. Tools for artistic creation such as animated videos and
interactive games will become much more powerful and enable collaborative
creation.”
Theme 4) Specific economic and social sectors will be especially
impacted; health/medicine and education were mentioned often.
JP Rangaswami, chief scientist for
Salesforce.com, commented, “It will be classic William-Gibson-future’s-here
stuff. The focus will shift from just thinking about live, very high-quality,
video-based apps to [experiences] that create lots of data to be moved around,
sometimes synchronously, sometimes asynchronously. Having a personal healthpod
you strap yourself into daily will become normal; wearing clothes that are
tailor-made for you every day, 3D-printed at home, will also become normal,
with the previous day’s clothes recycled efficiently; the school day will
disaggregate into a number of learning sessions, some at home, some in the
neighborhood, some in pairs, some in larger groups, with different kinds of
facilitators.”
Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University’s
Berkman Center for Internet and Society, responded, “Telemedicine will be an
enormous change in how we think of health care. Some will be from
home—chronically ill or elderly patients will be released from hospitals with a
kit of sensors that a home nurse can use. For others, drugstores (or private
clinic chains—fast meds, analogous to fast foods) will have booths that
function as remote examining, treatment, and simple surgery rooms. The next big
food fad, after hipster locavores, will be individualized scientific diets,
based on the theory that each person’s unique genetics, locations, and
activities mean that she requires a specific diet, specially formulated each
day. Augmented reality is another big future application that, for complex
shared images, will require gigabit connectivity and very accurate sensing.”
Ed Lyell, a college professor of business and economics
and early Internet policy consultant dating back to ARPANET, commented,
“Just-in-time learning will continue to expand, permitting people of all ages
to find the information they need when needed. It will permit the human mind to
focus on creativity and critical thinking with known information being
available as needed. Time in school will need to radically change since the
talking-head, expert teacher is less and less valuable. The role of
teacher-coach will be even more important yet require a different emotional and
intellectual skill set than that which most educators now possess.”
Breanne Thomlison, founder and president of BTx2
Communications, a marketing and strategies firm, wrote, “Gigabit killer apps
will be related to health and wellness and education. Tools will monitor us
from birth and predict sickness and heal us faster. Genetics will be patented
and evolve to have cures to current and new disease that will arise. All of
this will happen rapidly. People will be able to connect with others who share
similar DNA and experience a personal connection to focus on prevention versus
treatment. When it comes to education, there will be an app for every child’s
learning ability or disability… Children will be learning and tracking 24/7,
while sharing their experience with selected-in peers and networks. Everyone
will be the media and a newsmaker. Journalism will be more personal and
targeted.”
Theme 5) New digital divides may open as people gain opportunities
on different timelines and with different tools.
Danny Gillane, an information science
professional, commented, “If there is a digital divide now, it will still exist
in 2025. The divide’s existence will be magnified by the new killer apps—who
has access and who does not, beneficiaries and those left out. Increased bandwidth
and new compression technologies will just allow for more of the same as we
have today—more entertainment, more commercial activities, more and better
communications.”
Clifford Lynch, executive director for the
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), wrote, “Where very high bandwidth
environments exist (for example, the upper end of the research and higher
education sectors) we are seeing a lot of innovation in science and scholarship
that is dependent on very fast networks, advanced high-performance computing,
and data-intensive practices. Our understanding of what gigabit connectivity
can bring to consumers or small businesses (entertainment, games, education,
commerce, social media) is much more limited. I worry greatly that most of
these applications could be stillborn because affordable high-performance
network connectivity to the general public in the United States is not very
good and doesn’t seem to be getting much better quickly (witness the steady
drop in the US rankings in global surveys of national Internet connectivity),
due to a whole series of public policy and economic choices that have been
made. The good news is that we are seeing some ‘labs’ established as Google,
for example, wires a few cities for very high bandwidth. There are other areas
to watch carefully as well: mobile devices are still very
bandwidth-constrained, and the combination of very high bandwidth and mobile
may yield some interesting new apps. Also many of the most interesting
bandwidth-dependent apps seem to involve new sensors and I/O devices, and as we
see new developments there (Kinect, etc.) these could point towards new apps.
