- Should the U.S. try to catch up to countries with better infrastructure? If so, how?
- How important is symmetry? Will people need faster uploading speeds in the future?
- Does UW have user-owned initiative?
One of the eye-opening facts that I knew before reading this article, but which still catches me off guard, is how far behind the United States is when it comes to telecommunications infrastructure. “Providing ubiquitous gigabit networks in the United States,” an IEEE-USA CCIP paper, points out that the U.S. “seriously lags in satisfying the needs of the world’s strongest economy.” Like most developed nations, the U.S. has become an information society, with our economic well-being based on our ability to acquire and send information quickly. It seems like the government would want to foster development of this information in whatever way it can to promote economic stability.
Right now, it is still expensive to have a high-speed connection. When communities make high-speed access more readily available, more people have the opportunity to improve their standard of living through educational opportunities and access to information and health-care delivery. Individual communities have been able to make some headway where the national government has failed. Downtown Spokane has wi-fi available to everyone and companies such as Boeing have a corporate gigabit network. I think user-owned initiatives will eventually lead the way in bringing Internet access to communities as a whole.
While it’s important that private companies such as Verizon are experimenting with fiber, I think there need to be more incentives for installing fiber so that it won’t just be the wealthy who are able to have the benefits of fiber connections. The speeds that this paper talks about are mindboggling to me, but I can see where they will be needed in the future with the increasing popularity of video and other applications that need a high-speed connection. The importance of symmetry also becomes apparent when I look at the popularity of sites such as YouTube, that people use to upload their own video. These sorts of sites will only continue to grow in popularity and it will be important for users to be able to upload information as fast as they can download it.
