By Charles Miller
Several years ago in an earlier column I wrote that many internet users today could be using a thousand times more bandwidth than they did only a few years ago. A couple of readers emailed me to disagree, saying they did not see how that could possibly be correct. I replied that they could be right, that maybe I should not have said “a thousand” but “a million” times more internet bandwidth. It is not that those readers who wrote to me are innumerate but rather that many internet users do not realize how much bandwidth they consume today compared to the tiny amounts they used in years past.
Take the case of a hypothetical grandmother who, when first introduced to the internet in the 1990s, might have used it to read one or two news articles and send a few emails every morning. After using a meager few hundred kilobytes of bandwidth she then turned off the computer for the day. Fast forward a couple of decades, and today she still uses a computer, but in addition to that she now has a smart TV connected to the internet and has it turned on to streaming news programs in the morning and music radio streams all afternoon, then in the evening settles in for several hours of Netflix. Add to this the live video streams from security cameras and frequent conversations with Amazon’s Alexa; in addition some of her grandchildren gifted her an internet-connected smart picture frame that automatically updates every few minutes with family pictures streamed from the grandkids’ smartphones.
Such constant usage adds up to gigabytes of data. Many households today probably use as much internet bandwidth in one day as they used in the entire decade of the 1990s. And why not? Today’s connection speeds can be 4,000 times faster than back then.
I am quite sure that is the case for me because I can point to one quantifiable example. Back in the pre-internet days of the 1980s I used to use dial-up Bulletin Board Systems to download computer programs and other content. I was a very active downloader, and I meticulously saved everything on hundreds of floppy disks. In the early 1990s after I purchased my first CD-ROM writer I transcribed all of those boxes of floppy disks to a CD. That project took weeks, and when finished I was pleased to find that everything, those hundreds of floppies I had downloaded during the decade of the 1980s, all fit comfortably onto one CD-ROM disk with room to spare.
So there is no doubt everyone is using much more internet bandwidth than in the past. Based on the metric I described in the preceding paragraph I have a reasonable idea how much internet bandwidth I used over a whole decade in the last century. Today I probably burn through that much bandwidth every day… before breakfast! And the amazing thing is that this has been no problem with my internet service providers, who provide consistently reliable and “unlimited” bandwidth for all my needs.
That word “unlimited” is something I want to expand on, so be sure to pick up your copy of Atencion next week.
Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981, and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8@SMAguru.com.
