en-us http://www.keithwatanabe.net/index.php Keith Watanabe's Website http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2006/5/28/5747014c2146d28a5303b4a3675937b6.html Sun, 28 May 2006 05:39:06 -0600 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2006/5/28/5747014c2146d28a5303b4a3675937b6.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/11/27/ea5ad6a16d096dc0b69b8c842f9f8b85.html
I'm starting to see a pattern form in terms of what's limiting us. For whatever reason, it seems to be the cost of bandwidth that's not as scalable as hardware. At my last job, we had issues in terms of being forced to go over the Pacific in terms of making network request for one piece of the application. The article on wikipedia for Web 3.0 described the evolution of the web partly as the increased bandwidth with the coming of interactive web technologies such as flash, AJAX, P2P and other forms of online video. Then you hear about people like Mark Cuban who seems happy to persecute and limit online bandwidth bandits for their "clogging up his networks."

Compare this to hearing about people complaining about a user sharing someone else's processor or swap space. It doesn't happen. Or that website development is slowing. Just the contrary.

But you'll hear quite a bit about how the infrastructure in the states has been perpetually slow to upgrade due to logistics and cost of laying down fiber in the ground. Or you'll hear how this cable company decided to impose restrictions on bandwidth. And it seems that some companies like Google are so concerned about the optimization of their bandwidth usage that they compress their javascript since each character matters to them.

These trends and more lead me to believe that companies like Cisco, AT&T, and the cable companies need to get their butt into gear and start pushing out better quality networks. Network optimization seems to be more common place compared with optimizing one's code for memory usage or hard disk space. Certainly, those aspects matter too, but the holy grail of user experience has perpetually been the whole notion of providing content to a user fast enough. Compressing Javascript, caching requests and minimizing the chattiness of applications across tiers and the client are comparable to the old days where people would optimize for memory consumption. However, the monstrous growth in the past 10-15 years for computers in terms of CPU, memory and hard disk capability has been monstrous compared to the molasses speed of network improvement. I mean, I can get a 1 gb ethernet card and hub, but if my line doesn't support it, what's the point?

ISPs should be massively ashamed of themselves as well. I think America's internet growth has been horribly embarassing compared to the infrastructures of places like Japan (Tokyo) and South Korea. Certainly, logistics play a huge factor in terms of why countries like Japan can install high quality bandwidth networks. Still, a lot of what's going on in the states is also political. I mean, think about the wireless situation. The FCC's various rulings have put so many strangleholds on what people can and cannot do. It's no wonder why Google is attempting to get into that game since these other companies are just too slow to move on them.

If it's true that bandwidth has been a keyplayer in the evolution of web technologies, then for a country like the US to succeed, they must put an end to the political games and spend massive dollars in the next 3-5 years upgrading their outdated infrastructure and getting more people onto it to avoid the prophetic brown outs. By the same token, network manufacturers like Cisco need to put their foot on the gas pedal and start dishing out better quality products more frequently to keep up with other computer component manufacturers.]]> Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:56:16 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/11/27/ea5ad6a16d096dc0b69b8c842f9f8b85.html