Word: bandwidth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...would look like if it had been invented now instead of 40 years ago. (Fun fact: the first e-mail was sent in 1971 between two Digital PDP-10 computers.) Keep in mind that until the mid-1990s, when e-mail went mainstream, the network environment was very different. Bandwidth was a scarce resource. You had your poky modem and liked it. Which is why e-mail was created in the image of the paper-postal system: tiny squirts of electronic text. (See the 50 best websites...
...rolling in bandwidth, and power-wise, my phone could make a PDP-10 cry. Google has server farms the size of actual farms. And yet we're still passing one another little electronic notes...
Increased bandwidth use is good for the public, but it’s a headache for Internet providers. Because most broadband services offer their customers unlimited bandwidth, there is no incentive for users to shy away from file-sharing, Skyping, and other bandwidth-hogging behavior. To continue offering unlimited access at the same speed, ISPs must find ways to either expand their capacity or discourage high bandwidth use. One of the solutions has been to decrease the download speeds of customers trying to use high-bandwith websites. Last year, the FCC chastised Comcast for deliberately slowing down BitTorrent, a file...
Others fear that ISPs could start charging high-bandwidth websites for access to the “fast lane,” slowing down smaller websites that can’t afford to pay. This would be a blow to the level playing field that has allowed entrepreneurs to create online empires from humble beginnings in a garage or basement, perhaps explaining why Internet giants like Google and Amazon are among net neutrality’s strongest proponents. What would your life today be like if someone told Mark Zuckerberg that his new “Facebook” site...
...recognize that ISPs must find ways to ration their limited bandwidth effectively; however, this is still possible without picking the Internet’s winners and losers. Cell-phone providers charge talkative people more money, but they don’t charge based on who they’re talking to. Similarly, ISPs could charge users for the amount of bandwidth they consume, as long as they treat all Internet use equally. When ISPs start deciding which sites reach the masses and which don’t—no matter the criteria—they distort the marketplace...