Light Demand for 50-100Mbps Broadband?

For all the talk about the desperate need for speed in the consumer last mile, there doesn’t seem to be much action yet.  At least, not if you’ve got to pay more for it. According to SureWest CEO Steve Oldham, it’s not exactly a hot product.  From Connected Planet:

While mobile users are quickly gobbling up data bandwidth, Oldham said SureWest has seen residential user bandwidth demand grow, too—just not to stratospheric height. “We have a 50 Mb/s service that a few people are interested in. We would offer a 100 Mb/s service if we had anyone who would want to buy it,” he said.

It’s rather interesting actually to watch this.  LTE and WiMAX are beginning to bring the wireless last mile into the same speed realm as most DSL and cable provide.  I actually thought that wouldn’t happen, that wireline speeds would one way or another always be faster than wireless.  Of course fiber *can* be much, much faster.  And it is, in places like South Korea and Japan though.  Of course there’s always FIOS for some Verizon customers, but what about the rest?

But perhaps the problem is that there are few really popular applications that are that bandwidth hungry yet.  Netflix perhaps, but what else?

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Categories: Internet Traffic