What's next big thing in bandwidth?
iigs: Other than the obvious P2P file sharing that grows to fill the available space, better responsiveness (less buffering time) for high bit rate streaming video will probably dominate bandwidth needs for the near future.Remote computing applications will probably also get richer as latency drops and throughput increases.If we ever get in front of the common user's bandwidth needs, I'd say you might see applications that download speculatively, such as pre-buffering the videos advertised in the youtube player at the end of the selected video, or pre-downloading (pieces of) movies or TV shows that you watch online.Beyond that there's room to innovate in being clever (video codecs that don't under-run but degrade the bitrate of the video trying to keep things flowing), and there's probably a lot of untapped innovation there that could take advantage of more bits.