Think about the implications of a new generation of sensors that can be
controlled by thinking here. Also some of these can use local Wi-Fi type
technology to get fairly high bandwidth and then compress or abstract data
streams that travel across the wide-area network, circumventing some of the
bandwidth constraints.”
Rex Troumbley, a graduate research assistant at
the University of Hawaii at Manoa commented, “We should not expect these
bandwidth increases to be evenly distributed, and many who cannot afford access
to increased bandwidth will be left with low-bandwidth options. We may see a
new class divergence between those able to access immersive media, online
telepathy, human consciousness uploads, and remote computing while the poor
will be left with the low-bandwidth experiences we typically use today.”
George Lessard, information curator and
communications and media specialist at MediaMentor.ca, wrote, “Yes and the
digital divide’s gap between the US ‘have’ and ‘have-nots’ will grow even
larger.”
Theme 6) Who knows? ‘I have no idea due to rapid change.’ ‘The
best Internet apps are yet to emerge.’ ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you, I would
invest in it!’
danah boyd, a research scientist for
Microsoft, responded, “Moore’s law predicts that the answer is yes. If I knew
what it was, I’d be building that instead of filling out this survey.”
Joel Halpern, a distinguished engineer at
Ericsson, responded, “Changes in capability (such as bandwidth, computation,
storage, etc.) by several orders of magnitude are inevitable over the stated
time frame. Such changes will produce completely new and exciting applications.
To pretend we know what those applications will be is a mistake. Each time such
things have emerged, they have largely been in spaces that were not
anticipated. It is also worth remembering that many of the most pervasive
effects will likely be in ways that are not directly visible, but make a
dramatic difference indirectly.”
Howard Rheingold, a pioneering Internet sociologist
and self-employed writer, consultant, and educator, responded, ‘Who has ever
been able to predict the most significant results of increased bandwidth? Many,
starting with Taylor and Licklider in 1968, have been able to see that
networked computers would give rise to new communication media. But who could
have foreseen YouTube?”
Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center
for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate
School of Journalism, wrote, “I could not have predicted Google, Facebook,
Blogger, or certainly Twitter. So there’s no way I can predict what ubiquitous
gigabit bandwidth will bring. I only know I want it.”
Tiffany Shlain, filmmaker, host of the AOL series The Future Starts Here, and founder of The Webby Awards, commented, “We
have no idea what new apps will exist when every human on the planet is online.
We could have never predicted Google or Twitter. I can’t wait to see what 2025
will bring.”
Seth Finkelstein, a programmer, consultant and EFF
Pioneer of the Electronic Frontier Award winner, commented, “Historically,
every new technological capability generates new applications which take
advantage of that capability. However, if I knew exactly beforehand what those
new killer apps would be, I’d be contacting a venture capital fund, not putting
it in this survey.”
Rob Atkinson, president of the Information
Technology and Innovation Foundation, responded, “It’s certainly possible there
will be ‘killer apps’ but it’s hard to see what they will be. Even super HD
video does not require anything near one gigabyte.”
Theme 7) Advances will be gradual for various reasons: Bandwidth
is not the issue. The US will continue to lag by 2025 because a widespread
gigabit network is not easily achieved.
David Clark, a senior research scientist at
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, wrote, “Video
will continue to be the major driver of bandwidth demand. Video is not new or
distinctive. There will be new apps, but I doubt that they will be enabled by
increases in bandwidth. The exception may be mobile apps, which are highly
constrained by cellular capacity.”
Mike Roberts, Internet pioneer and longtime
leader with ICANN and the Internet Society, responded, “I’ve been involved
professionally with this issue for years. It suffers from the usual problems of
hype and misunderstanding. At least three major forces are at work in what is
called gigabit networks. 1) The economic issue of fair and equitable access to
the Internet; 2) The economic structure in which bandwidth and applications and
content generally are provided with Internet technology; and 3) The
opportunities for new applications development which are possible when
gigabit-style bandwidth is available to citizens. Generally, we are still stuck
in the situation with Internet technology where success is being measured by
comparison to the way things used to be done. Yes, there eventually will be
killer apps dependent on gigabit-style bandwidth, but the path to them will be
longer and more tortuous than advocates like to admit.”
