The Future of the Internet Depends on Faster Connection Speeds

My family pays for 8Mbps down and 1Mbps. Indeed we do receive that speed, but for the same price I could be getting speeds ten times faster if I lived in Japan. The United States is lagging behind in Internet connection speeds. But it’s not just the United States, it’s the majority of the countries on Earth. We should be able to download a 2GB movie within seconds, but instead we must wait for movies to load. Web developers today are limited by only two things: Creativity and Connection speeds.

I don’t give a darn how uncreative a developer might be, but seeing as we’re in 2009 and we haven’t even gotten as far as fiber to the house yet is pretty sad. Coined by the media or not, the 3rd version of the web, Web 3.0, is approaching. We’re getting smarter each year, but our Internet speeds are getting faster every 5 years. This is a problem. Imagine the things we would be able to do with no loading times or even slight loading times for the larger web applications. I would love to have Gmail load instantly after I log in, wouldn’t you?

But seriously, with faster connections developers would be able to transfer entire databases at once instead of bits and pieces of those databases. Why am I posting this today? Well, when I visited http://speedmatters.org/ it got me thinking. We seriously are in trouble. Congress defines high speed Internet as 200-some kilobits per second (remember, there are eigth bits in one byte)! That’s not high speed, that’s a joke! What we need to do is stand up for our right to a faster Internet. And yes indeed is it a right.

So what if http://speedmatters.org/ is geared towards U.S. citizens? If the United States did something about this, I can guarantee that many other countries will follow. Even Japan’s 100Mbps connections are minor compared to the 10Gbps the spinal cord of the Internet runs on, that we know is possible.