[GB-Today] Article: Add Another Zero: An Interview with Larry Smarr

[Susan Estrada]

Folks,

I thought you might find this snip interesting (from the Educause Review 
article entitled "Add Another Zero:  An Interview with Larry Smarr."


EDUCAUSE Review: The goal of the "Gigabit or Bust" initiative is to bring 
one gigabit of broadband per second to every home, classroom, and business 
in California by 2010. How realistic a goal is that?

Smarr: I have to take some blame for the "Gigabit or Bust" slogan. When the 
Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the 
Next Generation Internet (NGI) Roundtable were considering broadband to the 
home, we looked at all the previous reports. Most reports talked about a 
national decadal goal of 100 million bits per second going to the home, 
which would be an improvement of roughly one hundred times the speed of 
today's broadband. So that would not be an insignificant change. But I felt 
that if California is going to think of itself as a leader, then it needed 
to "add another zero." Besides, a gigabit seems like such a nice, round 
number, and "one hundred megabits" just doesn't roll off the tongue as easily.

But seriously, think how absurd the situation is today. If you buy a 
Macintosh laptop today, it comes with a built-in gigabit Ethernet, included 
in the price. So, our personal computers in 2003 have a gigabit input or 
output, and yet people are saying that in seven years we can't get that 
kind of bandwidth to our homes? In seven years, what do you think laptops 
are going to have for bandwidth? There's this crazy mismatch right now 
between the "last-mile" problem (which isn't a mile at all­it's more like 
the last-twenty-or-thirty-feet problem, from the curb to the house), and as 
a result we have these islands of data in our computers, in our servers, 
and we have this absurd bandwidth bottleneck between them. We have to smash 
that bottleneck and unleash the enormous peer-to-peer bandwidth capability 
that the intrinsic system of servers and personal computers allows for.

For the entire article, visit 
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm03/erm036_articles.asp?id=4