Colored Backgrounds

[Trevor Smith]

On Mon, 13 Dec 1999 14:20:08, David Gaskill wrote:

>The company that supplies my  electricity frequently sends me circulars urging 
>me to buy appliances which will use more of the stuff. However this is not 
>probably a good parallel with Internet bandwidth even though I suggested it in 
>the first place. 

I consider my power company to be more enlightened than yours. They
routinely (i.e. *every* month) send me newsletters urging me to use
*less* electricity and explaining how I can achieve this. They will
also send people to my home for free to test and explain how I can
make it more energy efficient. They also urge me to purchase new
appliances that are "Power Smart" (use less energy). Clearly they
realize that this electricity stuff isn't unlimited.

In case you're wondering, my power company is *not* a government
owned company. It is a publicly traded corporation.

>I don't suppose an increase in Internet bandwidth well have much effect on the 
>climate and the materials necessary to manufacture servers and optical fibre are 
>not about to become exhausted. 

I agree, I can't see any reason why we will "run out of" bandwidth in
the future either.

But at any given moment we have a fixed amount and there is no reason
to waste it on useless or near-useless fluff. The Internet *IS* slow
at times, no matter what some people might think. I have a cable
modem and, with the exception of traffic limited exclusively to my
cable network, I never see anything remotely approaching the speeds
my modem is capable of. Why? Because the Internet backbones are not
big enough to accomodate all the users at speeds that I can handle.

So, maybe because people feel like there's "more than enough"
bandwidth and feel that there is no good reason not to gobble it up
with useless embellishments, I and others get files from some site in
California at 35kB/s or 45kB/s or whatever instead of 70kB/s or
150kB/s. I'm making the numbers up but hopefully you see the point.
The bandwidth is *not* unlimited. The more one person uses the less
another person can use. Multiply that by 20 million people.


-- 
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 Trevor Smith          | We've got a blind date with destiny,
 trevor@haligonian.com | and it looks like she's ordered
 www.haligonian.com    | the lobster.         - The Shoveler
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