Ultrabroadband conference today: Noam
Eli Noam speaks first. Rough, paraphrased notes.
He has 100Mbps at home for $40/month from Columbia. (Not the typical situation.) One can see we will get to gigabit range access fairly soon. We're still talking about investments and incentives for these networks, national comparisons — but we're looking forward as well.
Historically, for thousands of years, information traveled only as fast as humans could. People tried to find ways to speed things up (shows drum network). Semaphore network under Napoleon went 100mph - but only when the weather was good, and only during the day, and only for a few people. It was a quantum leap to the telepgraph, telephone, cable, and he's interested in relating capacity and penetration and price in the US over the period since 1850.
Noam points out that content adjusts to transmission capacity and cost, and we're now moving to multichannel TV and beyond. This is a historical moment — it's as if we've moved from the bicycle to a car but now it's time to go to airplanes.
What will capacity be used for? Every time we have more capacity we doubt we'll be able to use it. Gives example of Sweden: in the early 1950s, they had two national radio channels, it was suggested that that was a bit boring, can't we have a third one — but a report came back that the “national cultural capacity would not support a third radio channel.”
Long tail phenomenon — easier to have specialized programs that appeal to narrower range of people — that's one thing we're seeing. But also more sensory additions — to beyond reality. Noam thinks we'll see very expensively produced content, hyper-reality. He also says there will also be community production, user-generated content, interactivity. He notes that there is a “return channel” for ultrabroadband. (For me, this is an understatement! This interactivity is the key, not a side-note.) He's seeing high-end and low-end content flourishing, and worries about the middle. He points to telework, virtual communities, immersive marketing
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