Molecularist

People talk about broadband like it’s all we ever need and everything will be beautiful. Indeed, Om (link below, see good graphic) makes some good points to bring some reality to this thinking by pointing the other way, asking what kind of gains do we actually get when increasing bandwidth.

My take on this is that we easily expand to the bandwidth we have, maybe just working beyond what we have (sounds like how people deal with money). I remember when GPRS came and everyone was touting how mobile browsing would be so much better. Yet, what did we do with the bandwidth? Added colour and graphics and streaming and so on – we expanded to consume all that bandwidth.

Also, we think of future bandwidth with an eye to current apps, so we are ill-prepared when deploying more bandwidth. People can always use more bandwidth, we just don’t know how they’ll use it or if the broadband companies can afford to stick around to run the networks by the time they make money from the new uses of more bandwidth.

Yes, this leads me to mobile – 3G, as it is currently marketed, is bunk. The 3G networks were all built to serve a few use cases that are not materializing even with companies like Nokia shoving the features under folks’ noses (mostly because the use cases aren’t relevant to normal people). If the operators really want high level of adoption of 3G and coming 4G (HSPDA, or whatever it’s called), then they need to open up their networks for experimentation. Let users decide how to take advantage of the faster networks.

Here’s a reassuring thought: Stuff like Ajax, VoIP, blogging, photo sharing are technologies and services we equate with the current resurgence of the Internet. All of them are based on simple technologies that were around 5 years ago. But, all of them are very much built on the back of broadband connections – their current success is tightly linked with, now ubiquitous, open broadband connectivity.

You want to see a similar growth of data services on ‘broadband’ mobile networks? Then, let a thousand flower bloom, and get marketing out of the way.

Link: Om Malik on Broadband : � Need For Speed… How Real?.

What this shows is that as we increase the speed, the real impact of the speed on what we do with it is marginal. Can your eyes tell the difference between a web-page loading in one second or 0.27 seconds. I guess not. If you can download a music file in 1.08 seconds, does that really mean you will be buying music all the time. No you perhaps will be buying better quality, and perhaps marginally more music. There is the other option, but its just easier to pay! Sure at 30 Mbps you can download DVD quality The Bourne Identity in 11 minutes, but its still going to take you 2 hours to watch it. These are analog questions in an increasingly digital world.

I was reading Battelle’s recap of his predictions (good habit). Pretty good stuff, in all. One prediction on mobile caught my eye.

Link: John Battelle’s Searchblog: So, One Year Later, How’d I Do?.

15. Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation – the kind that makes us all say – Jeez that was obvious – will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search. The outlines of such an innovation: it’ll be a way for mobile users to gather the unstructured data they leverage every day while talking on the phone and make it useful to their personal web (including email and RSS, in particular). And it will be a business that looks and feels like a Web 2.0 business – leveraging iterative web development practices, open APIs, and innovation in assembly – that makes the leap. (More on this when I start posting again).

It hasn’t happened, because I haven’t done it yet. 🙂

And with mobile being such a squib, he’s repeated (word for word?) the prediction for 2006 (giving mobile the lucky 13).

Link: John Battelle’s Searchblog: Predictions 2006.

13. Mobile. I repeat my mobile prediction from last year, in the hope that it will come true this year: Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation – the kind that makes us all say – Jeez that was obvious – will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search. The outlines of such an innovation: it’ll be a way for mobile users to gather the unstructured data they leverage every day while talking on the phone and make it useful to their personal web (including email and RSS, in particular). And it will be a business that looks and feels like a Web 2.0 business – leveraging iterative web development practices, open APIs, and innovation in assembly – that makes the leap.

Dorrian has a great article on the fusion of mobile and the Internet. He starts off with a device and applications view, writing a good story on how data is out there and devices are used as needed and as appropriate. He then brings up some great thoughts regarding the operators, making some suggestions as to their role in the future, such as customer support or billing.

Read it.

Link: Silicon Valley Himalayan Expedition: One Internet to rule the world: starting to wag the mobile dog.

We are years away from this future, but it is a future that is obvious to almost everyone I talk to.  Here are some emerging trends to help push us there:

*web applications are proving as robust or more robust than desktop ones
*application developers are recognizing that data should be free and live in the Cloud
*presence is becoming more important
* broadband access to  mobile devices is coming fast in all markets
*access to the Internet by mobile devices will outpace desktop access in a few years (as predicted in 2000)
*VOIP is coming to mobile
*seamless switching between various types of wireless networks will happen