While watching the wires you sometimes see bits and bytes about the future, and if you watch carefully enough you can sometimes hear the future screaming back at you from its temporal oubliette.
It appears Google is buying up massive amounts of land and spending billions on construction of datacenters around the country, probably around the world. Google is also buying up bandwidth planet wide. Think about that for a minute.
Meanwhile, when you average out internet usage among all of us connected over all the hours we spend connected you get speeds ranging in the area of a baud rate. Remember that old rating we used to use for speeds that something called a modem connected us to the internet with? Yeah, that old, and that slow.
The telecom companies that currently provide us with internet leverage that fact and usually oversell their bandwidth by as much as one hundred times the rated capacity hoping that you won't mind that they lied to your face when you were watching that commercial on TV that said you were going to get 1.5 megabits per second. Never in my entire history of paying for broadband service have I EVER received the speeds they said I was going to get even during off peak hours. I have never received half of what I was promised and I bet you haven't either.
It's also a known fact that the five percent of us that use bit-torrent consume half of all the bandwidth used by consumers and not so surprisingly it's mostly video that we're sharing. Oh shock and surprise!
Full length videos, movies, songs, rentals, phone calls, television, the list goes on. All of these and more are moving to the internet. Every communication service, every entertainment channel, everything, is all moving online. Why? Because it is cheaper, individual users can track and regulate it, and you can't stop the signal. Totally reliable, totally fault tolerant, and universally available. So when the remaining ninety five percent of users finally understand that yes you can watch your favorite show as many times as you want, on demand, commercial free, and for less then a buck per episode, what do you think they will do? And will the network be able to handle that capacity? Since it is currently about one hundred times oversold the answer to that would be no. Your current internet connection will die. You won't get one and a half megabits per second; you won't even get one and a half bits per second!
What do you expect from companies that think no more of you then as money pouches that just need sniping? The only thing ma' bell and Comcast care about anymore is getting the most money out of you, yes YOU. They have long since passed in years their mission of connecting the people of this great nation.
Now the frightful question is whether Google will be any better. So far they have held up the appearance of honor and justice in their dealings with individuals but that's easy to do when your profit to expense ratio in somewhere in the hundred million range. With all these new datacenter costs coming out of that old profit will Google remain the one bright light that has the ability to bring unlimited free communication to the masses? And will those masses be intelligent enough to use that communication effectively?
The answer to that my friends, is on the other side of my temporal oubliette.