Yup, real broadband to the home (and mobile too) is what's really needed to really make the net take off. And by real I mean 10 Mb/s bidirectional and up. Unfortunately I doubt we'll get it from the cableco and telco oligopoly here in Canada. More likely ths kind of bandwidth will come from something out of left field like Spanish upstart Fon.

From Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: The Broadband Bandwidth Boondoggle.:

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Paul's Rule of New Technology: Unless you offer a ten-fold improvement in performance along some meaningful dimension, most users of your technology won't notice the performance increase. Rolling up from 1.5Mbps to 6Mbps fails that test, even if it does offer broadband providers an opportunity to charge you more.

Real world-changing differences in broadband will require (mostly) two things:

1. A 10x increase in bandwidth. In other words, jump me to 15 Mbps or 30Mbps from 1.5Mbps; don't take me to 6Mbps.
2. A symmetric pipe. Most of what's interesting, at least to me, requires far more than the current throttled-to-death outbound pipe. The idea that in some near broadband future I'm getting, say, 15Mbps in, but still dawdling along with 640kbps out, does diddly for me.

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