Value of the pipe (not the oil one, the data one)

Facinating notion from an Editorial from last July in the New York Times.

"AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel."

I agree with the dependence of my modern life on connectivity and the annoyance/fear when I loose that connectivity (damn you Tiscali!)

The ironic part is that free bandwidth being freed up in the transition from our analog TV and radio world of the 1950s to the IP based digital world of today... and yet we are not allowed to tap into it -or at least not freely, something that Larry Page seems to feel passionate about.

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