High bandwidth! Fat pipes! Fiber to the curb! Feh! A slow Web is a better Web.
If there's one thing you can count on in the Web industry, it's the fictional future. Ask any developer or designer what's coming up next, and you're bound to hear, "Well, as soon as we have fast bandwidth and micropayments ..."
Fact is, we've been saying the same thing for the past five years, ever since there's been a commercial Web. And, as many have pointed out, we'll probably keep saying this for the next five years.
We're all familiar with Moore's law, which states that computer
technology in this industry gets twice as fast and half as expensive every
18 months. And while that certainly has held true for hardware, it doesn't
apply to connection speeds. In fact, we found that the Web got a lot slower
before it started speeding up. In 1994, the audience coming to HotWired was
split three ways: a third on 14.4 modems, a third in the 56-Kbps line/ISDN group, and another third coming to us on T1s. Naturally, we assumed that users would consistently migrate to faster and faster connections as more companies upgraded their infrastructure and cable modems became ubiquitous.
But that's not the way it happened. While many people did upgrade to faster modems and dedicated connections, an unexpected thing happened: The Internet got very, very popular. And this popularity didn't strike equally across our user base. Rather, millions and millions of people came online at once and all with low-end modems. When America Online, for example, upgraded its service to include the Web, it opened a floodgate of users who had anything but a fast connection.
The last two years have been better. Modem users have more than doubled their speeds on average, from 14.4 Kbps to 33.6 Kbps. But we certainly haven't had any paradigm-shattering leaps en masse to cable modems, DSL, or any other fat-pipe solutions for the home.
With no indication that connection speeds will increase at anything but an evolutionary (versus revolutionary) pace, we must brace ourselves to continue working with a slow, often frustrating Web.
Thank goodness, I say.
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