Robert E. McGrath, an Internet pioneer and software
engineer who participated in developing the World Wide Web and advanced
interfaces, commented, “First, there will not be ‘significant increases in
bandwidth’ in the United States. Increases yes, but not significant. Second,
I’ll take a chance here and say that there will be no ‘killer app,’ at least
not of the magnitude of the Internet. Lots of cool stuff will roll out, some
people will get rich, but nothing really ground-breaking. I note that there
haven’t been any ‘killer apps’ for quite a while. All the recent candidates
(social media) are minor permutations of Internet messaging. Third, it would
take massive investment in basic research now to get anything game changing by
2025. Investment is going down, which makes me say there will be no great
results, since we aren’t doing the work to get them.”
Leah Lievrouw, a professor of information studies
at the University of California-Los Angeles, responded, “I tend to agree with
economists like Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon that much of the innovativeness
in the last couple of decades has been incremental, refining and building and
elaborating on more fundamental infrastructural changes that are now decades
old, like TCP/IP and other key features of Internet architecture, optical and
satellite data transmission, petrochemicals and transportation, and so on. Over
the last couple of decades, especially with the commercialization of
publicly-funded infrastructure projects like the Internet and the ‘mean world’
perceptions of the post-9/11 age, the pressures to lock down, ‘stabilize,’ and
render disruptive digital technologies ‘safe’ and predictable have dominated
political discourse and popular culture, which has in many respects limited the
emergence of truly disruptive innovations that would destabilize existing
markets, products, and infrastructures. So we might well increase digital
bandwidth, but use it to deliver and meter familiar, trusted (and ‘safe’)
products and services, or variations on them: media content, college lectures,
voice telephony, security services, public utilities, financial information and
services, health care advice, and so on.”
Andre Brock, a survey participant who shared no
additional identifying details, wrote, “I am unwilling to believe that there
will be ‘significant’ increases in bandwidth before 2025. My concern lies with
the unwillingness of telecom providers to upgrade their backbones to
accommodate gigabit bandwidth and their continued litigation strategies to
prohibit municipal Internet service providers willing to install their own
fiber. Without significant federal intervention on the lines of the ‘universal
service’ provision of the 1996 Telecom Act, we will continue to see incremental
increases in bandwidth (wired and wireless), overcharges for ‘4G’ access, and
increased telecom lobbying against net neutrality in order to profit from
‘tiered service’ throttled access.”
David Bollier, a long-time scholar and activist
focused on the commons, responded, “The question contains embedded assumptions
that may or may not hold true: 1) that the Internet will necessarily remain
open and nondiscriminatory (net neutrality); 2) that telecom providers will
indeed build out Internet bandwidth in significant and roughly ubiquitous ways;
and 3) that killer apps are the necessarily the biggest, most desirable outcome
imaginable. The social capacity to use and diffuse new apps, and to innovate
‘on top’ of them, is at least as important. The most promising avenues involve
social collaboration, especially in nonmarket, commons-based contexts—but most
business models today presume some monetization imperative that can limit or
poison collaborative possibilities, and bottom-up, self-organized financing and
governance remain rudimentary and under-theorized.”
Doc Searls, director of
Project VRM at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, agreed that
resistance by entrenched interests may not stop the eventual development of the
gigabit Internet. He wrote, “For apps to be truly killer we will need
symmetrical high-speed (gigabit+) connectivity, so the speed of the network—in
both directions—approaches or equals that of our machines and our home
networks. I believe that will happen. The examples we already see in
Chattanooga and Kansas City will go viral in other cities, despite political
opposition by the incumbent carriers, which seem hell-bent on keeping old TV
consumption and business models alive for as long as possible. Once symmetrical
gigabit connectivity happens, offsite storage and computation in clouds, for
everybody, will become a norm. So will personal control over how that is done.
Once everybody can keep and manipulate their own data in their own clouds, the
Internet of Things will be included as well.”
And some said innovation will occur regardless of bandwidth. Glenn Edens, a director
of research in networking, security, and distributed systems within the
Computer Science Laboratory at PARC, a Xerox Company, replied, “The new and
distinctive applications will occur with or without increased bandwidth. Our
current progress in increased bandwidth is pretty miserable; my home bandwidth
has been stuck at 24 megabits (on a good day) for many years now. Mobile
bandwidth is getting better but usage increases are still outpacing gains.
Application developers find new and interesting things to do all the time—a lot
new will occur even if bandwidth gains stall.”
