[Gllug] To LLU or Not to LLU?

[Richard Jones]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 01:34:47PM +0000, Peter Corlett wrote:
> Could you explain to this bear of little brain why a residential property
> requires gigabit Internet access,

Here are a few ideas which hopefully go beyond the usual "everyone
should be able to download porn/hollywood movies/play MMORPGs"
arguments:

(1) Cut carbon emissions and pollution, and free up the roads and air,
by allowing far more people to work at home.  To do this effectively
requires really good quality (high bandwidth, low latency) video
conferencing services.

There is an excellent case for the government to be driving such a
scheme.  The technology is pretty much in place - cameras are cheap,
readily available and very high quality now, and computers have the
processing power to display movie-quality video feeds.  Large
projection screens are cheap-ish, and soon to get a lot cheaper.

What's missing is the huge amounts of bandwidth needed to the home to
make it work effectively.  Not really helped when the monopoly
provider of bandwidth decides to jack up prices and do the very
minimum to extend the network.

(2) Put the BBC archive online, free to UK households.  The BBC
archive contains vast amounts of entertainment and educational
material which goes unseen.

(3) UK universities should both broadcast live and make available
their old lectures online for free.  The technology exists to do this.
Why not let interested people study at home?

(4) The future we don't know.

Current always-on broadband enabled Linux, Wikipedia, blogging and
social networking, YouTube, Twitter, Skype, collaborative document
editing, Flickr, TheyWorkForYou, online storage & backups, .. to take
off.

In the future, I don't know, but it will be equally dramatic.  Maybe
people will collaborate in their spare time to make films and music?
Or we'll be able to have thousands of people meeting virtually to
discuss politics directly with their MPs?

> and how the killer app that requires this expects to cover the cost
> of building-out all the infrastructure and ongoing maintenance?

The UK hasn't been afraid of capital projects before: canals,
railways, roads, airports, all cost billions (or the equivalent of
"billions" at the time).  All brought huge benefits.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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