High Speed Internet: How Science Fiction Failed Us

March 26, 2010 - By Phineas Delgado

Well, faithful readers, here we are yet again to explore how we’ve been duped by the Science Fiction we created. It’s almost ironic how we glean the best of what our imagined future has to offer, while neglecting to plan for the possible side effects. Of course, overlooking possible side effects is what humans do best, though, right?

That brings us to the topic of this article: High Speed Internet. It occurred to me as I was coming up with a topic for this article that none of the previous topics would even be relevant (or even possible) without the advantage of High Speed Internet. I can’t imagine anyone waiting 20 minutes to a Wikipedia page to open so that they can find out who the second king of Siam was. They would just find a geek to ask, or open an encyclopedia (remember those?) to get the answer. And for those of us who actually played games over dial up connections, I can guarantee you that there wouldn’t be over 11 million people playing World of Warcraft[1] if it took 30 minutes to load the raid. Finally, keeping in mind how much slower phones are compared to PC’s anyway, imagine trying to get turn by turn directions on your phone over an analog data connection. You’d might as well walk there, it’d be faster.

We been spoiled by the speed that information is made available to us. Seriously, when was the last time you had to wait more than 30 seconds for an answer to a question, excepting of course when you barely have enough details with which to search?  Many of you may not even remember a time when pings to remote servers under 2,000ms were rare. I played Mechwarrior 3 over dial-up. Let me tell you, there’s nothing like pulling the trigger and counting to 10 before seeing the shot appear on your screen. Hell, by then, you might already be dead, because the guy on the other team had an ISDN connection. Everyone hated that guy.

With speeds well past 10Mbps, downloading content has become so fast that we are able to stream our favorite shows and movies without the pauses and long waits we previously endured. And Cisco recently announced that their new router, the CSR-3, will be capable of delivering 322Tbps[2] (that’s TERAbits per second or 32 million times the speed most of us enjoy now).  With that in mind, I suggest that these speeds have done nothing but make us intolerably impatient.

It’s funny how often I hear at work “my internet is running slow”. Of course, slow to the user means that an operation that normally takes 5 seconds is suddenly taking 15 to 30 seconds. It’s helped to create the “instant gratification” mentality we all seem to share these days. Just imagine how long it would have taken us to find out about Sandra Bullock leaving Jesse James just a short 10 years ago. High Speed Internet has single handedly brought about the demise of Encyclopedia Britannica, FYE Music Stores, and Entertainment Tonight. Soviet Communism couldn’t even do that, and it was backed up by men with scary mustaches.

Just remember to unplug and slow down sometimes. Your IT guys will thank you. Probably with cookies.

[2] Wired Magazine Online (3-9-2010) “Just How Fast Is Cisco’s New Router? Really Freaking Fast” by Dylan F. Tweney