Internet, Innovation & Infrastructure

Om Malik comentando y analizando sobre nuevas evidencias y hechos acerca de Internet y la Web vistos en su dimensión infraestructura (tema predilecto de Om), dimensión que podría llegar a poner en peligro, es la tesis esta vez, la espiral vituosa de la Internet - innovación

Extractos:

"I have often argued that just as gigahertz drove the WinTel ecosystem, bandwidth (both up-and downstream) drives innovation in the broadband world. Of course, it would be too simplistic to correlate last-mile bandwidth with innovation, for the network architecture is inherently complex, and is getting more complex by the day..."

"Is today’s infrastructure adequate? Given that there will be more than 2 billion phones and a billion PCs connecting to the “network” in 2008, the back-end infrastructure is going to need a rethink. We’ve been going on the same set of core technologies that made their debut in the late 1990s..."

"John Roese, chief technology officer of Nortel (NT)...“If you look at the progress made from 300-baud modems to 10-Gigabit Ethernet,” said Roese, “the cost per bit has declined by a factor of 22 million to one. But that isn’t reflected in the consumer Internet experience.”... The fault is in the asymmetric nature of the Internet. The downstream speeds are getting higher, but upstream speeds are still being controlled in a miserly fashion by ISPs, thus acting as a break for truly interactive applications... An asymmetric Internet is good for disseminating information - after all pulling down information (or YouTube videos) moves packets in one direction... The future, however, is in two-way, symmetrical Internet, where applications such as Kyte.TV and Sling Media can actually be put to use. “The Internet needs to become interactive, bidirectional, and be contextually aware,” argued Roese..."

Some T.I.M.E.LY questions:

1. ¿A qué nos enfrentamos si Internet cesa de progresar como hasta ahora?

2. ¿Qué Internet - innovaciones podrían surgir en los próximos 20 años si se resuelven los retos de la infraestructura?

3. ¿Qué tanto impacta o no Internet la calidad de vida de la especie en comparación con otras infraestructuras (energía, aguas, vías y puertos...)?