Month: February 2010

100 MB download speeds – Google and Medialawprofessor think alike

Back in 2001 I gave a presentation at a broadband conference where I made the then-bold assertion that each household would need a minimum of 100 MB of undiminishable (ie not shared) bandwidth.  I remember at this same conference that another speaker who was attached to slow DSL speeds made fun of me saying essentially that there was no need for 100MB of bandwidth to every home – he asserted that DSL( then 1.5MB tops) was as fast as anyone would need.  Well it feels good to be right and just about a decade ahead of my time.  Google is now imagining ultra high speed networks to the home and the FCC is proposing its “100 squared initiative” – 100 million homes with 100 MB of service.  In order to stay ahead of the curve, I can now foresee the need for 10GB of service to the home in the next 20 years.  It takes a lot to do a hologram even with good compression….

This is a link to my original 2001 presentation.  Towards the end you will see a couple of slides where I calculate what I think the then-foreseeable need for 100MB might be: https://medialawprofessor.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/broadband-presentation-morris1.ppt

Social Media? Still a small deal

And so the Super Bowl is over, and more importantly the commercials of the Super Bowl.  What do people watch? Still television has the most impact.  Yes, the ratings of the networks are going down.  Yes there is increasing fractionalization of the audience.  But if you want to launch or promote a product of general interest (car, hamburger/food, beer, stock brokerage), the best place to advertise is still in the mass media.  That is not to say the social media is not important, it is, but it might take months for a million views of even the most popular shared viral video on You Tube, and NBC’s Olympics is reaching 10 million, American Idol reaches 19 million, and the Super Bowl reached more than 50 million.