Wednesday, August 13, 2008

It IS the size of the pipe

If you don't give a crap about high speed internet, what I'm about to say will bore you to tears.

High speed internet is of great importance to my business. When I lay down a voice over session in the recording studio, the audio gets delivered via the internet to a waiting client. Because I upload hundreds of megabytes of audio every day, connection speed is big.

I paid $250 a month for years for faster business-level access. Now, because of the competitive nature of the market, I have five times faster service for less than 1/3 that amount. Here's the screen shot of a speed test of my Charter service taken moments ago:


If you don't know much about the internet, that's 96th percentile in the US. Wanna test your own internet speed? Try Speakeasy's speed test.

The future of high speed internet is fiber optic, with Verizon's FIOS offering up to 50 mbps... but fiber optic isn't available on a wide scale, and build-out is expensive and slow.

WiMax and LTE are duking it out for mobile carriers. Theoretically, you soon may need little more than your mobile phone to handle all of your internet needs, with speeds of LTE looking to reach around 320+ mbps. (20x my current speed)

For now I'll take the 16 mbps I have. Oh, and the iPhone gets about 1.2 mbps via AT&T's 3G. Soon those numbers will sound very slow... and we'll all be computing on a cloud with no need for a PC.

Violet loves when I talk tech.