Broadband Explosion : Far Reaching Impact In Business Ecosystem

A range of emerging digital technologies and wireless devices enable interactive communication and collaboration, yielding unanticipated results. At the heart of this new interactivity is cheap and abundant bandwidth-a broadband explosion that holds the key to the next level of economic value creation. Where do the opportunities lie? What challenges will companies face? How far can broadband really take us? The book brings together views of various experts about the potential of emerging technologies, new business models that will result from broadband deployment, security concerns, regulatory obstacles, and more. High-quality collaboration at a distance will soon be a reality-and the business implications are dramatic. "Broadband explosion" denotes the coming together of real-time communication and rich media technologies to produce a truer form of interactivity across geographic distance than has been possible up until now. We've had some forms of interactive technologies for a long time (e.g., telephone) and many kinds of media too, but real-time interactivity at a distance that comes anywhere near what we experience in face-to-face communication has been elusive. People have been anticipating profound effects from the ability to collaborate in real time at a distance for a long time. Different countries are taking very different approaches to investment in an infrastructure that will allow the broadband explosion to come into being. The US is seen as lagging behind in broadband penetration and usage compared to a few other nations.The business impact on account of this needs to be assessed.
Some key impacts outlined are:
- The enhanced interactivity emerging from the broadband explosion - extend far beyond the productivity-enhancing effects of better human-computer interfaces. One less than obvious implication of interactivity in communication is that it allows innovation in business to become more rapid and less expensive
- A lot of the benefits from the broadband explosion will probably arise from non-obvious, second-order effects—things we can't see clearly right now.
- Skyrocketing bandwidth might be used to create a much more interactive experience in communication. This allows us to structure work differently, to achieve more communicative loops, and to therefore try more things faster and more cheaply. This has the potential to supercharge innovation, because we can prototype more ideas and share them with each other much more rapidly. The tranformative abilities of this broadband explosion far exceeds what is observed & measured at first instance. In all clearly, there is a qualitative shift in what will be achieved when the bandwidth that is reliably available reaches a certain point.