How fast is your Internet connection? You don’t have to tell me. I just want to get you to think about it in meaningful terms. If you can remember a time when your connection was much slower and less reliable than it is today, then you have a point of comparison.
We have come a long ways from the early days of AOL dial-up service. At that time, it seemed like magic to get a page of text after only a short delay. Today, we get impatient if our 4K movie doesn’t start playing right away on our mobile device of choice. Grant it: There was no such thing as 4K video at the time. But that is the nature of things. The more bandwidth that is available, the more that will be required.
Right now, our high-speed bandwidth allocation is about watching movies and playing games on mobile devices. Tomorrow, there will be even more interesting things to do with our high-speed connections, and more challenges that go along with them. Here is a small peek into the future to wet your appetite:
Bigger Video, Better Games
There was a time when Internet video was little more than a postage stamp-sized box in the middle of your screen. As bandwidth progressed, that postage stamp got a little bigger, and a little bigger still. Now, we expect video in 4K fidelity to fill our 27” screens with no lag or artifacts. We’re not wrong to want that. We are just a little behind the technological curve.
According to information found at http://fiberinternetproviders.com/uverse-internet/, right now we can expect a 4GB video to take 13 minutes to download. That is a lot faster than it would take us to get dressed, go to the store, buy the video, bring it home, and get past all the FBI warnings accusing us of pirating the video.
That said, 13 minutes is a long ways from instant. With the connection of the future, we will measure the download time in seconds, not minutes.
Online gaming will also see a similar boost. Not only do we have to wait to download a game, we have to suffer through the small, but noticeable latency when playing the game. That latency is the difference between being a winner and being dinner. The look and feel of the games we play are limited only by our ability to display detail. With online gaming, we have to both display and transmit that detail via a connection. With the Internet connection of the future, it’s going to get real up in here.
The Doctor Will See You Now
Is that a rash, or bug bite, or a bit of coloring crayon? It’s hard to tell if you do not know what you’re looking for. You would love to just send her a picture. But as good as your camera is, it may not be good enough to capture the detail. If your camera is good enough, there is a good chance your Internet connection is not.
The Internet of the future will have more than enough bandwidth for doctors anywhere in the world, to get a good look at patients anywhere in the world. Fiber-driven Internet will do more than provide doctors with a good look. It will provide doctors with the ability to do surgery from remote locations. While this may seem like science fiction, this telesurgery procedure is already being done.
Education
In the future, there will be no schools, at least, not as we know them. Today, a school is a room where only an exclusive few get to gather, to sit and listen to one person talk for one to three hours. While other things happen in that room over the course of a semester, none of those things actually require one to physically occupy that space. Fiber around the world will make that forced exclusivity a thing of the past.
The benefits of high-speed Internet are both obvious and exciting. The best part is, everything mentioned in this article is something that is already taking place right now. The future has already arrived.