The fastest I have surfed is when I was alone on the campus (during a brief stay in summers) at Planet-I. It was a glorious 2mbps speed. And it rocked! All you want at a click of a button. Even when the campus was in full swing, with 300 odd participants surfing the internet, the net was still at a decent pace. This is India we are talking, where people still pay a big premium for connectivity.
Last week, one of my room-mate informs me that in UK, they are working on this new technology thats going to shoot the transfer rates beyond imagination. Just imagine, what would you do with transfer rates of 100mbps!! All data you want is completely accessible and available to you within seconds. An entire movie within seconds … infact, the individual user’s need for a personal storage drive just might go down. This combined with the fact that many websites are now showing a conceptual web-OS … like Desktop2 or Fanbox. Also, many SMEs are now opting for the Software As a Service (SaaS) model, where in the firm does not have to invest in the licensing cost of any software, but would rather pay a periodical amount for that service.
You could in fact, cut costs by having an hosted ERP, Google Docs, a web OS and dumb terminals hooked up to a hosted storage server all on the internet. Your capital expenditures go down, but the variable expenditures might go up. If the opportunity cost of your capex beats your opex, then you definitely have a winner here.
Think about an individual user, all media content available … on a pay per usage basis of course. For gamers, there is the WWW as your LAN … talk about one huge LAN party.
It does change your perspective on connectivity and storage doesn’t it?