NBN - speed, speed, SPEED!!
But is it?
Well, mostly yes. If you don’t remember dial up then you probably wont appreciate the NBN as you should, and while you may not have been browsing at speeds likely to cause retina damage you have certainly had speeds significantly over 14.4kbps or 28.8kbps …. before we had the fast modems at 54kbps!
We may not have the best NBN option available, but it is mostly better than it’s predecessor. We would all have preferred fibre to our door step … we would also probably prefer to have a Ferrari or a Rolls Royce, but unfortunately we are stuck with what we can afford. And what we can afford isn't as bad as we tend to think.
We are living in a time that demands instant gratification, if what we want on our screen hasn't appeared before we asked for it then it simply isn’t good enough. We don't suffer delays well, and anytime that we have to wait for something to load our computers are at real risk of terminal screen damage! Australia is a pretty big place, we can only browse as fast as our slowest link and we need to wait for some of these links to catch up.
Most of the sites we visit are international, there is some caching locally and technology is always marching on with improvements. The downside with fast internet is that we now largely live an almost virtual life, time spent on social pages and online videos, we put more into our online web pages and download large software updates, we can backup online, we do a significant amount of work ‘in the cloud’. Everything we need is ‘on the net’.
But that all requires more and more bandwidth, things that would have taken days now take hours …. but who wants to wait hours? We need more bandwidth now to make that faster …. and on it goes.
How fast can you go?
If you have the funds you have an almost limitless choice … within reason. Gigabit ethernet used to be the domain of an internal local area network, this is now an option for an internet connection.
Our children’s children will wonder how ever did we survive with only 1gbps internet links to our homes!