[The following post is part of a series titled Demystifying Bandwidth, a non-technical guy's attempt to explain a few of the big concepts behind how the Internet works in schools.]

What is Broadband?

Let’s start with dial-up. In the early days, your options were one of the big national folks (AOL Online, CompuServe, NetZero, etc.) or some sort of local company or university. There are still a few folks using dial-up Internet access in rural (and sometimes not so rural) areas. We’ll get more into the reasons why later. Dial-up Internet progressed from 9.6kbps to 14.4kbps to 28.8kbps to 56kbps between 1992 and today.

Most of us have left dial-up for broadband. Broadband Internet generally comes from your telephone company (DSL), your cable company (cable), your satellite company (satellite) or a mobile phone company (wireless).

Telephone and cable companies will typically market their Internet offerings in different tiers. “Fast, faster, and fastest”. If you dig a bit deeper, you’ll see some metrics put to the marketing speak, typically 3Mbps, 5Mbps, or 10Mbps. Even with the metrics, this is a bit of a joke. If you have a headache, would you rather have Advil or Maximum Strength Advil? Of course, you are going to choose Maximum Strength Advil. If your only choice were Advil, you’d begin to question whether there were other options. With Maximum Strength Advil, we know we are getting the best and look no further.

Don’t let the numbers and the marketing distract you. Basically, your top tier broadband Internet provider is now 20x faster than your top tier dial-up provider. That’s all you need to know about that.

Side Note: Satellite and mobile phone companies are fairly recent to the broadband world. Be wary. Though they call themselves “broadband” connections, they are intended to fit very niche markets. If you can’t get broadband from your telephone or cable folks, you may be stuck with satellite or mobile broadband. You’ve heard “3G”, right? Marketing speak. It means little and is advertised to complicate the issue. (We’ll get much more into that later.)

Broadband is the thing that comes to your house from somebody that either looks like a telephone company (AT&T, Verizon) or a cable television company (Comcast, Time Warner, Charter). At the end of the day, all of these companies have a huge problem. Telephone companies delivered voice service to homes and charged based on the distance the call traveled and the number of minutes used. Cable companies bundled networks into packages and charged based on the popularity of those networks and the number of networks. Both of those business models are fading rapidly.

Notice that they are all marketing their “triple play” packages? Telephone companies offer voice, video, and Internet for one low price of _____. Cable companies offer video, voice, and Internet for one low price of _______. The is where we learn our first big lesson about bandwidth.

It’s all simply data. There’s no difference between voice, video, text, or images in the world of the Internet. Skype. Hulu. This Internet thing can do the same thing for “free”.

Competing against “free” is really hard.

You can be the best tennis player in the world. If your opponent refuses to hit the ball back across the net, the game quickly becomes frustrating.

Christopher Harris writes a nice letter to Follett regarding the rollout and marketing of their new product Cognite.

The mission you are communicating is that Cognite is a powerful new tool that eradicates the need for librarians.

Now, more than ever, we need Follett Software to showcase the librarian – the person – as the expert who can support the spread of information and resources using powerful new tools like Cognite.

[✱]

Perhaps it is not that contemporary media use has led to a decline in civic and social engagement, but rather that a decline in civic and social engagement has led to retribalization through contemporary media (McLuhan, 1964).

Source: Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as “Third Places”

The United States and Russia have reached a deal on their most extensive nuclear arms-control agreement in nearly two decades, the Kremlin announced Wednesday. The pact appeared to represent President Obama’s first victory in his ambitious agenda to move toward a nuclear-free world.

Source: United States and Russia reach nuclear-arms deal – washingtonpost.com

Wisconsin fourth graders scored 220, which was the same as the national average. The state score was not significantly different from 2007 when it was 223.

Wisconsin eighth graders scored 266, which was above the national average of 262. The state score was not significantly different from 2007.

Because if they were 120, there’d be some sort of cause for alarm.

Source: Wisconsin Schools’ Scores Change

Pure awesome.

Mobile data bits traveling around the world outnumbered voice traffic for the first time during December of 2009, according to wireless equipment vendor Ericsson. Worryingly, that data traffic was generated by an estimated 400 million smartphones set against 4.6 billion mobile subscribers making voice calls. What happens when everyone has a smartphone?

Source: Mobile Milestone: Data Surpasses Voice Traffic – GigaOM

Are you kidding? What happens when you can actually make a phone call on one of these things? I might actually replace the $40/month landline service I have at my home.

I found a new byline for my newsletter.

There’s not a lot of room for slightly-out-of-the-ordinary.

Source: Seth’s Blog: Telling a story on the label

Seth Godin is looking for people to spend a week with him in May.

Source: In Search of High Leverage – Seth Godin

Thanks to Chris Sessums for this find.