Disqus - Latest Comments for Kevin Walsh

Re: Survey finds that 83% of Americans don’t understand the concept of bandwidth

Kevin Walsh — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:14:26 -0000

Actually, the survey stated that 67% understood the meaning of “gigabyte” but didn’t know how many they used in a month. 16% did not know the meaning of “gigabyte.” How this is the same as “83% of Americans don’t understand bandwidth” is unclear to me.

Your argument as to why people should be ok with bandwidth caps is eerily similar to why people should be ok with higher taxes. “We’ll only raise them on the rich who can truly afford to pay” is a favorite of politicians pretty much anywhere in the world. And, pretty much anywhere in the world, this tax-the-rich-and-we’ll-leave-you-alone message fails to resonate. Partly because no one trusts politicians and partly out of fear that once government starts raising taxes they’ll find it difficult to stop and pretty soon everyone will be “rich” (and pay more taxes).

The same applies to caps. 250GB might sound like an awful lot but it’s only the starting point.

Re: Eyeing the broadband stimulus skeptically | Telephony Online

Kevin Walsh — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:03:36 -0000

It is fitting that your webcast is on the same day that we all get to remind ourselves who really pays for this stuff.

Re: How "Fast" is Broadband?

Kevin Walsh — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:25:32 -0000

David,

We may be in agreement then. My primary contention is that most casual observers (and many that write for national newspapers) don’t realize that there is a difference between “speed” and “capacity” and that the metric everyone uses to measure broadband services, millions-of-bits-per-second, is a capacity measure, not a speed measure.

I also agree with you that the NSP aggregation networks, such as those in Japan, are frequently oversubscribed and therefore heavily congested. This limits the usable capacity of the broadband pipe even in cases where 100 Mbps is pulled to the home. In fact this is another point I was hoping to get across—if we really want to spend taxpayer money improving the broadband infrastructure we might be better advised focusing on those portions of the network that are most congested.

Kevin