What’s your definition of high speed Internet, and what is cheap to you? Cheap high speed Internet has two qualifying factors. What is high speed and what is cheap?

When you think about Internet access you may look at broadband or dial-up. Dial-up is practically universally available if you have a telephone line. Plug in a modem and your good to go. But the FCC in their wisdom regulates dial-up speed to 56kbps max. We know that it is pretty painful to try to get much accomplished at dial-up speeds.

 

Next step to high speed Internet is loosely called broadband. That could be anything above dial-up speed but often includes speeds as low as 384kbps and up. I say that low figure may be broadband but it’s not high speed.

Several Internet Service Providers offer ‘lite’ broadband of around 768kbps download speed and even less upload speed. Again I don’t think that’s high speed Internet.

If you work on computers in a business network file sharing speeds are typically 100Mbps. That means about 10,000kbps transfer speed. Access from a business to the Internet goes through a gateway to connect to phone company DSL, TV cable, or dedicated T1,2,or 3 lines. and it is shared by all the people at work, slicing and dicing the available pipe capacity equally.

Plus it’s pretty expensive to have business level high speed Internet access. Part of it is that business will pay more, as an expense, and also because it expects a better quality of service with perhaps 0.1% max outage time.

For home office folks the choices are limited. Dial-up is inadequate. DSL at 3Mbps is not shared but still sometimes feels slow, and TV cable at 10Mbps is hardly better when the whole neighborhood is online together sharing the bandwidth.

And then there’s the price. It seemed that in the early years, DSL cost about $20 per month. Maybe not super fast but tolerable for the speed that PCs were at. Then the price seemed to keep climbing in spite of cheaper hardware switches, more TV cable competition, and greater public subscription. Now basic Internet service is around $30, plus all those taxes and fees.

Now it seems that there has not been much progress in getting high speed, like 10 - 100Mbps, to the curb and house. With gigabit switches so cheap now and 40Gbps available why can’t we get real high speed Internet access to the home office? Is this an opportune time for a wireless grid computing solution?

Imagine the productivity improvements and feature enhancements if we could have the next generation of broadband delivered to the door. With the economy slowing and transportation costs soaring it’s time to rethink the need for commuting and office time when we could be working remotely and video conferencing, if only we had decent high speed Internet connectivity at a reasonable cost.

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