Thinking Out Loud About the Future

Today, when we're walking around cities and emailing/Tweeting/phoning, our cell phones have to connect to cell towers which talk back and forth to satellites to get us the information we need. Beaming phone and data signals into the sky and receiving instantaneous reception back is pretty amazing, but it seems totally bandwidth constrained at 2 points. The first point is the device <--> cell tower. The more traffic there is, the weaker the signal gets (why AT&T sucks massively in NYC). A solution is to put in more towers or stronger towers. The problem with that is NIMBYism created and furthered by the idea that cell towers cause cancer. The second constraint is cell tower <--> satellite information quantity and speed. Similar problems. Similar solutions. Similar concerns.

Comcast, TWC, AT&T, Verizon, and Google all provide phone and internet service in our homes and offices. All of them are laying fiber optic cables underground in various parts of the country. Some have laid this fiber optic cable to local nodes (FTTN) that then distribute phone and data signals through existing cable or copper infrastructure. Cable and copper can't handle the same speeds that fiber can, so our download and upload speeds are capped at pretty low rates. Google has decided to jump ahead of everyone, laying fiber directly to the premises (FTTP) in whichever city the company decides to do so - so far, Kansas City, Provo, and Austin. It's great technology that offers download speeds about 100x faster than what we're used to. It's super expensive to put down and will take time to build out.

The real question is why do we need that fast of speeds connecting to the premises? I get that it would be awesome to download an HD movie in 7 seconds, but, honestly, current speeds are good enough (20 mins for an HD movie). In my view, that's not the rub. Imagine what a sophisticated network of super fast hotspots would do for mobile communications. Instead of having to go through cell towers and satellites, in major metro areas with a density of WiFi routers, you could have everyone always on super fast WiFi. I'm probably not visionary enough here, but how does instantly streaming high def video captured by cell phones sound? How else does this change things? I'll have some hypotheses later.