You remember that joke from the 80s – “High five, up above, down below! Uh-oh, you’re too slow!” – that’s Australia when it comes to Broadband. It really is dreadful – I recently read somewhere that we have even slower broadband than Brazil. But, the point of this post isn’t to bash Aussie Broadband, it’s to talk about something called “The Grid”. Sounds awesome what is it? Well, it’s a high-speed Internet connection that is more than 100,000 times faster than your average broadband connection, to put this into perspective movies, music and games could all be downloaded in seconds, not hours and hours….and hours….“The Grid” is based on a series of fibre-optic cables and routing centres and can handle huge amounts of data. There are already more than 55,000 servers out there with 200,000 expected by 2010. The really awesome thing about this technology is what we could do with it – according to the boffins that invented it, we could be storing gigabytes of info on the net as well as transmitting holographic images and getting high-def video calls for the price of a local call.
MyTake – I read that one of the guys behind it said that it could revolutionise society. It could. Look at what we’ve done with web 2.0 and broadband, you’ve got to wonder how the traditional record store or video hire chains are going to survive with the speeds they are talking about for “The Grid”. True content-on-demand AND content that people want – “The grid” could be more than just an evolution of the Internet, it could be the biggest and most powerful distribution channel and outlet ever seen.
