Bandwidth - massive wireless and cable bandwith to the home
From Blindside
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[edit] What is it
Bandwidth is a term commonly used in digital communication to describe the rate at which voice or data is transferred. The term has spread from its digital communications roots into common usage in other areas.
Western countries in general lag far behind Asia, most notably Japan and Korea. In Britain, bandwidth is both slower and more expensive than many other countries. In Japan, for example, users have 100Mbit lines into their homes over fibre optic cable at an average price of 11p per megabit per second. By contrast, the cheapest bandwidth in the UK costs £1.59 per megabit per second, and speeds like Japan's are effectively unavailable to all but the largest businesses.
[edit] Impact & Maturity assessment
Impact 2 (with potential to move up) Maturity 2
[edit] Information Assurance issues
Answer: what seem to be the likely information assurance issues of the emerging technology under discussion
The first, but certainly not the last, IA issue is caused by uneven take-up of increased bandwidth. The American Army in Iraq recently closed access to Internet videos because of bandwidth issues at their gateway.
Other issues sure to crop up (but unlikely to be reported in real time) include the speed of illegal data upload due to high bandwidth wireless, combination of high bandwidth wireless with Bluetooth to allow data theft by visitors without visible access to networks, etc.
Perversely, staggered introduction of high bandwidth access could crash the Internet if large tranches of users get sudden access before backbone capacity can adjust.
Commercial media providers constitute a very large source of pent-up demand, hoping to provide internet video content (Joost being the latest example) as soon as they judge (with or without consultation with ISPs) that network infrastructure can support mass dissemination of televised content. If they get it wrong, there could be serious (but probably short term) affects on the Internet backbone.
YouTube, with 165 million video downloads a day, has had a measurable impact on Internet performance. Imagine 500 or more YouTubes to get a picture of possible imapct on traffic.
Longer term, massive bandwidth enables large scale usage of virtual environments (eg Second Life and numerous massive online multiplayer games) which may assume greater importance in daily life. Depending on the nature of these environments, there could be very real IA implications.
[edit] Implications for UK Government
[edit] Timescale
Is the impact of this emerging technology felt - now (less than 18 months) - in 2-5 years? - in 5-25 years - longer-term than that even
Current impact as reported in the media is fairly minor, but will increase over 5-year timespan.
[edit] Examples
Comcast demos 150mb/sec downloading
UK joint academic network Janet
Massive Bandwidth Key To Global Information Grid Australian article about the US military global informaiton grid:The US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is aggressively enhancing its current end-to-end information transport system to support the Pentagon's controversial dreams of establishing its own Internet - a $US200 billion Global Information Grid (GIG). Expected to be at least two decades in the making, the GIG, a World Wide Web for the US military and its allies, including Australia, is intended to be a secure, wireless information network fusing US and allied military and intelligence services into a unified system and providing vast amounts of information to armed forces in the field.
The Times article on Shoreditch Telehouse project claiming 2Gb/sec (but the project, Digital Bridge, seems to offer more mundane ISP-like broadband despite £12m of government and EU subsidy)
Global broadband prices revealed, BBC (July 16, 2007).
[edit] Comments (attributed)
What people say about this emerging technology (attributed)
[edit] Organisations
CableLabs US-based research lab
Be Un Ltd offering 24mb/sec ADSL2 in the UK
LINX - London Internet Exchange
[edit] Documents & research papers
Very brief abstracts or links to informative documents, presentations or academic research papers about this emerging technology
[edit] Experts (academic, practitioner)
Links to academic experts or expert practitioners and commentators on this emerging technology
