BBR reports on a republication of a hypothesis in Business Week stating that there can be too much bandwidth. I didn’t blog about it then, but since this thought is still out there, here goes:
The idea that there is such a thing as too much bandwidth is like saying there is such a thing as bad pizza.
Bandwidth, (Plain pizza) = good.
More bandwidth (Sausage, black olive, and pepperoni pizza) = better.
Ignore my weak (but mouth-watering) analogy and just read the spot-on retort to when this first appeared last week by Cynthia Brumfield at IP Democracy, where she states simply “there is no such thing as too much bandwidth.”
Om Malik also offered dittos to Cynthia at GigaOm. VTOR Blog had some good thoughts, too.
A colleague reacted to the BW story with this, which I’ll share in full:
I think the most important aspect of this story is the good news about Broadband in the US. We've gone from 2 million homes with BB at the beginning of 2000 to 51 million by the beginning of this year!!! And at the same time, the price per megabit/second has dropped from $26 per month in 2002 to $7 per month last year (2006) and could drop to as little as 80 cents per month by 2010!!! The story also highlights the positive competitive dynamic - Cable was faster than DSL, Verizon leapfrogs cable with FiOS and AT&T responds with FTTN, now cable must respond with DOCSIS 3.0. Competition works - Consumers win.