These early adopters and their applications may not generalize completely, and not all of these services will necessarily succeed from a business standpoint, but they do illustrate how people respond to the availability of broadband and integrate it into their activities at large. Experimentation in industry and academic laboratories provides another source of indications of potential applications. The limited pool of users with broadband at home today, together with a larger set of users who access the Internet at high speeds in the workplace or through the networks of academic institutions, provides some indication of the sorts of applications that could emerge on a mass-market basis. There are, nonetheless, a number of places with experience in new broadband applications. And distributing content within the home in a useful way-i.e., at least as well as do today’s conventional consumer electronics (television, radio, and stereo systems)-remains a significant “systems integration” problem involving broadband hardware and software, inhome networking, and consumer appliance design. Modem technology are unable to provide large quantities of high-quality video-on-demand. This incrementalism may be inevitable for economic reasons, but it also disconnects the application experience of today from that anticipated as a result of enhancements to familiar applications, the introduction of new applications, and the integration of diverse broadband-based activities into everyday life.Īs the examples in this chapter illustrate, technology capabilities are one constraint on new applications. A few new broadband-only applications are available today, such as network backup and storage.

This experience is enriched by improved access to audio materials (most notably, music and Internet radio) and, albeit less frequently today, video. In practice, what broadband customers see today is largely a better version of the Internet access that they enjoyed with dial-up ISP service, featuring Web-page viewing, e-mail access, messaging, and the like. Indeed, as the discussion below suggests, there is much potential for future applications that enrich or complement traditional content and communications channels, but excitement about them should be tempered by an appraisal of the time frame in which these applications could be realized. BROADBAND APPLICATIONS: PROMISE AND REALITYīroadband is a means to an end: It refers to capabilities that people will use, but the question is, how and why? There is much excitement in some quarters, but many consumers who are unsophisticated about information technology and networks and do not yet have experience with broadband connectivity have expectations that are very much at odds with current reality.

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